Abstract:
On the first day of summer in the year 2103, valedictorian of the Excel High graduating class Ola Brewer-Asaju is ready for a weekend of outfits, parties, and fun with her best friend before her summer job starts. Unfortunately, she's not un-grounded until tomorrow. It's been a week since her mother, Michelle, grounded her for exposing a corrupt administrator on national television instead of delivering the pre-approved speech of heartfelt farewells expected of the class speaker. Today, Ola argues with her mother before she leaves for work, but this quickly becomes the least of her concerns as revelations about her mother's employers, her father's death a year prior, and worsening freshwater scarcity across the nation come to light seemingly by the hour. By evening, Ola is forced to embark on a routine, but dangerous trip by herself for the first time across her hometown of New York City to put the pieces together— pieces of herself, her ancestors, and the fragmented histories of water and trans-atlantic slavery that threaten the end of her world. The Recipe for Water follows Ola through the twenty four hours of her life that bring her to questions about the past 82 years into our future, from 2021, and 248 years after the "end" of trans-atlantic slavery to reflect on the creation of Black futurity.
