Make Your Way Home, Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection, is a poetic, bittersweet blending of past and present that delivers a smart moral jolt. Permeating these eleven expertly told stories of contemporary Black life in the American Deep South is a cautious optimism that acknowledges the damages of the past.

An overture to the whole collection, the opening story, “When We Go, We Go Downstream” evokes the horrors of the slave trade: the title alludes to the original meaning of being “sold down the river.” The story follows Ever Roberts as he prepares for his sister’s marriage to another woman. Despite the modernity of its premise, the story doesn’t shy away from the  legacies of chattel slavery and the subsequent nadir of race relationships as they continue to haunt Ever’s family. 

Ever since Ever’s third-great-grandfather Elijah attempted to escape from bondage, abandoning his lover, the family’s romantic relationships have ended in heartbreak. Acutely aware of the family curse, Ever can’t help but see potential cracks in his relationship with long-term girlfriend, Amari. However, he’s not a cynic. He admires the love between his sister and her bride-to-be. His given name, Ever, evokes longevity. Though the narrative doesn’t reveal the ultimate fate of either his or his sister’s relationships, readers are left with the same vague optimism that keeps Ever from giving up on love, hoping that every “ever after” is a happy one. 

In “Cottonmouths,” Twyla, a low-income teenaged girl in the rural South, falls pregnant at the same time that her mother does. Twlya’s childish fantasies of having their babies share a crib wane when she discovers that her parents want her to move out. Her mother encourages her to find the baby’s father—Twyla slept with multiple, equally immature boys—and somehow make him into a husband. Twyla listens, dumbfounded, as she realizes that her due date will also be her new, premature entry into womanhood. Her name and feelings of abandonment are the same as those of the protagonist from Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” (1983)—but instead of getting sent to an orphanage like Morrison’s Twyla, Moore’s must prepare to fend for herself. 

Before Twyla can process this betrayal, a giant cottonmouth invades the house. Her father isn’t home. Her mother demands that she ask one of the neighborhood boys—one of whom could be the father of Twyla’s baby—for help. Twyla refuses, and in desperation she comes up with a solution that doesn’t involve leaving her mother behind. After making the house unbearably hot, shutting all the windows while the potbellied stove is going, she creates an exit path for the snake with rolled-up quilts. Her efforts save the day: the snake uncoils itself and departs. Will Twyla leave as well? Moore leaves the question open, preferring to stay with Twyla’s hope, which has emerged from her broken dreams. As the story ends, Twyla imagines herself and her mother holding their babies at the table. Twyla’s mother needs Twyla’s spiritedness as much as Twyla needs her mother’s imperfect grounding. Instead of a decision, their story’s conclusion leaves the two with a stronger, more complex relationship.   

As the collection unfolds, the lingering sense of half-hope fluctuates in strength. There’s little hope for the central character in “All Skin Is Clothing.” In this story, a teenage girl with overbearing parents ends a romantic tryst with a boy in order to protect her little brother whom she almost lost to a drive-by shooting. She learns to thwart parental attempts to control her, but her desire to protect her family—especially her brother—at all costs is what ultimately keeps her from escaping. In “How Does Your Garden Grow,” a woman suffering from uterine fibroids can’t decide what she wants out of life even when her condition improves. Following a breakup, a biopsy, and a transformative trip, she discovers that she’s most likely cancer-free. There’s a future for her uterus; she could still have children. She just doesn’t know if such a life would make her happy. She’s still haunted by her childhood reliance on hair relaxers—one of her many attempts to fit into predominately white environments—and how they might be at the root of her current medical woes. 

Moore’s fuzzy endings can make the stories feel listless, like their beginnings and middles are grasping for a greater meaning that they can’t manifest as they end. But to dismiss them on these grounds would be to miss the point. The stories challenged my understanding of what makes a short story complete in a culture that’s obsessed with providing false closure to ongoing systems of oppression. A more cynical writer might have used positive developments—the marriage in “When We Go, We Go Downstream” or the effective use of modern medicine in “How Does Your Garden Grow”—as symbolic ends to not just the protagonists’ struggles but the South’s history of bigotry. Moore’s ambiguities subvert the desire for such easy answers, prompting American readers to think of their own uncertain futures in a country where so many injustices—from slavery to income inequality—go unaddressed. There are no happy endings, but no cynical ones either. Like the characters, we are left with the daunting existential task of making our own meanings.  

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Carrie R. Moore’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. A recipient of the Keene Prize and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat, she earned her MFA at the Michener Center for Writers. Born in Georgia, she currently resides in Texas with her husband.

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Megan Howell is a DC-based writer and a 2025 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review and The Establishment, among other publications. Her debut collection, Softie: Stories was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.