The Island Beneath the Sea

The eventful story of a slave in 18th-century Santo Domingo who manages to free herself from the stigmas society has imposed on her to achieve freedom.

For a slave in late 18th-century Saint-Domingue, Zarité had been lucky: at nine years old, she was sold to Toulouse Valmorain, a wealthy landowner, but she never knew the exhaustion of the sugar cane plantations or the suffocation and suffering of the sugar mills, because she was always a domestic slave. Her natural kindness, strength of spirit, and honesty allowed her to share the secrets and spirituality that helped her people, the slaves, survive, and to know the miseries of the masters, the white people.

Zarité became the center of a microcosm that reflected the world of the colony: master Valmorain, his fragile Spanish wife and sensitive son Maurice, the wise Parmentier, the military man Relais and the mulatto courtesan Violette, Aunt Rose, the healer, Gambo, the handsome rebel slave... and other characters in a cruel conflagration that would eventually devastate their land and cast them far from it.

When her master took her to New Orleans, Zarité began a new stage in which she would achieve her greatest aspiration: freedom. Beyond pain and love, submission and independence, her desires and those imposed on her throughout her life, Zarité could contemplate it with serenity and conclude that she had been lucky.

«In my forty years, I, Zarité Sedella, have had better luck than other slaves. I will live long and my old age will be content because my star -my z'etoile- shines even when the night is cloudy. I know the taste of being with the man chosen by my heart when his large hands awaken my skin. I have had four children and one grandchild, and those who are alive are free. My first memory of happiness, when I was a bony, disheveled brat, is moving to the sound of the drums, and that is also my most recent happiness, because last night I was in Congo Square dancing and dancing, with no thoughts in my head, and today my body is warm and tired.»

Review:
«A song to freedom.»
El Mundo