Breath, Eyes, Memory: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

It is summer, and school doesn’t start for two more months. Sophie accompanies Martine to her job at a local nursing home each day, watching soap operas in the lounge while her mother works. She also goes with Martine to her night job—working as a private nurse for a very sick old woman. Sophie feels terrible for her mother, whose night terrors, hard work, and obsession with skin-lightening cream have weathered her young face beyond her years. Martine tells Sophie that she wants Sophie to work hard in school so that when she’s grown, there will be certain things she “won’t have to do.”

Martine asks Sophie what she thinks of Marc, and Sophie says she thinks Marc is “smart.” Martine tells Sophie the story of how she met Marc—when she was getting her green card through an amnesty program, she needed a lawyer, and found Marc’s name in a Haitian newspaper. Marc and Martine became friends, and Marc, old-fashioned but kind and generous, took her out frequently to restaurants and even once brought her to Canada. Sophie asks Martine if she is going to marry Marc, but Martine says she has no idea.

Martine turns the question around on Sophie, asking if Sophie has ever liked a boy back in Haiti. Sophie says she hasn’t. Martine tells Sophie that when school starts, she needs to ignore boys and stay “good.” Sophie knows that by “good,” her mother means that she needs to stay a virgin and not let anyone touch her. Sophie promises her mother that she has always been “good,” and will stay that way. Martine tells Sophie that when she herself was a young girl, Granmè Ifé used to “test” Martine and Tante Atie to see if they were still virgins by putting her finger in their “very private parts.” Martine recalls how Tante Atie used to “scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse” during the testing—but Granmè Ifé, Martine says, was raised to believe that it was her responsibility to keep her daughters pure.

Martine continues her story, telling Sophie that Granmè Ifé stopped testing her early because one day, when she was not much older than Sophie, a man pulled her off the side of the road into a cane field and raped her. Sophie doesn’t want to hear the story her mother is telling. Martine tells Sophie that though she never saw her rapist’s face, she knows now, by looking at Sophie, that the old adage is true: “A child out of wedlock always looks like its father.”