Lucie
Liana's mother. She farms a hillside plot Marc Royer bought for her, and she settles the terms of her daughter's marriage.
The book
At a glance
- Liana's mother
- A shack on a hillside farm, two hours' ride above the town
- Bought for her by Marc Royer, with a cow and chickens
- Liana and four others — a son and three daughters, one of them sixteen
- An annuity for the rest of her life, settled at the marriage
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLucie lives two hours' ride up a hill path from the town, in a shack Marc Royer bought for her and stocked with a cow and chickens. Bougainvillea and orange trumpet flowers climb the sun-faded pink walls outside; inside it is dark and rotting. She has four children besides Liana.
When Liana runs home from Marc, Lucie does not take her side. She has been cheated by white people before and does not intend to be cheated again, but she is not going to lose the farm over her daughter's feelings either.
How the book draws them
- What she asks firstHer daughter arrives having walked out on the richest man on the island, and Lucie's question is whether he beat her. That would at least be a reason. Even then, as she thinks it through, women had been beaten before and stayed.
- The silence in the small roomThey sit in the dark of the shack, Lucie sewing, Liana waiting for an order or an argument and getting neither. When Liana finally says that Marc despises her except at night, Lucie shrugs, so slightly that Liana barely catches it, and goes on sewing.
- Her arithmeticWhat Lucie is actually thinking about is that Marc will take the farm back now, and that there are four other children eating, and that she is getting old. Her other children had no white father to give them the loosely curling hair and the small nose, and by her reckoning Liana was the only one of them with a chance.
- She thinks her daughter is idleIn Lucie's account Liana was never a worker. She would sit about all day playing with her hair, looking at her own face, smiling, making plans, telling herself stories and finding excuses to go into town.
- Settling the marriageWhen Marc proposes it in her house, Lucie looks at him with suspicion — not at the idea of the marriage, which she does not care for, but at the risk of being fooled while a bargain is on the table. She asks who will bring the priest. She takes the annuity he offers her for life. Liana is on the floor against the wall with her legs stiff in front of her, and nobody asks her anything.