6 stars
First Sentence: A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart.
Thoughts: The Lougandour women of Guadaloupe were always poor, but they were always strong. This is the story of three generations. Well, five if you count all of them. Really only two, but now we’re getting technical.
It began with Toussine, the daughter of Minerva, a freed slave. Toussine was beautiful and capable, even as a child. She made everyone happy, especially the fisherman Jeremiah. As soon as she was old enough, they got married and moved into a nice house in L’Abandoneé village. It was just a shack like all the other houses, but Toussine made it into something special. They had good luck twin daughters, and a garden full of flowers and vegetables. Then tragedy struck. The house burned down and one of the twins was badly burned. She died a few days later, in agonizing pain.
Toussine and Jeremiah moved into an abandoned manor house with their remaining daughter. No one saw them for years. Then Toussine came back out into the sun and started cleaning up the property. A few years later she had another daughter, Victory, and a new title, Queen Without a Name.
Victory grew up. She stayed in L’Abandoneé after Jeremiah’s death when Toussine moved to another village, Fond-Zombi. Victory had two daughters, Regina and Telumee. She never married, but had a string of lover. Angebert, Telumee’s father, was the best of the lot, but after he was killed in a bar fight, Victory sent Regina to live with her father and Telumee to live with her grandmother so she could gallivant off with her new man.
Toussine taught Telumee many things, but mostly how to be a strong woman. She introduced her to Ma Cia, the local witch who taught Telumee how to look beneath the surface. She sent Telumee to school to learn how to read and write. She taught her how to be “a woman with two hearts.”
Telumee, meanwhile, was more interested in Elie, the son of the local barkeeper. They fell in love in school, but couldn’t get married for a while. Elie had to earn enough money to build them a house so he went to work with local mystery man Amboise as a sawyer, cutting boards in the forest. Toussine didn’t want Telumee to work in the cane fields where any overseer might get hold of her, so Telumee went to work as a maid for the Desaragnes, the descendants of the White of Whites who once owned all this land. She endured mockery, insults, and a handsy master until Elie serenaded her one night to let her know their house was finished.
Telumee left the Desaragnes and went back to Fond-Zombi. She and Elie moved into their new house where they were very happy until one day they weren’t. Elie began to drink more and beat her when he came home. Toussine tried to help, but she was old and her life was almost over. Then the worst happened. Telumee left Fond-Zombi for the Mountain of Lost People where she made a new life. She found love and lost it. She found a child and lost her. She found another man and he lost himself.
By the end, Telumee is an old woman looking back at her life. It was a hard life filled with joy and sorrow, peaks and valleys, but it was a life well lived.
As I struggled others will struggle, and for a long time yet people will know the same sun and moon; they will look at the same stars and, like us, see in them the eyes of the dead. I have already washed and ironed the clothes I want to feel on my corpse. Sun risen, sun set, the days slip past and the sand blown by the wind will engulf my boat. But I shall die here, where I am, standing in my little garden. What happiness!
The Eclectic Reviewer 