Where I come from, there’s more than one way a man gives you his name. He marries you or he buys you. In some places that is the same thing, and they call it a dowry, but it’s a truth everybody must savvy that in some places a man has no need to marry what he’s bought.

This isn’t going to be the story of all that was done to me at Paradise, or of everything I did. But I’ll have to include some of it, I suppose. I’ve always wanted to tell my story, even though one person’s story is only a raindrop in an ocean. But if you’ve ever stood in the sea when rain’s coming then you know they’re two different kinds of water. Seawater is nothing like the first cold drop springing fresh on your face, then another on your tongue, then another, pat-pat-pat on your closed eyelids until all around you rainwater’s slapping at the sea.

The difficult thing is to know where to start. My life began with some truly hard things, but my story doesn’t have to, even though nothing draws honesty out of you like suffering. The receiving of it, but the giving also.

I was born at Paradise and I was still a small girl when they took me from the slave quarters up to the house. For a long time, I thought that was a stroke of luck, but it was nothing more than the liar’s habit of trying to make fact better than truth.

Some nights, if Phibbah had left the shutters open and the candles lit, I could creep along the river through damp grass, hide behind the sugar mill, gawp at the house. Yellow light shivered at the windows like church glass, and Miss-bella’s shadow stretched grey and tall as she drifted past them. I pictured her inside, getting ready for bed, rolling towards Langton. The syrupy way white women move. Not like the cabin-women, who were quick as hens.

The house was a sight come morning too. Sun shining like Langton’s church shoes. Heat already gripping my throat but still a cat’s tail of mist. I’d walk the track through the guinea grass up to the front porch. Out in the cane-piece, the men waiting for their bowl of mash. Lime-washed walls, porch wide as shoulders, the logwood shutters Miss-bella made Manso put up to shut out the bad air. I liked the idea that the house was as new as me. Langton used to brag about making Manso and the hired-on stonemasons and carpenters work like clocks for three years getting it plumb.

Then I’d smooth out my brown calico, walk round to the back. Everything, all the way to where the river cut north, black, slow and mud-clogged, belonged to Langton. I’d sit right on one of Miss-bella’s campeachy chairs, listen to the floorboards creak, lift my own arms out of the sun the way I’d seen the white ladies do, push my toes down to set the chair rocking. Just close my eyes and wait for the day to crawl towards noon.