Caul Baby, the first novel from bestselling nonfiction writer Morgan Jerkins, opens with the story of Laila, one of the “last vestiges of the Black elite in Strivers’ Row,” a well-to-do Harlemite in the late ’90s who has struggled for years to carry a child to term. “Her body was a desolate land, each crack in her earth a forewarning from the last child to future ones that this place was no home,” Jerkins writes about Laila’s chronic infertility.