Horrified by this violation of her body, Sophie deflowers herself with a pestle and elopes with Joseph, enduring sex because she now hates her body, though her baby Brigitte is a consolation. Maxine follows a Haitian tradition and checks regularly to make sure Sophie is still a virgin. Six years later, Sophie, who has never had a boyfriend, falls in love with their much older next-door neighbor Joseph, a black American jazz musician. Seeing her daughter again has revived memories of the rape, and Maxine is suffering constant nightmares. She also tells Sophie that she is the product of a rape a stranger forced himself on Maxine in a sugar-cane field. Maxine is perpetually tired after her nursing-home double-shift she lives alone and dates a lawyer called Marc. When 12-year-old Sophie is summoned to New York to live with the family provider, Maxine, the mother she cannot remember, she is dismayed. The world of Sophie Caco, her beloved guardian Tante Atie, and her grandmother IfC the matriarch of this peasant family, is bounded by the sugar-cane fields of rural Haiti. Sexual traumas link a Haitian mother and her daughter in this wonderfully self-assured debut by 24-year-old Haitian-American Danticat.
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