The Spirits of Mulberry : THE HAND I FAN WITH.<i> By Tina McElroy Ansa (Doubleday: $23.95, 432 pp.)</i>

One of the benchmarks of great literature is its ability to transport us to a different world, one that crackles with as much authenticity as the street on which we live. Over numerous novels, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi became so real that the author could draw an imaginary map of it.

We can add to that imaginary literary atlas Mulberry, the setting for Tina McElroy Ansa’s third novel, “The Hand I Fan With.” From the depth and complexity of her superbly crafted story to the loving representation of a small middle Georgia town, the novel is a tour de force of imagination and wisdom.

Readers familiar with Ansa’s work will remember Mulberry as the location for “Baby of the Family,” about the adolescent Lena McPherson, and “Ugly Ways,” the story of the irrepressible Lovejoys. “The Hand I Fan With” brings us back to Ansa’s mythical stomping grounds just after the devastating big flood of 1994. In its wake, the flood has caused a condition called “Cleer Flo,” which makes the Ocawatchee River run cleaner than the municipal water supply and “cool as the dreams of a drought-stricken people.”

Under such ideal conditions, by the spring of 1995, Mulberry is hopping with “life going on and going on at a furious pace.” And not a moment too soon for Lena McPherson, now a 45-year-old “got it made” success story, owner of a thriving real estate business and all-around helping hand. But the small town’s dependence on and assumption of her ever-present largess (“Shoot,” one resident says, “Lena McPherson is the hand I fan with”) is leaving Lena little time or enthusiasm for a life of her own. That is until she feels a breeze on her neck one day while driving along U.S. 90, which sends her into an unexpected--and nearly fatal--orgasmic experience.

A later incident at her parents’ cafe / juke joint causes her to bump her head and be rushed to the hospital. By the time the cause of these incidents manifests itself, the reader is caught up in Ansa’s storytelling power, carried along like the Ocawatchee that runs along her property. We are prepared to suspend disbelief long enough to see just what this spirit--summoned by Lena and a girlfriend in a half-joking ceremony to conjure “a sexy man, a wise man, her man”--has to offer the busy yet unfulfilled woman.

Among the gifts the spectral “Herman” brings is a reverence for nature that Lena has virtually ignored, despite her vast estate being situated on some of the best land in Mulberry. His very scent reminds Lena of what she had almost lost: “Herman smelled like topsoil . . . as if he were the dark rich crumbly earth itself outside her door.” But Herman’s relationship with Lena is not just a lesson in horticulture or an opportunity for Ansa to show off her skill in writing about nature.

Being with Herman also allows Lena to examine the way in which she lives her life--the bustling efficiency, her addiction to fashionable but uncomfortable high-heeled mules, her preoccupation with other people’s problems, her lingering fear about the power of the caul and the spirits that haunt her: “She had given herself so little time to just sit and think, without planning and fixing and scheduling her day in her head. Now some days she found herself sitting alone under a sycamore tree in the woods just wondering. She was beginning again to think freely and comfortably about her mother and father and the other dead members of her family, chuckling to herself how she was like this one or that one.”

In addition to the spirits with whom Lena makes peace, the novel is populated by the residents of Mulberry--characters in every sense of the word--their language and customs expertly captured on the page and destined to linger in the mind. While not essential to enjoying the townspeople’s opinions and antics here, the fact that Peanut, Cliona from Yamacraw or Gloria the barmaid have appeared in other Mulberry novels gives their appearance a comfortable resonance and deepens the thrall in which Ansa holds the reader.

While the novel operates on one level as a magical love story set in a small town, it is also about our reconnection with the past and the ability to live fully in the present, about finding one’s higher calling in the spirituality and sensuality of everyday life. From the intense love scenes with Herman that start as flesh-and-blood encounters and end in a wisp of smoke to Lena’s speculation on the meaning of the Eucharist, with its symbolic partaking of the flesh and spirit of Christ, Ansa illuminates the intersection between the sacred and the secular where, as Herman says, “it’s all communion, baby.”

Lena is indeed empowered through her relationship with Herman, a coming into her own that is intensified, not diminished, by Lena’s impending menopause. That factor alone will cause the novel to be championed by a generation of women eager to see strong images of their mid-life selves. “The Hand I Fan With” also exudes a sexuality and frank eroticism that is revelatory, and too seldom explored in African American literature.

“The Hand I Fan With” is also a paean to black culture and history in all of its manifestations, from the blues and R&B; music that punctuates the story to the history of the Maroons of Northern Florida. Ansa’s obvious love for black Southern culture, in particular, is also a tribute to one of its earliest champions, Harlem Renaissance author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. From allusions to “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in references to the mules that made both Herman and Lena’s lives a misery, to the sensual descriptions of the Southern landscape, Ansa pays homage to this fellow Southerner and literary ancestor while creating, through her own inventive use of language, characterization and the deeply felt rhythms of black life, a new legacy that writers of the 21st century, especially women, will find both inspiring and enlightening.