Book Description
Ayodele was born free in Africa, but now she is enslaved on a Virginia plantation, where her captors are determined to strip away her name, her heritage, and her connection to the Orisha, the African powers whose enigmatic guidance challenges her to discover her own answers and make her own choices.
When a talking drum calls her into the night, Ayodele discovers others who remember the old ways and are planning a dangerous journey toward freedom. But the path ahead will demand more than courage. She must survive the violence of slavery while holding on to the identity her captors are determined to erase.
Then Yemoja, the Orisha of motherhood, takes Ayodele on a journey through time. There she encounters Chloe, one of her descendants, and sees a future she could never have imagined—a world in which her descendants are free to learn, create, dance, and honor the Orisha.
At the center of that future stands a temple Chloe is building for Xangô, the Orisha of fire and thunder. This temple connects Ayodele's past with the spiritual legacy carried into the future. As Ayodele struggles to survive the present hopelessness, she can hardly believe in the future possibilities that Yemoja shows her.
Gathering Drums is a story of freedom, heritage, faith, identity, and the enduring connection between generations.
Delve into a world where dreams come with a price.
What You'll Experience in Gathering Drums
This novel shows how the strength of heritage can survive oppression, connect generations, and inspire hope for a future no one can yet see.
Excerpt from Gathering Drums
Somebody, somewhere, remember my name,
The anchor by which my spirit will live.
Remember the time I dwelt on the earth.
We’ll rise up brand new, and all breathe as one.
Eternal we live collective we thrive.
The soft curls atop her newborn’s head still barely covered its scalp, and Ayodele dared not ruffle them. When she was a child in Africa, her mother’s friends said there was a soft spot atop a baby’s head — the last portal for its spirit to escape the horrors of earthly life. It seemed unholy to touch the escape route that Ayodele wished she still had.
She looked up when Jimboy kicked open the door of their cabin. He stood there for a moment, looking as if he’d just come back from doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. Was a slave on a tobacco plantation supposed to gather grass from behind his master’s kitchen for a little black baby that meant nothing to his master? Well, why not? Jimboy was, after all, taking care of his master’s property, and the baby was as much his property as the kitchen and the tobacco were.
In the darkness, Jimboy had filled two flour sacks with the softest grass his much-abused fingers could find. Emptying the sacks onto the dirt floor of their cabin, he pushed the grass together to make a bed for the baby. "I don’t care what Massa Keaton say," Jimboy whispered, looking into the baby’s eyes. "She’s beautiful. She looks just like you with my nose, of course."
"She looks like one of the babies I cuddled back in Africa."
"Did babies lay in cradles back in Africa? She ought to be in a cradle — not on the ground, in the grass like something from a sow’s litter."
"You gonna ask Keaton for a cradle? ’Sides, she better close to the earth surrounded with the living grass."
"Yeah, I guess it’s living, though I made sure wasn’t no critters in it before I put it in the sack."
"We need to show her Mother earth. We need to make things as nice as possible, so she’ll want to stay."
"Want to stay? She a baby. Where she gone go?" He tickled Adedewe’s feet. "You ’spect she gone try to run? I bet that’s more of that African stuff. Did y’all Africans believe a baby could just get up and walk away if everything wasn’t nice?"
"Not walk — fly. And it’s not stuff. There’s a hole on top of her head. If she decides not to stay, her spirit will fly out of that hole." Uncertainty creased Ayodele’s brow. "I don’t want to lose another baby. Well, at least it’ll be the baby’s choice this time."
"Hole? What hole? Our baby got a hole top her head?" He put two fingers on the baby’s head, probing through her hair for the offending hole. "Lyris, I do feel something."
"Don’t touch it." Ayodele snatched his hand away. "You’ll disturb her spirit. You might even make her come out just to see who’s at her door."
"Maybe we could keep a cap on her head, so she can’t get out."
Ayodele gasped. "No! We can’t trap her. She’ll grow up sad and angry."
"Like her mother."
Note from Author Rhonda Denise Johnson
I felt a sense of accomplishment bringing everything together in this finale of the Orisha Trilogy.