The Power — Jim Duggins

The night before Mama was beaten with a salted leather strap, she told her daughter, “Don't worry, chile. You be a queen.” Those words sustain the little slave in the dark days ahead. THE POWER follows Reyna Royale, a slave girl, from her voodoo initiation on a Georgia cotton plantation to partial freedom and esoteric study with Marie Laveau in New Orleans, America's voodoo capital, and to gold rush San Francisco where she becomes a rich and successful madam, a courageous underground railroad worker, and ultimately a cold blooded murderess.