PRÉLUDE

1668 – 1968

Think of generations as a chain, one link leading to and binding the next, and all of them—even the most distant—forever connected and inseparable. Forget about ancestors the way we usually talk of them, as if they are somehow less real than we are. Those who came before are not footnotes to the Very Important Life you’re living now. They are real people, and still. They breathe through you. They bleed and cry and dance, pull their rotten teeth with pliers sanitized in bootleg rye. They plow fields and pray for rain. They sing their children songs at night:Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormezvous, dormez-vous. They clutch their sheets in fever. They run great machines that make cloth and paper for the whole world. They fight in wars. They tell lies. They sit awake long after everyone they love has fallen asleep, a hand-rolled cigarette pinched between their fingers, waiting in desperation for first light, eternally.

Their ghosts are all around you, clamoring to be seen and heard, like Marley rattling his chains. And like Marley, they have things to teach you.

So: Think of them all as yourself. A single entity, spanning centuries. Finding its current but by no means final iteration in you.

Once, for example, you were a woman named Evangeline LeNormand: Parisian orphan, ward of the church, survivor, and cynic. You came to Nouvelle-France in 1667. Many of the girls who traveled with you believed the promises the priests had made—handsome husbands of noble birth, the riches of the New World theirs for the asking. But you knew better.

The boat smelled of shit and wet rot, rolling for months over endless waves. After the first week both passengers and crew began to get sick, clawing at rashes and grabbing their skulls in agony. You waited your turn, watching as ten of the otherfilles du roi died, their corpses wrapped in cotton cloth, given a box-check blessing, and dropped overboard. A dozen others went insane with fever. Yet you somehow remained healthy, dumb luck—though whether this luck was good or bad, considering how things would turn out, was debatable. By the time the ship docked in Quebec there were twenty-one girls left, each still somehow convinced that fortune smiled broadly as they promenaded off the ship. Then there was you, pulling up the rear and dragging your chest through the mud, trusting no one to carry it but yourself.

The other girls went fast, married and pregnant and drying beaver skins before you could saytabarnak. In a place where men outnumbered women eight to one and winter lasted six months of the year, it was inevitable someone would claim you. His name was Joshua Currey. He traded tools for furs with the Mi’kmaq, and because he was Scottish you did not understand him and he did not understand you. As was his right, he took your trousseau and the fifty livres and when the money was gone he left you in the fall of 1673 with two daughters, Dominique and Madeleine.

Ahundred years after that you were Madeleine’s great-grand-daughter Aimee, your hair an unruly black corona just like the women before you, and as with the women before you, men were drawn by that hair