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Once upon a time there was a widow who had two daughters. The elder was so much like her, both in looks and in character, that whoever saw the daughter saw the mother. They were both so disagreeable and so proud that there was no living with them.

Perhaps that was what my mother disliked most. I resembled her. I could not help but wonder if for some women, that was the worst sin of all.

MY MOTHER AND
I never discussed my education again, until one day she brought a hired man into the library to clean the window glass, and found me there. By then I was a serious girl of thirteen, nearly a woman, but I was sprawled upon the floor, my head in a book, my hair uncombed, my chores left to the maid. Madame Pomié threatened to throw the fairy tales away. “Take my advice and concentrate on your duties in this house,” she told me. “Stay out of the library.”

I had the nerve to respond, for I knew she wouldn’t dare to deface my father’s library. “This room doesn’t belong to you.”

My mother sent the hired man away and shut the door. “What did you say to me?”

“You know my father’s wishes,” I said. “He wants me to be educated.”

I no longer cared if my mother disliked me. I didn’t understand that when I closed myself to her, I took a part of her bitterness inside me. It was green and unforgiving, and as it grew it made me more like her. It gave me my strength, but it gave me my weakness as well.

My mother tossed me a knowing look on the day I spoke back to her. “I hope you have a child that causes you the misery you have caused me,” she told me with all the power of a curse.

From then on she acted as if I were invisible, unless she had a task for me or a complaint about my appearance or my deeds. Perhaps she was so cold to me because she’d lost the child that had come only nine months after my birth. He had been a boy. She had wanted to give my father a son; perhaps she thought he would love her more if she had been able to do so. I often wondered if she wished that of her two children, I’d been the one who had been taken.

Il était une fois un Roi et une Reine, qui étaient si fâchés de n’avoir point d’enfants, si fâchés qu’on ne saurait dire.

Once upon a time there was a king and queen, who were so sorry that they had no children—so sorry that it cannot be told.

My father had recovered from the loss and loved me, but my mother was inconsolable, refusing to open her door, to him or to me. By the time she was improved enough to oversee the household once more, my father no longer came home for supper. He was out until all hours. That was when I began to hear my mother weeping late into the night. There was a part of me that knew my father had left us in some deep way I didn’t quite understand. I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both—the library and my father—equally and without question.

JUST AS PERRAULT HAD
interviewed the women in the salons about the stories their grandmothers had told them, I spoke to the old ladies in the market and began to write down the small miracles common only in our country. For as long as I was trapped here, I would write down these stories, along with a list of the wondrous things I myself had seen. When I went to France, I would have dozens of tales to tell, each one so fantastic people would have difficulty believing it. In our world there had been pirates with more than a dozen wives, parrots who could speak four languages, shells which opened to reveal pearls, birds as tall as men who danced for each other in the marshes, turtles that came to lay their eggs on the beach in a single mysterious night. On these occasions I would wait in the twilight with Jestine, watching as the shoreline filled with these lumbering creatures, all so intent on their mission on the worn path they always took that they didn’t notice us among them. We were turtle-girls. If we had been inside of a story we would surely have grown shells and claws. In silence, we studied the beach through the falling dark. We could not light lanterns, for turtles follow the moon, and in the eyes of such creatures the moon is any globe of light, even one you hold in your hand.

I had pinched a blue notebook with fine paper made in Paris from my father’s store. If anyone noticed they didn’t say so, although my father’s clerk, Mr. Enrique, a stern, handsome man, looked at me differently after that. The first story I wrote down was one the old ladies told about a woman who’d given birth to a turtle. They liked to take turns when they told it, so that each storyteller added a detail or two. The woman who was the turtle-girl’s mother was so stunned by the green shell surrounding her baby that she ran down to the beach and left the newborn by the shore. She meant to desert the child and let it be taken out to sea with the tide, but luckily, a mother turtle with a nest of hatchlings was nearby and she raised the turtle-girl as her own. Jestine and I always searched for a turtle that was half human, with a human face and soul. She was said to have grown to be a woman who looked like any other, with long arms and legs and moss-tinted hair. You couldn’t see her shell unless she was in the sea. She could have easily disguised herself and joined our world, eating in cafés, dancing with men who found her beautiful, but instead she’d chosen to live in the world of the turtles. If you happened upon her you would see that her skin was a pale green and her eyes were yellow. She had swum to every gleaming sea in the world, but always came back to our shore.

We are here,
Jestine and I whispered as we stood on the beach.
O Sister,
we called. We would not forsake her or judge her if only she would show herself to us. But she never did, no matter how late we stayed, even when we waited until the last of the turtles had returned to the bay. It was clear that Jestine and I were as uncomfortable as the mysterious turtle-woman when in the company of humans. Jestine was especially shy, perhaps because she was so beautiful her mother had warned her not to be too friendly to the boys and men who might approach her. As for me, I was distrustful by nature. The two of us roamed the island as if there was no one else in the world. We would collect buckets of hermit crabs and ghost crabs and race them against one another in the sand before setting them free and watching them scramble away from us as if we were monsters.

Sometimes I was forced to bring along my younger cousin Aaron Rodrigues, who lived with us. There were three years between us and he was nothing but an annoyance to me. I was told his parents had been lost in a storm when he was little more than a baby and afterward our family had taken him in. My mother preferred him, even though he wasn’t related to us by blood, perhaps because of the baby boy she lost. Girls were not worth very much in her eyes, especially a disobedient girl such as myself. Aaron was handsome, dark, with startlingly pale blue eyes. Even as he grew older, my mother still enjoyed showing him off to her friends, especially the formidable Madame Halevy, whose stern presence intimidated us all but who melted whenever she saw Aaron.
Mon chouchou,
she called him, even when he was a rowdy boy of nine.
Mon petit canard
. In return I pinched Aaron and called him a duck in English, not such a pretty word. He always gave me a wounded look, though he didn’t complain. I should have been guilt-ridden, but I suppose I was a brutal girl. I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.

On nights when I was forced to look after Aaron, I gave him over to Jestine, who was more kindhearted than I. Perhaps because he was an orphan and Jestine had no father, she could feel compassion for him, even though he was a wild boy, who delighted in leaping from cliffs. I took to scaring him to get him to behave. He was terrified of werewolves, half-human beasts that were said to reside on the old plantations. My father had assured me these were made-up stories, used by the plantation owners to frighten slaves from running away.
There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story,
he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon.
One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed
.

By now my father had decided I’d had enough of fairy tales and was too old for such notions. Perhaps my mother had complained to him or perhaps he thought I should be more serious or maybe he simply longed for the son he’d lost and wished to educate me in the way he would have had I been a boy. Monsieur Pomié was a respected member of the Burghers’ Association, the businessmen’s society that one must join to be a merchant, in my father’s case, a shop owner who exported rum and sugar and molasses. Aaron was fated to take over his business, since girls and women could not inherit property, but perhaps my father hoped those laws would change. He began to teach me figures, so I would understand the ledgers in the store, and I was honored to be educated in a way few girls were.

All the same, I wrote down the werewolf tale the way I’d heard it from our cook, Adelle. She had told us that the werewolves were members of the old Danish families who owned slaves. Their transformation was God’s punishment for their wrongdoings. You could spy their teeth and claws at night, even when they were in their human guise, so they often wore gloves and scarves, even in the hottest times of the year.
If you see such a thing,
Adelle told us,
run
.

I read this story to Aaron on a nightly basis. Though it terrified him, he always wanted to hear it again and again. It came as no surprise that he began to imagine such beasts in every dark lane and alleyway. He stayed close to Jestine, trusting her as much as he mistrusted me. Sometimes I made a howling noise when I walked behind him and he’d jump as if he’d been bitten.

“Must you frighten him?” Jestine would ask me.

“Must you pity him?” I would say.

Still, I admit that on certain nights I had my own fears, not of roaming half wolves, but of our own homeland. It seemed there was an inescapable loneliness here. The bats above us, the wind from Africa, the roar of the waves. It was as if we were on the edge of the known world and could drop off into the darkness at any time. When the three of us were out together, no one knew where we were. If anything happened, we would have to save each other.

PEOPLE WHO CAME HERE
from Europe often claimed they couldn’t tell the difference between winter and summer on an island as mild as ours. They clearly didn’t know this island. We had times of rain and wind, blue nights when a cold thread coiled through all the houses, pinching the babies and making them cry. On such nights the fish in the ponds turned black and floated to the surface. The leaves of the jasmine curled up like little frogs. But in summer, everything turned white-hot and bright in an instant, with sparks in the air that were as hot as flames. The heat stunned people who weren’t used to it. Women who accompanied their husbands here from France on business often fainted moments after disembarking from their ships. They were given a drink made of palm bark and sugar water, yet many could never abide the bright light, not if they stayed here for years, not if they spent their whole lives here. They shrank into darkened rooms, keeping their window shades closed against the fierce light, not venturing out until dusk. We would see them sometimes, crying in courtyards.

“Werewolves,” my cousin Aaron would declare when we passed by these houses, for their weeping sounded like howling. “No, they’re not beasts,” Jestine assured him. “Just lonely women from France, longing for home.” But whenever we came near the old Danish estates, where there were still slaves living in shacks, we ran as fast as we could, with Aaron trailing behind us, until he grew so tall he could outrun us. Then we had to use all our strength just to keep up with him. By the age of twelve he was six feet tall, so handsome that grown women stopped on the street to call to him. Jestine made certain he didn’t go to investigate when the women made clucking noises aimed at him, as if they were hens and he was a fox. I knew then, she wanted him for herself.

EACH YEAR I HAD
more stories to write down. The women at the market waited for me whenever they had a new one to tell. There was the story in which a hundred butterflies arose from a single tree all at once to form a second yellow moon, and one about a fish with the face of a horse who came galloping into the city one night, and another about a bird that flew halfway around the world for love, and was flying above us still.

I tied my notebook with ribbon and kept it beneath my pillow, far from the grasp of my mother. “Don’t tell,” I warned the laundry women who came to change the sheets. They understood why I would keep a secret from my mother. She had little tolerance for what she considered to be nonsense, and that included most things in this world, even the history of our people, and how we had come to be so far away from our rightful home. I knew if she found my notebook she would toss it onto the trash heap at the back of the yard. Everything I knew of our island I had learned in my father’s library. It was a complicated history, for St. Thomas had traded hands many times, belonging to the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, and finally, the Danes, who sent the Danish West India Company to begin a society that was mostly concerned with trade. In 1688, of the 739 people who lived here, 317 were Europeans from eleven nations and 422 were African people, who were brought here against their will. The wretched slavers’ ships docked across from schooners belonging to the relations of royalty, many of whom had been cast out from their own kingdoms and had no inheritance other than tracts of land in the mountains beside the dormant volcano known as the Quill. Pirates from all nations camped in the coves, hidden from the authorities.