The Book of Night Women

Dulcey wakes Lilith up laughing and dancing and singing, which confuses Lilith because of what happened the night before. She brings Lilith to a barn and asks her to milk the cow. Lilith doesn’t know how to do it and Dulcey just laughs at her. Eventually they both sing as Lilith milks.

At breakfast, Roget eats with one hand and touches Dulcey’s body with the other. Dulcey makes noises that please the master but looks out the window the entire time. Lilith brings up the mistress’s breakfast in bed, and she orders that Lilith take care of the baby instead of another enslaved person named Matraca.

A young enslaved person named Sacco brings flowers to the mistress’s room, and the mistress starts sneezing. She orders the other enslaved people to tie Sacco up so that Roget can whip him. After the whipping, they cover his naked body with honey and let ants bite him as he screams. Dulcey tries to warn Lilith not to look, but once Lilith sees, she douses Sacco in water and he says they’re both dead now. Sacco later disappears without a trace.

Lilith has been at Coulibre for six weeks. Two weeks ago, the mistress whipped Dulcey to death after the mistress opened the goat pen and blamed it on Dulcey because she hated that her husband smelled like her. Lilith inherits her work and starts to think about doing to white people what white people do to them. The house is quiet and sad without Dulcey’s laughter.

Trying to quiet her thoughts, one day Lilith wanders into Roget’s library and stumbles upon a copy of Joseph Andrews. She continues to teach herself to read, but one night the child Henri comes to ask for milk and the book falls on the ground. She tells him it’s a secret and if he tells his mother she will hurt him.

One day Homer comes to Coulibre and they talk about Wilson and Isobel having sex before a proposal, Homer falling in love with a man named Benjy, and her attempt to escape that left her scarred. The Maroons caught them and kept Benjy but beat and raped her as he stood by. They returned her to Montpelier and she had the worst whipping the plantation had ever seen. They branded her back and front, and then twice Wilkins sent six men to rape her so that she would have a child. Homer says she’s been affecting the mistress’s mental health through her tea for years, and Lilith says she has her ways and then pees in the pot of tea. They laugh about it, and Homer says it looks like Lilith is turning into a woman.

For the first time at Coulibre, Lilith sees a woman at night who she cannot identify, who disappears soon after. She looks at Lilith, points to the sky, taps her heart seven times, and disappears.

The next morning Isobel slaps Lilith awake, and Lilith begins to bathe Roget. He complains about the way she strokes his penis and she says under her breath that he should do it himself. He hears her and grabs her. A voice within her says to stop being uppity and stop rushing toward death, but instead she spits in his face. He struggles but he chokes on air and she shoves him under water. He comes up and she thumps him on the chest seven times to kill him. She reflects on the “true darkness and true womanness” that made that happen and realizes that that is what the mystery woman in the night wants. The mistress screams when she sees him dead, and Lilith pushes her down the stairs, killing her. She knows they will torture her if they find her, and without thinking, she sets the place on fire, including the children’s room. As she leaves the fire starts to get to her and she runs.

Coulibre burns, and all the enslaved people are either killed in the fire or lynched and stoned after the white men torture confessions out of them. Lilith is brought back to Montpelier and Quinn looks at her and talks to her like he knows something. Pallas and Homer seem to know too.

Pallas tells Lilith to bring soup up to Isobel, and Isobel accuses Lilith of killing her family. Isobel does not wish her family was still alive, but she wishes she was strong enough to wield an axe to kill every Black person. Lilith denies that she did it and then says sorry and that she wishes she could bring them back. Isobel says she wishes she was Black so she could choke Lilith and cut her tongue out. Wilson hears the sound, slaps Lilith, and kicks her out.

Wilson insists on opening the door to his room, which Isobel is staying in. Isobel is distraught that they had sex and that therefore her and her family’s honor are gone. She blames Willson and refuses any food made by Black people, and she wears a nice dress and coat in bed. A month after the fire, they have a funeral and Isobel wears the same dress.

Lilith is haunted by the people she killed in the fire no matter how much she tries to tell herself that the white ones deserved it. She works as hard as she can to forget. One night she wanders outside and sees Isobel riding through the gates on a black horse dressed like a man.