In 1894, as the Mississippi River is forcibly straightened to fuel the Gilded Age, an enchanted Afro-Indigenous parish hidden in its serpentine bends fights for memory itself. A Haitian American midwife lianne Sol ne Noirel who can extract people's dreams, a silver-eyed cypress spirit S lombre ("Shadow-Salt"), and a chorus of blues-singing ancestors must preserve the river's forgotten curves before a railroad tycoon Whitfield "Whit" Huxley distills time into profit, erasing every story that does not serve him.