Bones Become Flowers

Tracy Carter seems to be living the African-American Dream, her forty acres a beautiful home in the Oakland, California foothills, her mule a $70K Land Rover. She has a very eclectic but practical education, the means to indulge her taste for art; and at age 33 owns a successful boat-building business, as well as being heir to a considerable family fortune. So why does her story begin in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, with her battling alone through rugged mountains and jungle forests in a rusty old car with no spare tire? Is she on a mission to "save" Haiti's children? Is she searching for her ancestral roots? Or, could she be on an unconscious quest for something much deeper, something long-buried in vine-tangled graveyards and shrouded in moonlit shadows of Voodoo? The meaning of life? Or the secrets buried within her own soul? ...Or does she even have a soul, and if she does could she lose it?

Her journey takes her to the children's refuge of Father Avery, which seems at first a Garden Of Eden. Yet something isn't quite right. Are the children a little too angelic? ...That is except one, a 12-year-old boy who keeps a Voodoo doll in his locker and who the Good Father seems to fear. And why does this boy dig at night in the refuge's little graveyard, where, among other small skeletons, lies that of a gifted young wood-carver who died at the age of 13.

Tracy soon finds the answer to that, but only uncovers more mystery, along with a Voodoo priest's warning that she has embarked on a voyage from which there is no turning back.

At first it begins literally aboard an ancient rusty freighter powered by steam and fueled by coal which is shoveled by children, but then it becomes a deeper quest over a dark sea of bones toward a faint and distant light.

Tracy's journey is like the voyage of that weary old ship fighting her way through a raging storm, beaten and pounded by roaring waves, whipped and battered by howling winds, and slashed by rain that cuts like knives. And, like that ship, she must abandon all her cargo to survive, throw everything overboard into the sea, every possession of earthly value, in hope of reaching home.