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To toughen me and perhaps to punish me for his disappointed paternal hopes, he decided to raise me as if I were a boy. Every morning, he would ask for his horse and put me in the saddle. I screamed the first time, frightening the stable hand Demosthenes, an old black man who was enslaved by his meager wages and who trembled before my father. I fell the second time. Demosthenes picked me up, and my father told him:

“Put her back on the horse.”

Crying, I clung to his neck.

“Put her back in the saddle,” my father screamed.

The poor man had to obey.

I fell again and Demosthenes grabbed me in his arms and ran to the house.

“Madame,” he said to my mother. “He’s going to kill your little girl.”

My father came to get me. He struck Demosthenes, angrily tore me from my mother’s arms and stood me in front of the animal.

“He’s not going to do anything to you,” he said, “look!”

He put my frozen hand on the horse’s muzzle, sat me back in the saddle and whipped his rump.

I screamed in terror, and then stiffened my legs and thighs around the horse’s warm belly. A month later, he galloped with me beneath the trees in the courtyard.

While waiting to be dispatched to France, I spent my time with other daughters from bourgeois families at the École Nationale of the French sisters, whose mother superior was a friend of my mother’s. This meant I was watched closely. At home, it fell to my father to make me do my work. Every day I was punished for the blots in my notebook. The punishment consisted of kneeling with arms crossed, chin up, next to my father. Eyes closed, trembling with fatigue, I would wait for the “get up” that signaled an end to my torment. Sometimes I would cry, and then the punishment lasted much longer.

Twice a week, from my room I heard my father yell orders to the servants and gallop away to Lion Mountain, which is what they called the six hundred acres planted with coffee, from which he extracted our prosperity. My father, very proud of his coffee, bragged about having studied agronomy in France and, unlike the other planters, personally watched over his field hands.

When I turned ten he gave me my own horse, which I promptly named Bon Ami, perhaps foreseeing the moral solitude that awaited me.

People tended to keep to themselves. When we did have guests, and this was rare, our living room would open to the Granduprés, Bavières, Soubirans, Duclans, Camuses, Audiers, M. Prélat, a French merchant set up on Grand-rue, French ship captains and crew, and all the best society from Port-au-Prince, always received in the French style with plenty of wine and champagne. Our port was opened to Europe and the United States, and Grand-rue overflowed with French, German, English and American products. The Syrians, recently naturalized as Haitians in order to benefit legally from all of our privileges, were also supplied by these boats.

In the year 1912, I was barely twelve when I became friends with Térésa Aboud, a very sweet Syrian girl with long black hair who spoke nothing but Creole. I only saw her at school, and even then only while concealing it from the mother superior. One day she came and told us that the Syrians were being driven out of the country by the president of Haiti and that they, the Abouds, would starve to death in Kingston, where they planned on taking refuge. My friends and I found such a measure truly unfair and took Térésa under our protection.

“Papa,” I asked my father at the dinner table, “why does President Leconte17 want to drive the Syrians out of our town?”

“Because they are getting rich at our expense,” my father replied. “What’s more, they spend little, hoard money, and are seeking protection under the wings of foreign powers whose citizens they now claim to be. Because of their disloyalty, the competition has become unfair and the poor Haitians are being driven to bankruptcy.”

“We waited too long to drive them out,” my mother interjected with rancor. “The competition ruined my parents.”

“Is that true, Mama?”

“It’s true, my child.”

Back in school, I avoided talking to Tér