How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Page)
Quote #10
There is a place where women are buried in clothes the color of flames, where we drop coffee on the ground for those who went ahead, where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: "Ou libéré?" Are you free, my daughter?' (35.234)
Haiti is a place that always occupies Sophie's imagination. Partly this is because she has to recreate it in her mind when she is living in Brooklyn, and partly it happens from the colorful stories she recalls from her childhood. In them, everything is brighter, more intense, more violent—more everything—than her gray life in New York. This realm of stories, Haiti, also defines her life narrative, and her mother's. In the end, the two of them have become part of the mythology of the land, something that immigration can't take away from them. At the same time, there is part of them that can never escape from the land. The question "Are you free?" is definitely a loaded one, and one that we don't ever get a direct answer to.