Lone Women

Victor LaValle Lone Women ISBN: 9780525512097, 9780525512080 Kindle / ASIN: B0B4R7NMQ7 Genre: Historical Goodreads Rating: Hardcover, 304 pages Published: 2023 Blue skies, empty land—and enough room to hide away a horrifying secret. Or is there? Discover a haunting new vision of the American West from the award-winning author of The Changeling. Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory. Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it. 2023 - ePub verification and revisions by zardox Lone Women is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2023 by Victor LaValle All rights reserved. Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Hardback ISBN 9780525512080 Ebook ISBN 9780525512097 oneworldlit.com randomhousebooks.com Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook Cover design: Tal Goretsky Cover images: Magdalena Żyźniewska/Trevillion Images (figure); Spencer Whalen/Alamy Stock Photo (texture): Hinkleyimaging/Getty Images and Jeff R Clow/Getty Images (landscape) ep_prh_6.0_142879849_c0_r0 To Paul, my brother Contents Cover Epigraph Part One Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 Part Two Chapter 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 Part Three Chapter 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 Acknowledgments About the Author By Victor Lavalle _142879849_ “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon 1 There are two kinds of people in this world: those who live with shame, and those who die from it. On Tuesday, Adelaide Henry would’ve called herself the former, but by Wednesday she wasn’t as sure. If she was trying to live, then why would she be walking through her family’s farmhouse carrying an Atlas jar of gasoline, pouring that gasoline on the kitchen floor, the dining table, dousing the settee in the den? And after she emptied the first Atlas jar, why go back to the kitchen for the other jar, then climb the stairs to the second floor, listening to the splash of gasoline on every step? Was she planning to live, or trying to die? There were twenty-seven Black farming families in California’s Lucerne Valley in 1915. Adelaide and her parents had been one of them. After today there would only be twenty-six. Adelaide reached the second-floor landing. She hardly smelled the gasoline anymore. Her hands were covered in fresh wounds, but she felt no pain. There were two bedrooms on the second floor: her bedroom and her parents’. Adelaide’s parents were lured west by the promise of land in this valley. The federal government encouraged Americans to homestead California. The native population had been decimated, cleared off the property. Now it was time to give it all away. This invitation was one of the few that the United States extended to even its Negro citizens, and after 1866, the African Society put out a call to “colonize” Southern California. The Henrys were among the hundreds who came. They weren’t going to get a fair shot in Arkansas, that was for damn sure. The federal government called this homesteading. Glenville and Eleanor Henry fled to California and grew alfalfa and wild grass, sold it to cattle owners for feed. Glenville studied the work of Luther Burbank and in 1908 they began growing the botanist’s Santa Rosa plums. To Adelaide the fruit tasted of sugar and self-determination. Adelaide had worked the orchards and fields alongside her daddy since she was twelve. Labored in the kitchen and the barn with her mother for even longer. Thirty-one years of life on this farm. Thirty-one. And now she would burn it all down. “Ma’am?” Adelaide startled at the sound of the wagon man. “Good Lord, what is that smell?” He stood at the front entrance, separated from the interior by a screen door and nothing more. Adelaide stood upstairs, at the threshold of her parents’ bedroom. The half-full Atlas jar wobbled in her grip. She turned and called over the landing. “Mr. Cole, I will be out in five minutes.” She couldn’t see him, but she heard him. The grumble of an old Black man, barely audible but somehow still as loud as a thunderclap. It reminded her of her father.