In this intimate portrait of two generations, a granddaughter and a grandmother come to terms with what it means to be family, Black women, and alive in a world on fire.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Mary Annaïse Heglar’s Troubled Waters, which is out May 7th 2024.
The world is burning—and Corrine will do anything to put out the flames. After her brother died aboard an oil boat on the Mississippi River in 2013, Corrine awakened to the realities of climate change and its perpetrators. Now, a year later, she finds herself trapped in a lonely cycle of mourning both her brother and the very planet she stands on. She’s convinced that in order to save her future, she has to make sure that her brother’s life meant something. But in the act of honoring her brother’s spirit, she resurrects family ghosts she knows little about—ghosts her grandmother Cora knows intimately.
The world is burning—but it always has been. Cora’s ghosts have followed her from her days as a child integrating schools in 1950s Nashville to her new life as a mother, grandmother, and teacher in Mississippi. As a child of the civil rights movement, she’s done her best to keep those specters away from her granddaughter. She faced those demons, she reasons to herself, so that Corinne would never know they existed.
When Corrine’s plan to stage a dramatic act of resistance peels back the scabs of her family wounds and puts her safety in jeopardy, both grandmother and granddaughter must bring their unspoken secrets into the light to find a path to healing. Their world hangs in the balance as past and future meet in the present moment.
Chapter 1
Lovely Day
December 19, 2013
Even as she typed the last paragraphs of her final paper for the semester, Corinne couldn’t hear the feverish click-clack of the keyboard under her fingertips or the frantic whispers of the other students. She wasn’t in North Ohio anymore, burrowed away in the basement of the massive library at Oberlin College. She was back in Mississippi two springs ago, listening to that eerie stillness as the Mississippi River swelled out of her banks and onto the roads that connected Port Gibson and Vicksburg, quieting the dull hum of traffic. Then, the River had seeped into playgrounds and backyards, hushing children at play and neighbors at gossip. Eventually, the water rose so high, the birds were too confused to sing, and the River silenced the sky. Corinne had lain in her room with the windows open, wary even of turning on the television lest she further anger the Mississippi. There was nowhere to go and nothing to say.
By the time her waters had receded, the River had washed past every watermark on record, even the one set by the Great Flood of 1927.
Earlier in the semester, Corinne had gotten into a bitter argument with one of her environmental studies professors about the causes of the 2011 Mississippi River flood. He’d insisted that it was simply a natural phenomenon.
“Rivers flood,” he’d said with a wave of his hand. “There’s no reason to think it was global warming.”
Corinne, on the other hand, had insisted that it wasn’t that simple. The 2011 flood was an alleged five-hundred-year flood, and so were the 1993 flood and the 1937 flood. The 1927 flood—the one that had haunted Corinne since elementary school when she first learned about those who’d drowned and the horrors of a river unhinged—still held the record for the most destructive river flood in US history. There wasn’t even a century between any of them.
“How was that ‘natural’?” she’d demanded.
Her professor had stood back, crossed his arms, and told her to prove it. So here she was, two months later, with a browser window littered with tabbed articles about deforestation and wetlands, La Niña, and pre- versus postindustrial rainfall levels. She felt even more strongly that, had the River been left to her own devices, she probably would have flooded in 2011, but not so viciously. If the earth’s temperature had held steady, the rain would have fallen, but not nearly as much. The River may have risen, but the wetlands and the forests would have been able to absorb the water. But as strong as her conviction was, she still wasn’t sure she was being convincing enough for her polemic professor.
“Corinne, just send the damn thing so we can be done!”
Corinne looked up from her screen to see Ashley yawning and swaying by the door of the study lounge, her laptop in one arm and a long-empty coffee cup in her other hand.
“I just want to read it one more time,” Corinne muttered before she went back to her screen. “I feel like I’m forgetting something.”
“The whole thing? Girl, you keep on, and you finna ‘forget’ to pass the class,” Ashley snapped, her Georgia accent thickening with frustration. “Ain’t nobody ’bout to fail you over a typo, and at this hour, a stroke of brilliance ain’t coming. Just turn it in!”
Corinne pushed her hair out of her face and felt how dry and brittle it had become since she started her final exams. She hadn’t so much as sprayed water on it in a week. “If you really want to go back to the room, Ashley, you can,” she grumbled. “My professors have run out of sympathy for me this semester, so I actually have to do this right.” She still felt a strange mix of gratitude and guilt for all the extensions her professors had granted her last spring. Most of them hadn’t even asked what, exactly, her family emergency was.
“Girl, first of all, you know I’m not leaving you across campus this late at night,” Ashley shot back. “Second, you’re already past the deadline by ten entire minutes. Third, do I need to remind you that you fly out in the morning? Turn in the paper, Corinne. Better done than good at this point.”
Corinne knew she was right, but she hated even the risk of losing an argument, especially when there was a grade at stake. She took one last look at the final paragraph, couldn’t find a typo, and decided to take Ashley’s advice.
“Fine, we can go,” she said as she clicked the Send button.
