My first encounter with Gilda was by way of the 2015 anthology Ghost: 100 Stories to Read with the Lights On, edited by Louise Welsh. Lush prose, engaging episodic story, and masses to think about. It's all about being Black and queer in America, about blood and home soil, giving and taking about living in a greedy, exploitative, violent place and resisting those things. In the process she finds relationships (no less valid because they can't last) and slowly starts to build a found family. Gilda moves through the decades learning how to trust and finding a place in the world, but it's over a century before she can begin to confront her experience of slavery, and start overcoming the trauma. It may not be a voluntary exchange, of which she's aware, but it is still a form of payment and valuable, because demanding something for nothing and hurting people are in fact wrong. So she uses psychic vampire powers to identify problems and help: open horizons, give self worth, repair memories. She's taken in by a vampire, who turns her with consent and care, and who teaches her the first lesson: you leave something of value in exchange for blood. Gilda (as she becomes) starts off as an escaped slave, a little girl who's fled the cotton fields now her mother has died, leaving her family. I generally don't like vampire books for many many reasons, one of which is that the common trope of 'oh no, I am forced to be an exploitative predator, my trauma' makes me want to punch MCs in the fictional face.

The gilda stories by jewelle gomez