The Curse We Carried
A Novel by JoJo Penwood

In the heart of the Deep South, one act of cruelty births a curse that echoes across centuries.

In 1812, as the flames of resistance smolder beneath the fields of the Whitlow plantation, an enslaved African woman named Ama N'Doye whispers a final incantation—an ancestral curse meant not only to mark those who enslaved her people, but to bind memory to blood.

The Curse We Carried is a sweeping, intergenerational saga that follows two American families—the white Whitlows, descended from slave owners, and the Black Boones, descended from Ama. Across seven generations, the novel explores how trauma, guilt, silence, and spiritual unrest are passed down like heirlooms, hidden in dreams, buried in addictions, and etched into the soul of a nation trying to forget.

From the dark days of slavery and the chaos of the Civil War to the battlegrounds of Civil Rights and the uncertainty of the modern age, each generation must reckon with the ghosts they inherit. But in the seventh generation, as two unlikely descendants cross paths—one Black, one white—buried truths surface, and healing at last becomes possible.

Powerful, poetic, and spiritually haunting, The Curse We Carried is a story of memory and mourning, of inherited pain and long-delayed redemption. It is about the chains we carry, the voices we silence, and the deep work of remembering before release.