The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters

• One of NPR’s “Nonfiction Books We Love from 2025” • One of Kirkus’s “Best Nonfiction Books of 2025” •

A powerful new voice, telling the American story through three generations of Black mothers.

"This searing, poetic memoir covers generations of powerful Black women who raise their children singly and transmit strength by showing up. . . . Bonét writes her own mothering story with brute honesty." —NPR

"[A] profound story about all Black women, and about the effects of racism in all Black lives. . . . [O]bservant, thoughtful and poetic, in the best sense. [Bonét’s] account of both her family history and the lives of her tributaries show off her gifts to the fullest." —The New York Times

Sasha Bonét grew up in 1990s Houston, worlds removed from the Louisiana cotton plantation that raised her grandmother, Betty Jean, and the Texas bayous that shaped Sasha’s mother, Connie. And though each generation did better, materially, than the last, all of them carried the complex legacy of Black American motherhood with its origins in slavery. All of them knew that the hands used to comb and braid hair, shell pecans, and massage weary muscles were the very hands used to whip children into submission.

When she had her own daughter, Sofia, Bonét was determined to interrupt this tradition. She brought Sofia to New York and set off on a journey—not only up and down the tributaries of her bloodline but also into the lives of Black women in history and literature—Betty Davis, Recy Taylor, and Iberia Hampton among them—to understand both the love and pain they passed on to their children and to create a way of mothering that honors the legacy but abandons the violence that shaped it.

The Waterbearers is a dazzling and transformative work of American storytelling that reimagines not just how we think of Black women, but how we think of ourselves—as individuals, parents, communities, and a country.