If there was a man involved in the creation of Annie May, he was drawn away by the road, withered by disease, or a blood sacrifice to coal, cropping or the bored violence of white men. None of her siblings had fathers, either: as for her mother's profession it was a mix of many things, but if they wanted for shoes and sometimes for flour, none in that household ever wanted for love or lore or a choice of parents to shape them. A dozen dubiously-related aunts and uncles raised Annie May, and Gramma Arly found and fanned the spark of power in her and a couple of her sisters.

The little mountain witch has sat with wise folk from Europe and from Africa, with the church people and the green forest, and frequently with people returned to their own lands against the will of the law. She turned all her reach and knowledge to helping those without help and those in strange trouble, but the South broke her heart; she left it buried in Tennessee and came heartless to Harlem to find some things to fill up the gap.

Annie May is relentlessly practical, neat for efficiency but always visibly rural in aspect. Look elsewhere for ostrich feathers and pearls, gold-edged Tarot to delight the white occultist and the broad advertisement of "show voodoo": Annie May has a necklace of chicken bones and works with crow feathers, tells fortunes on cast bones and can suck the flint curse out of a hexed child's palm.

She can curse you, too, since a lone Black woman in the South needs certain mortal safeguards to survive. She can sell you protection in a jar packed with nails, or vengeance for the right price, if she deems it just (or just something for that tenement cough or restless baby, or part-cures for bad dreams).