“I assure you, I am humbled.”

“Fanm pale nan tou de bò bouch yo.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Three months, and you still have less of a grasp on the language than a baby.” Ella still had her head bent over her sewing.

I closed my eyes. Willed myself to remember floating on the water.

“What is it that you’ve worked on for so many weeks?” I said finally. “Surely you are done?”

She lifted her head. She slit her eyes at me. Then she held up what was in her lap. A jacket, which she held by the shoulders and gave a good shake so that it uncrumpled.

I got up from my seat and went to sit beside her. “May I?” I said.

She nodded.

I took the garment in my hands and turned it over. Close embroidery in that bright red thread. I held it nearer to my eyes. It was words. An incantation. Maybe even a history. I could only make out a few of the words, but I realized she had embroidered a whole story on this jacket in Kreyòl.

“What does it mean?” I said.

“You are like a child, always asking that.”

I stuck my thumb into my mouth and hummed, like a baby would. I had the satisfaction of startling her into a laugh.

“Your estimations are always correct, Ella.”

“Stop.”

“I am an infant and, as such, would be delighted if you schooled me in this.”

She looked at me. I raised my thumb back to my mouth. “All right,” she said. “He hasn’t told you, has he, yet, of the bad year we had here?”

“When your mother and brothers passed. Yes.”

“He has not told you, though, what else happened?”

“No,” I said.

“We were thirteen,” she said. “We had been here three years. We knew the language so well by then. There was a great crime, in Port-au-Prince. We lived there then—we had not yet come here to build the church in Jacmel. A man had sold his niece to the Vodoun priests, and they had slit her throat and drained her blood and drank it and ate her flesh. The government investigated and brought the bad people to justice. We watched them burn in the capital square. Ti Me, my brother, and I. We saw God’s law that day. It was extraordinary. Emmanuel fainted, and Ti Me kept saying, “It is not right.” She stayed at the square till the last of the embers died down. I think she was waiting for something. I do not know what. My brother was very upset. He said it was a tragedy. That they should never have burnt those terrible people. He still says it was a tragedy. He wrote to me about it, even when he was with you, in New York. So I began to make this for him. To remind him of the true history. I wrote it—see, I stitched it in thread. So he will always remember.”