Nikesha Elise Williams starts the prologue of "The Seven Daughters of Dupree" with a sentence so horrible readers will hope it’s a metaphor for something less unthinkable. And then, as though taking the hand of a reluctant child, Williams pulls her readers into the first chapter – and into a hair salon where we meet the first of seven women whose stories Williams tells.

We meet Nadia first – it’s her salon – and her mother Mimi, seated, awaiting her hair treatment. Tati arrives, Nadia’s teen-aged daughter, wrinkling her nose from the stink of strong hair products and assessing the chores she needs to start.

She’s walked in on a conversation that her mother and grandmother have been having for as long as she can remember. It’s not banter; it’s tinged with derision and defensiveness. And it includes her.

Raised by a single mother, she’s never known her father. Doesn’t even know his name. And now, at 14, she listens to the back and forth between Nadia and her Mimi a little more carefully. “Ain’t no secrets in this house,” mutters Nadia.

“Oh yeah, there are,” her mother says, “but that’s what you get for ruttin’ around with a married man.”

Here is where Williams ignites the separate plots that make up "The Seven Daughters of Dupree." Tati’s search for her father is just one, and Williams stitches them all together like a literary quilt, orderly but colorfully scattered, the pieces becoming a whole, familiar as an old movie set in the South but uniquely owned by Black culture. Here, in this book, by Black women. Their words, their music, their hair and their men. Their conversations have a musical rhythm, and all the women, not just Nadia, prioritize the care of their hair, a woman’s crowning glory. “When you goin’ start doing this child’s hair?” Nadia asks Tati. “She’s eight months. You need to start her in a routine now or she gon’ be tender-headed.”

Like the squares of a quilt are carefully placed to create a pattern, so are the stories of the seven daughters. It’s not a book to be hurried through. Williams hasn’t arranged the stories in chronological order, but moves them back and forth over more than a hundred years. Each chapter starts fresh, with a new face, a new situation, a new plot, but Williams doesn’t let you forget who you left behind.

You worry about the curse that follows the women whose boy babies never survive. You worry about the condemnation of biracial coupling – both communities – White and Black. You worry about the men they fall in love with. (“Tati had been hearing all her life about men like Roman, thinking he’d be the exception to the rule …” You worry about their broken hearts. “If only there was a conditioner for the heart,” muses Tati while she rinses her grandmother’s hair. You worry about them but you marvel at their resilience.

Readers may have a favorite story. The stability of Eugene’s love for Gladys, the drama of Sampson and Ruby, or the dreadful betrayal of Logan and Jubilee. Readers may find the sad and unavoidable history of the South, the slaves, and Man’s inhumanity to Man deeply disturbing; but "The Seven Daughters of Dupree" will be an unforgettable read, a novel stitched together with myth and memory, legends, curses and superstitions. And love. That, too.