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Intro
In Part One of the novel, Sophie Caco, who has spent the first 12 years of her life growing up in the Haitian village of Croix-des-Rosets under the care of her mother’s sister, Tante Atie, is suddenly summoned to New York to join her mother, Martine, in Brooklyn. Sophie is resentful of the fact that she has to leave Haiti—even as escalating violence threatens its urban and rural areas alike, and even as Tante Atie seems to struggle more and more each day with her unrequited love for Sophie’s schoolteacher, Monsieur Augustin. While other people tell Sophie that a daughter belongs with her mother, Sophie feels more like Tante Atie’s child—and even has nightmares in which her mother, whose face she only knows from pictures around the house, tries to kidnap her or physically restrain her. Sophie makes a Mother’s Day card with a little dried daffodil attached to the edge for Tante Atie—but even though she repeatedly tries to give it to her aunt, Tante Atie insists the card should be for Sophie’s real mother.
On the day of Sophie’s departure from Haiti, Tante Atie rides with her to the airport, where a violent protest is taking place. Sophie is seated on the plane next to a hysterical little boy, whose “trés corrupt” father has just been murdered outside the airport in the midst of the demonstrations. After falling asleep in the midst of the chaos onboard the airplane, Sophie arrives in Brooklyn. Martine is elated to see her, but Sophie is nearly catatonic with shock. As Sophie adjusts to her mother’s bleak apartment in a gritty but vibrant neighborhood, she also learns that Martine suffers from horrible night terrors, violent visions which stem from a rape Martine suffered when she was a teenager—a rape which resulted in Sophie’s conception. Sophie meets her mother’s boyfriend, Marc, and nervously prepares to start school. As the start of the school year approaches, Martine asks Sophie if she is a “good girl”—meaning, if she has had any boyfriends—and darkly tells Sophie about how, when Martine and Tante Atie were girls, Sophie’s Granmè Ifé used to “test” their virginity by routinely placing her fingers inside of them.
In Part Two, Sophie, now 18, moves with her mother to a house in a different part of Brooklyn. Martine, a nurse, works dreadfully long hours at two separate jobs, leaving Sophie—about to enter college—to her own devices much of the time. Sophie strikes up a friendship with Joseph, a musician who lives next door. Joseph is Martine’s age, but there is an undeniable tension between him and Sophie, and soon Sophie begins allowing Joseph to take her out on the town at night to jazz clubs and bars. Sophie tentatively brings up the subject of having a boyfriend with her mother, but Martine’s reaction tells Sophie that she will never be able to have romance in her life as long as she lives under her mother’s roof—even though Joseph tells Sophie that he loves her and wants to marry her.
One night, when Sophie comes home late from an evening out with Joseph, she finds her mother waiting for her. Martine tells Sophie that she knows about Joseph, then drags her upstairs where she violently “tests” her in the same way Granmè Ifé tested Martine and Tante Atie. Sophie “doubles,” or dissociates, during the testing, but doesn’t tell Joseph what has happened to her. Joseph tells Sophie that he’s leaving New York to live full-time in Providence, Rhode Island, and asks her one last time to marry him—Sophie rejects him, but when she returns home, she is lonely, upset, and full of longing for Joseph. While her mother is out on a date with Marc, Sophie takes a pestle from the kitchen upstairs to her room, where she plunges it into her vagina, mutilating herself and breaking her hymen, which effectively destroying her “virginity” by Martine’s standards. When Martine returns home and tests Sophie, she believes Sophie has had sex. She flies into a rage and banishes Sophie from the house. Sophie limps next door, where she tells Joseph that she’s ready to marry him.
In Part Three, Sophie, now the mother of an infant daughter named Brigitte, spontaneously travels to Haiti in the middle of August. She has returned to her grandmother’s village of La Nouvelle Dame Marie to reconnect with her roots, get some answers about her past, and escape for a while from her marriage to Joseph—which is suffering problems due to Sophie’s intense pain and revulsion surrounding sex. Sophie reconnects with Granmè Ifé and Tante Atie. In Sophie’s absence, Tante Atie has embedded herself in a deep friendship (and possibly a romantic relationship) with a local woman named Louise, a merchant determined to sell her prize pig for money to secure passage to America. Sophie doesn’t expressly tell her grandmother or her aunt the reasoning behind her visit for a while—but when Granmè Ifé confronts her about her marriage, Sophie admits she’s having problems and claims that the testing her mother subjected her to has ruined her life. Sophie asks Granmè Ifé why mothers continue testing their daughters. Granmè Ifé says that mothers just want their daughters to be safe, pure, and happy—but also apologizes for the pain she has, through perpetuating the practice of testing, caused for Sophie.
Soon, Granmè Ifé receives a cassette tape from Martine. On the tape, Martine (who has not spoken to Sophie for years), reveals that Joseph has called her in a panic, looking for Sophie. Granmè Ifé makes a cassette to send back to Martine in which she reveals Sophie’s whereabouts. A few days later, Martine arrives in Haiti, hoping to reconnect not just with her mother and her sister, but with Sophie too. Sophie witnesses her family members breaking down—Tante Atie and Granmè Ifé are locked in constant tension as Tante Atie tries to spend more and more time out drinking with Louise, angering Granmè Ifé, while Martine enters Sophie’s room at night to weep over Brigitte’s sleeping body. Granmè Ifé, in a betrayal of Tante Atie, purchases Louise’s pig in order to make Louise leave Haiti. Alongside this familial conflict, the violence in La Nouvelle Dame Marie escalates as the Tonton Macoutes—a lawless paramilitary force, one of whose members raped Martine years ago—murder a beloved villager. Eventually, Sophie realizes that she must leave Haiti and return home with her mother.
In Part Four, Sophie and Martine return to New York together, resolving to start their relationship from scratch and come clean with all their secrets. Sophie stays at Martine’s apartment for the night before returning to Providence. Sophie reveals that she is bulimic, and Martine reveals that she is pregnant. Sophie is shocked to learn that her mother has been sleeping with Marc all these years and urges her to get married. Martine, however, says she isn’t even sure she’s going to have the baby—she’s seriously considering an abortion. Sophie urges her mother not to do anything rash and returns to Providence, promising to visit with Brigitte and Joseph the following weekend.
Back in Rhode Island, Sophie meets with her sexual phobia support group and her therapist, Rena, who offers her advice on how to handle the news of her mother’s pregnancy. Rena suggests that both Sophie and Martine’s views of love, sex, and conception have been warped by the sexual violence they’ve been subjected to throughout their lives, and tells Sophie that the only way for either of them to heal is to directly confront their shared and separate traumas. After a visit to Brooklyn, Martine tells Sophie that she’s planning on getting an abortion—she claims the fetus inside of her is evil and has been talking to her in the voice of a man. Sophie is concerned about her mother but doesn’t try to dissuade her from getting the procedure—she simply asks Martine to call her after it’s done.
One afternoon, though, Sophie comes home from therapy to find a message from Marc on the answering machine telling her to call him. When Sophie gets in touch with Marc, he informs her that Martine has committed suicide, killing herself and the unborn baby by stabbing herself in the stomach 17 times. The devastated Sophie packs and heads straight to Brooklyn; she and Marc board a plane to Haiti to bring Martine’s body home. Back in La Nouvelle Dame Marie, Granmè Ifé claims she intuited that Martine was both pregnant and dead before she heard news about either thing. She and Tante Atie mourn Martine’s loss beside Marc and Sophie. Sophie, overwhelmed with emotion during her mother’s burial, flees into a cane field, much like the one in which her mother was raped as a teenager. She thinks about the generations of pain and trauma that have formed the women of Haiti—their suffering has nearly broken them, but it has also made them stronger. Sophie realizes at last that she can be free of her burdens without surrendering her family or her history, and allows Granmè Ifé to comfort her in a rare moment of vulnerability.
