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I repeated those words to my father, who beat him so badly he ran away. We never saw him again. He was replaced with Augustine, whose parents themselves brought her to us from Lion Mountain, and from the abuse we heaped upon her, I learned to give thanks for my social position and to appreciate my father despite the beatings he continued to visit upon me. We were about the same age, Augustine and I, and I would have loved to share my games with her, but my mother flatly refused to permit this.

“She’s just a servant,” she said, “a black girl from the hills we don’t even pay! Your father would be furious if you played with her. Invite Jane, Dora and Eugénie, and leave that girl to her work.”

Dodging my parents’ surveillance, I sometimes went to meet an old stable hand, a jack-of-all-trades they called a “groom” in Parisian fashion. He slept on a mat in the stable near the horses. I took out the sugar cubes I had stolen for him.

“Thank you, Miss Claire,” he would say. “A good person, you are.”

Then I went to hug Bon Ami, who would wrinkle his nose to eat the sugar out of my hand.

Félicia was four years old at the time. My mother, who didn’t trust the servants, forced me to help look after her. I had no time to myself. After learning my lessons and doing my chores I had to look after my sister without a break. I took revenge on the sly by leaving her to her own devices as much as possible. Once I let her take a tumble down the stairs on purpose and this got me another thrashing. Yet another comment by Augustine about the color difference between my sister and me prevented me from loving her, and gradually I began to envy her.

The day I turned thirteen, my father ordered Demosthenes to saddle our horses and we galloped to his plantation. I was in a riding habit he had ordered from France, and he was in riding breeches, pith helmet on his head. In my long skirt, frilly white blouse, goose-feather hat, I had the pretentious air of a snob aristocrat of the eighteenth century. I had begged them to take out the feather, pointing out my youth and the embarrassment I would feel exhibiting myself in such a getup.

“Allow me to introduce you to the finer things,” my father said angrily. “You will soon know why.”

The coffee was in bloom. Thinking back, I can still smell the bitter-sweetness of the coffee cherries wet with dew, of mango and quenepa branches like open parasols over the fields; the smell of birds frolicking in the leaves, flying low enough to brush past us; the smell of fresh resin warming in the sun along the coarse trunks of oak and logwood trees. Caw, caw, the seahawks screamed, as the peasants chased them away waving their arms and shouting. I hadn’t seen the farmhands for some time and they were amazed to see a young woman before them. They shook my hand limply in the peasant manner, and one of them scratched his head and said:

“By God, that’s one beautiful black girl you got there, Agronomist.”

My father’s laughter seemed forced. He replied in a pretentious Creole:

“Our race has surprises in store for us yet, Louisor; no one here can predict what type of child will come from his mother’s womb.”

“Except for the real blacks, Agronomist,” retorted Alcius, the oldest of the farmers. “They know they can’t be fooled. A black man and a black woman will give you naught but little black babies. And that’s the truth.”

My father changed the subject, crushed a coffee cherry between his fingers and breathed it in:

“My coffee is the best in the region,” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “Listen, farmers, I know what’s happening on the other plantations: it’s a mess out there. The big planters are abandoning their coffee to dishonest people who steal from them. You know I trust you, but twice a week during harvest I come to check on your work. You can see the result …”

He gestured at the immense verdant expanse, where cherries gleamed between the leaves like rubies.

“Even if I should disappear,” he continued, “you must faithfully keep your