This theme represents one of the text’s most urgent and overtly represented concepts, for Ward calls the practice of breaking families apart during enslavement a “death before death.” That kind of traumatic fracture is one of the framing pieces of the narrative as a whole. Although the story begins with a portrait of Annis and her mother on the North Carolina plantation that they call home, the “descent” that follows the sale of these two women away from each other is the novel’s primary narrative arc, and that sale emerges as the action’s inciting incident.

The history of Annis’s ancestors begins with just such a rupture. Her grandmother, Mama Aza, was sold into enslavement as punishment for having an extra-marital affair while married to the Fon king in West Africa. Mama Aza is torn away from a man whom she dearly loves and who is the father to her unborn child. She will give birth to this baby, Sasha, on a ship carrying its “cargo” of enslaved men and women to the United States. The ship’s captain lays claim to her daughter immediately after her birth, and Mama Aza is struck by the horror of “this owning from birthing to grave” (16).