“A blanc [white person] is coming to visit today. He’s your papa, but when you see him don’t call him papa. Say ‘Bonjour, monsieur’ and disappear. If the neighbors ask you who he was, you tell them you don’t know. He is such a good man, we have to protect his reputation. That’s what happens when men of good character have children with dogs,” said Florence to me in Creole when I was about seven or eight years old.

So begins Jean-Robert Cadet’s autobiography, Restavec. Mr. Cadet’s story starts with seeing his father for the first time. His mother died when he was around one year old, and his father brought him to be cared for by a Haitian lady named Florence.... more

"Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of." (From The Farming of Bones)

A couple of months ago, I read the book The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat. The Farming of Bones takes place on the island of Hispaniola in the 1930s. It begins in a fictional village in the Dominican Republic; at the same time Dictator Rafael Trujillo began his policy on Haitian genocide. We... more