On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces. A powerful generational saga at once tenders overflowing with magic and common sense. Mama Day, who embodies the supernatural, possesses a “gift” that she inherited from her great- grandmother, Sapphira Wade. There is a connection between recovering black women's history of the woman as healer and source of supernatural power and the survival of a people with their ethnic identity intact