Summary
Part III: Chapter 13
It is an extremely hot day in Haiti and Sophie’s driver continues to lecherously comment on her beauty. She almost would not have been able to get a ride in this van painted in bright red with safari animals on the side if not for the driver’s interest in her beauty. She says nothing, happy that she and her daughter Brigitte have even made it this far.
The driver jokes and compliments her but she says she is a married woman. He also compliments her baby, and the fact that she comes back to the place where she was born.
A hunchbacked crone pays a fare and gets into the van. Brigitte yawns. Female vendors in the road call to each other, asking “Ou libéré?” Sophie sees a woman she recognizes—Louise, Man Grace’s daughter.
Out of the van, Sophie waits under the shade of a tree while Brigitte takes a bottle. A couple tonton macoutes laugh together. Someone whispers in Sophie’s ear that they have a pig to sell her. Sophie jumps in fright but it is just Louise. Sophie tells her she does not need a pig.
Louise says she and Atie are close because “we are both alone in the world, since my mother died” (98) and Sophie asks where Atie is; she was supposed to meet her here.
Louise asks Sophie what she does in America and Sophie replies that she is a secretary but has not worked since the baby. Louise muses that she wants to go to America and will take a boat. Sophie comments that this is dangerous but Louise knows this and does not care.
Louise then asks about Brigitte and comments how skinny Sophie looks. She buys Sophie a papaya cola.
Sophie looks up and sees Atie waiting. She looks exactly the same and is grinning widely. Atie races over and looks closely at her niece. She picks up Brigitte and marvels that she looks like Martine.
Chapter 14
On the walk back, Atie admires little Brigitte and Sophie states that she is a strong Caco woman. She asks Atie about Louise telling her that she learned her letters, and Atie smiles that she does know how and sometimes writes things down that Louise calls poems.
Atie inquires whether or not Martine has met the baby and Sophie responds that her mother will not take her letters or her calls, and she has not seen her since she left home. Atie sighs that this is sad for both.
A moment later, Atie asks about New York and Sophie calls it a “place where you can lose yourself easily” (103). Atie replies that she can lose herself here too.
They pass Man Grace’s house. Atie explains that she died in her sleep one night and it is hard on Louise because they slept in the same bed every night.
At Grandmè Ifé’s house, everything looks the same. She smiles broadly at her granddaughter and great-granddaughter and hugs them tightly. Sophie tells her she calls her daughter Brigitte Ifé after her. Grandmè looks at the child and marvels how “we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face” (105).
Chapter 15
The family eats supper outside. Lights on the hill twinkle. Tante Atie asks if Martine cooked Haitian food and if Sophie does. Sophie says she will have to try a meal.
Grandmè tells Atie she ought to go to New York, but Atie replies that the reading takes too much time. Grandmè sighs that Atie ought to go to day classes and it is not okay to go about in the night as free as a devil. Atie says she has to labor at night. They continue to squabble, and Grandmè is clearly annoyed that Louise will not come here to teach Atie.
Atie goes inside, brings out a book, and haltingly starts reading from it. The words she reads are the ones from the Mother’s Day card Sophie had made for her long ago. She says she has never forgotten them, and then heads out into the night for her lesson.
Sophie is given her mother’s old room and sinks into the mattress. Lying in bed with Brigitte, Sophie thinks that all they are missing is Joseph. When Sophie was pregnant, Joseph used to play his saxophone near Sophie’s belly and Brigitte would come alive inside.
Sophie looks at her daughter and asks her aloud if she will remember this, and if she will inherit her mother’s problems. Sophie has an urge to tell her daughter a story like Atie used to tell her.
Brigitte wakes and Sophie feeds her. She goes outside and sees Atie waving and giggling. It sounds like she has been drinking. She hears Grandmè get up and chastise Atie, but Atie does not care.
Chapter 16
Sophie watches the sun rise and then performs her ablutions. She still feels fat even though she has lost a lot of weight since the baby. She scrubs her skin with leaves and remembers the goosebumps she got when her mother tested her. She smells the herbaceous leaves.
After her own washing she washes Brigitte. Grandmè also washes, and Sophie notes her small hump that does not show under her clothes. She thinks of how her mother had lumps in her breasts and had them taken out.
Chapter 17
The family eats cassava sandwiches. Grandmè looks accusingly at Tante Atie, who keeps her head down while she eats. A bell from the cathedral tolls, signaling indigents’ funerals.
Grandmè says she is going to do the maché and Sophie asks if she can come. Grandmè says yes. They pass the cane fields and Grandmè introduces her granddaughter to some of the men working and singing.
At the market, Grandmè shops “like an army general on rounds” (116). Sophie sees Louise selling colas to a few macoutes. They joke like they are friends. One who may be as young as a teenager stares at Sophie and lewdly grabs his crotch and blows a kiss at her. A boy flying a kite wanders around and a macoute gives him a coin.
Louise asks if they want to buy her pig and Grandmè snaps that they do not. A young macoute begins yelling at the coal vendor and says he stepped on his feet. He rams his gun into the man’s ribs. Grandmè says she knows the end already.
Grandmè and Sophie walk home, and Sophie turns back to see the coal vendor on the ground spitting blood. All the macoutes kick him viciously.
Sophie asks if her grandmother is mad at Louise and the old lady replies that she does not like the way Tante Atie has been since coming from Croix-des-Rosets; they are like milk and lemons, oil and water. She drinks too much. She should have stayed there. Grandmè is irritable and says she can care for herself and Atie ought to go to New York. Sophie asks if Grandmè wants to go and Grandmè replies that she has “one foot in this world and one in the grave” (119) and has no interest in doing that.
Sophie wonders why Grandmè doesn’t tell Atie this and Grandmè sneers that all Atie does is read. Sophie thinks it is good that Atie reads because it is her freedom.
Chapter 18
Atie is resting on the porch with Brigitte in her lap. Atie says she has a lump in her calf and has to go to the market. Grandmè warns her not to because the macoutes are beating Dessalines, the coal vendor. Atie asks why and Grandmè shrugs that “when people hate you they beat your animals” (121). Atie goes anyway.
Grandmè and Sophie spend the day watching the beans boil. Eliab, the kite boy, comes by and Grandmè gives him water.
Atie does not return for dinner. Grandmè remarks that Brigitte is quiet and Sophie says she has always been like that. This makes Grandmè think of Martine, who was also quiet.
Grandmè asks why Sophie left her husband so suddenly. Sophie says she did not leave him for good. Grandmè asks if they are having trouble with marital duties and Sophie replies honestly that they are, and that the duty is painful. Grandmè asks if Joseph is honorable and Sophie explains that he is but she has no desire and it feels evil. Grandmè asks if Martine tested her and Sophie assents but thinks “test” is a weird word. Grandmè shrugs that it is what it is called, and Sophie says sternly that she calls it humiliation and hatred of her own body. She feels like she needs to be somewhere alone.
Grandmè calls “Krik?” and Eliab and his little friends call “Krak!” They ask for a story and she says she has one. Sophie and Brigitte listen and Sophie stares at the sky, thinking of how the stars are not the ones you wish on—when a star falls here, someone will die.
Grandmè begins. There was once a lark that fell in love with a little girl and lured her with a pomegranate. The bird kept promising her more pomegranates for more things, such as kissing her. One day, the lark asked the girl to go away with him but she did not want to. He looked so sad, though, and she finally agreed. When she got on his back and they headed out into the water, he told her there is a king in a faraway land who will die if he does not have a little girl’s heart. The girl replies that she should have told him this too—that little girls know their hearts are precious and they leave them at home when they go away. The bird suggests she go get it and she agrees. He sets her down but she runs away and never comes back. Thus, if you see a lark in a tree, he is always waiting for his pretty girl to come back.
The boys clap and ask if this is true. Grandmè says it is as true as her hair is blue.
Atie comes home a few minutes later. Grandmè asks her to read her something and Atie replies that she is empty.
Analysis
Like her mother, Sophie flees her home to escape the problems she cannot yet come to terms with. Danticat has the reader piece together Sophie’s story, but it becomes clear that she married Joseph, had extremely painful sex with him, became pregnant with Brigitte and had to have a C-section because of what she’d done to her vagina, and now cannot enjoy sex with her husband. She also has body issues in terms of what she looks like; she thinks she is fat and disgusting and cannot bear to be naked. In order to deal with her body issues she becomes bulimic; controlling what goes in and comes out of her body gives her a modicum of control over a body that never seemed to belong to her.
Back in Haiti some things are the same and some are different. Atie has learned how to read and revels in her “poems.” She feels a sense of freedom in going out at night and studying with Louise, which is important because she does not have much autonomy at all living with and caring for Grandmè. It is strongly hinted at that she and Louise are lovers, which is also (initially) a positive thing for Atie. When Louise leaves, though, Atie is broken. Atie’s tendency toward drunkenness is also troublesome. What has not changed is the sway the tonton macoutes hold in Dame Marie and everywhere else. They are menacing presence in the marketplace, leering at Sophie and beating up, and eventually killing, Dessalines the coal vendor for a negligible reason. The macoute’s hostile lechery towards Sophie is certainly worse than the driver’s flowery compliments, but even that encounter reminds readers that a woman is never really safe from a man thinking he can say and do whatever he wants to her, even if she is uncomfortable and unreceptive.
While in Haiti, Sophie begins to take small steps towards dealing with her issues. In these chapters the main thing she does is confront her grandmother about the testing. She is honest with Grandmè about how awful it was and how it has destroyed her ability to have sex within marriage. Grandmè does not have anything particularly helpful for her, explaining why it is important for a mother that her daughter be pure, but she does say, “My heart, it weeps like a river… for the pain we have caused you” (157). And, of course, the irony of the testing is that (as Sophie points out) neither Martine nor Atie have husbands, and Sophie can barely have sex with her husband.
As the scene has shifted back to Haiti, we can once more look at the intersection of women’s roles and image with that of politics. Critic Simone A. James Alexander begins her article on the subject by delineating how nationalist rhetoric, which is articulated and dominated by men, puts women’s stories on the periphery and in the domestic sphere, frames the nation/country in feminine terms and in need of saving and being protected, and seeks to regulate women’s experiences to further state interests. Danticat reveals how women’s bodies are dehumanized as they are subjected to the scrutiny of the regime, as well as the fact that the myth of blind female patriotism for the Duvalier regime and Haiti was erroneous.
Beginning with Martine’s rape, Alexander sees it as symbolic in that “woman’s body metonymically parallels land and… the desire for land/woman’s body is constructed as masculine desire.” As the rape is by a tonton macoute, this is a metaphor for state-sanctioned crimes being carried out on the land. Danticat provides multiple examples of the violence of Haitian men against Haitian women, of how women are subordinate to men and exist only for their sexual and reproductive capacities. Martine’s body is a victim of theft and colonization and thus she is rendered verbally and corporeally incapacitated.
One of the tragic elements of this situation is that “the demonization and victimization of the black female body… impels Martine to lecture Sophie on virtuous womanhood and on being proper,” and “perversely [Martine and Grandmè] become enforcers, perpetuating violence and victimization, and thus emulate the Tonton Macoutes, as they police their daughters’ bodies.” Martine’s internalization of her inferiority is also seen in her desire to look white, for Sophie to speak English, etc.
Ultimately Martine refuses to adhere to the state’s expectations regarding her role as a woman. She does not abstain from sex with Marc. She does not marry Marc. She does not carry her child to term, and kills herself rather than reproduce a cycle of misogynistic violence (since she perceives her child to be imbued with the spirit of an evil man, perhaps that of her rapist himself). Martine’s end is far from a happy one, but there is power in it. As Alexander concludes (see further analyses for an assessment of Sophie’s progress), women use their bodies “the only possession of which they have minimal control, as deadly weapons. In transcending sexist discourse, the Caco women relinquish their previous roles as agents of pain and become agents of their discourse… [and] literally and allegorically [traverse] borders and triumphantly [negotiate] terrains of torture and pain toward platforms for action.”
