The first volume
A Star Seed and A Witch
This is the first volume. Chapter 1 is the door: Willie Mae, the boy, the cane. After the light there was still a family shop — metal, a small job, brothers. The title names the memoir and the work that may follow. The rest of this volume is the bound book.
This is not a novel that borrowed a life. It is a life that would not stay ordinary. A Star Seed learns the cost of running. The land, which has been watching the whole time, finally speaks in a sentence short enough to carry.
The intoxication is real — a shop, brothers, a cracked court, a first temptation, a gathering that felt like a return. So is the warning. The book holds both without sanding either one down. Living names that are not the author’s stay off this house.
Chapter names live in the bound edition. The movements below are the shape of the first volume as this house will speak it — not a table of contents.
An earlier illustrated telling, The Starseed and the Witch, is on Kindle as a picture-book storyboard. This house is for the memoir.
I
The Wound
Chapter 1 is Willie Mae. He was five in Pahokee — third boy, dirty-blond, eyes light blue with shades of green. Heat came off the roads in waves. Green cane. Black muck. The iron memory of the lake. She met him in the office. The wound was older than he was. The land had never closed.
II
The Seed
After the first light the days were still long. A shop close to the house. Sheet metal. A small job. Brothers on a cracked court. Letters that would not hold still. One room that did. The cane had patterns a page could not. He was a Star Seed only in the way a bruise is a color. He did not yet know what the land would ask.
III
The Gathering
Family found him again. Lights in the trees. A gathering that felt like a return. He mistook a shine for permission. The land was watching. It always had been.
IV
The Sentence
The old life could not hold. A sentence arrived that was not quite a curse and not quite a kindness — a job, if he would take it. Carry the load, or lose the house.