Caul Baby

Caul Baby is a novel by the American writer Morgan Jerkins, published in 2021. It is set in Harlem and it concerns an old family whose reputation rests on a physical inheritance.

The Melancons have lived in the same brownstone for generations and are known in the neighbourhood for their caul, a piece of skin that is the source both of their healing and of their standing. It is also what makes them useful to people in trouble and what makes them careful about whom they help.

Laila's approach to them is a request for a piece of the caul, in the hope of carrying a pregnancy to term, and when the arrangement fails she is left with grief and anger. What she does not know is that her niece, Amara, a college student with ambitions of her own, will shortly give birth and hand the infant over to the Melancons, and that the child, Hallow, will be raised inside a family that believes she has come to restore its fortunes. The novel follows Hallow as she grows up and begins to ask what her relation to the family she lives in actually is.