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“And if he declares, as I predict he will, that it’s a lost cause and that we have to accept this?” the grandfather asked.

“Well, then we’ll have to accept it.”

“I will never abandon my land to these thieves,” the grandfather yelled, walking toward his son, who quickly jumped to close the door. “My father sweated to acquire it, and I will not abandon my land to these thieves.”

He regained his composure with difficulty, pricking up his ears despite himself.

One could no longer hear the hammering. This unexpected silence coming from outside, as if in response to his anger, seemed so ominous to the old man that he pressed both hands on the table, bending his spine as if threatened by some immediate danger. The grandson crossed his arms, and knitting his brows, looked at his father; the latter seemed to have gone beyond plain fear. Huddled up, every muscle tense, he looked like a lion tamer locked in a cage with wild beasts and expecting to see them pounce and tear him to shreds at any moment.

“If they come, especially if they heard us, you’ll have to keep quiet and let me do the talking,” he begged in a voice so low that he could hardly be heard.

He clenched his teeth and the muscles of his face tightened.

The three of them stood like that for a long time. Then the young man looked away from his father, lifted his shoulders and walked to the door, opening it a second time.

“They haven’t moved,” he said with forced casualness.

And he sat at the table for breakfast. He pushed away the omelet that Mélie had prepared and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Maybe, like my father said, we’ll have to accept it,” he said.

Hearing these words, the grandfather, his eyes bloodshot, left the table and went out on the porch. Thumbs in his suspenders, he paced up and down for a long time, then stopped, suddenly slouching: all around him stood the houses of the neighborhood, that old quarter of Port-au-Prince where he had grown up in comfort thanks to his father, a peasant who had managed to make it in the bigoted world of bourgeois blacks and mulattoes by dint of honest and sheer tenacity. He earned his position by the sweat of his brow, as the grandfather loved to declare to his son and grandson, and their name was respected to this day. A farmer from the market town of Cavaillon, the old patriarch—intelligent, crafty, tireless in his task—dreamed of a different life for his son. This house, this “big-house” as he called it in Creole, had been built at the end of Lysius Salomon’s rule,1 and while everyone was finding their way into the troubled waters of politics, he had remained steadfastly committed to his business. During the 1887 currency adjustment that linked the Haitian gourde to the American dollar, he was able to accumulate a small fortune.

The colonial-style wooden house looked like all the established houses in the neighborhood. Rising up between courtyard and garden, they were decked with railed balconies and hat-shaped gables, and stood in the midst of sprawling properties planted mostly with fruit trees, mahogany and oak. Here and there, a few modern buildings lay flat and square at their feet, their scale limited by lack of land. Looking at them, the grandfather began to regret not having sold his properties, as others did, to the nouveaux riches and given the money to his children.

Humiliated by his father, a true Haitian black man who insisted on serving his loas2 faithfully he had renounced the religious vocation he had been drawn to very early on. Once he was orphaned, he had also refused to rent the house, refused to leave the neighborhood, though he had no income to live on. After all, who else would take care of his father’s grave? For forty years, he had made do with the income from the sale of his fruit to the local peddlers who would come around to haggle with him.

Every day during harvest, he went to the garden and paid a few young black men to climb up the trees with sacks on their backs. Down came coconuts