Works by
Helen Elaine Lee
(Writer)

• Serpent's Gift (1994)
  One of the most striking and heartening developments in American letters in recent years has been the flowering and attendant celebration of African-American writers and of books that have introduced to readers everywhere people, situations, and events that have, hitherto, largely been ignored, denied, or unknown. Now comes Helen Elaine Lee's supremely assured The Serpent's Gift, a first novel that gives to us -- with the fullest emotional resonance, humor, and exultation in the novelist's art -- the intertwined stories of two families from early in this century to our own times.
  
  Central to this haunting (and sometimes haunted) novel are the mothers, a study in contrast in strength and rigidity, Ruby Staples and Eula Smalls, and their children: LaRue Smalls, adventurer, storyteller, and chronicler of his people; his sister Vesta, intimidated by life from an early age, yet determined, valiant even, to hold her disparate family together; and Ouida Staples, a rare beauty who elects, in the face of convention, to spend her life with another woman. Each will face trials and challenges and sometimes be transformed, shedding like the serpent, an old skin, reborn by the art of invention.
  
  From its opening pages, which recount in eerily compelling detail, the death that will bring these people together, to its almost pastoral conclusion, The Serpent's Gift creates a world that is both realistic in its detail and lyrical in its presentation -- it is a superb, triumphant debut.

• Water Marked (1999)
  From the talented author of The Serpent's Gift, which The Washington Post called "beautifully crafted and profoundly insightful...staggeringly accomplished," comes a richly textured novel about two estranged African-American sisters who reunite in a search to understand their father and their family history.
  
  A note in the mail announcing, "He's been alive. He died last week," summons painter Sunday Owens from Chicago to her native town. It has been five years since she has been back to see her sister, Delta, who has never left Salt County, where the local river routinely overflows its banks, taking bits and pieces of people's lives when the waters recede. But more draws her to their childhood home than a desire for reconciliation with Delta; Sunday returns to claim her story and to unearth the secrets that have shaped her since her father, Mercury, left his shoes by the river and disappeared before she was born.
  
  Now nearing midlife, with their troubled mother and matriarchal grandmother, Nana, both buried, Sunday and Delta learn that Mercury did not commit suicide as believed; he had lived another life -- as someone other than their father. Looking for clues to their father's past, they comb through the accumulated mementos of their old house, trade stories and childhood memories, and talk to the few living Bread Ladies, a group of Nana's friends who convened weekly to gossip, to comfort, and to make bread. A new portrait of the Owens family -- and their town -- gradually emerges as Sunday and Delta grapple with why their father chose to abandon them. Meanwhile, they confront their own personal struggles and work to repair the tattered bonds of sisterhood.
  
  A novel about how family can both heal and hurt, about how the past reaches out for you no matter where you are, Water Marked resonates with mesmerizing language and deep emotion. A true storyteller, Helen Elaine Lee here elegantly confirms the extraordinary promise of The Serpent's Gift.

• Life Without (In progress)
  About the lives of inmates in American prisons.

See also:

• Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995), Gloria Naylor, ed.

• Ancestral House: The Black Story in the Americas and Europe (1995), Charles H. Rowell, ed.