Rating: Not rated
Tags: Fiction, Para Señor Miguel, Latin American, Lang:en
Summary
Born a slave on the island of
Saint-Domingue, Zarité -- known as Tété -- is
the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the
white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her
childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds
solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the
voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When
twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in
1770, it's with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of
financial success in his mind. But running his father's
plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It
will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but
marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And
Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged
slave. Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the
moving story of the intertwined lives of Tété and
Valmorain, and of one woman's determination to find love amid
loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and
to forge her own identity in the cruelest of circumstances.