Ka Bienaimé and her father, Papa, are traveling through Florida when Papa goes missing. Both Ka’s parents are from Haiti, but she was born in Brooklyn and has never visited the country. They are delivering a sculpture Ka made that depicts Papa during the year he spent in prison in Haiti. A police officer, Officer Bo, asks to see a picture of Papa, but Ka doesn’t have any: Papa hates having his picture taken and always covers his face to hide the prominent scar on his cheek. Ka is delivering the sculpture to Gabrielle Fonteneau, a famous Haitian-American actress who is currently staying at her parents’ house in Florida.
At sunset, Papa reappears and drives Ka to a lake in which he has thrown the sculpture, destroying it. Ka is angry and bewildered. Papa eventually explains that he was actually a perpetrator of violence back in Haiti, not a victim. Ka suddenly realizes that this is why Papa and her mother, Anne, have no friends and never discuss their life back in Haiti. Papa insists that he never wanted to hurt people and would never commit violence now. Ka calls Anne, who tells her that Papa has been wanting to tell her the truth for a long time.
Ka and Papa go to the Fonteneaus’ house to tell Gabrielle in person that the sculpture is gone. Mr. and Mrs. Fonteneau greet them warmly, and at lunch they discuss their love of Haiti. Yet when Ka tells Gabrielle that the sculpture is gone, Gabrielle reacts coldly. Ka and Papa drive away and Ka thinks about what she and Anne mean to Papa, how they have become “masks against his own face.”
The next story is about an unnamed man and his wife, who are about to see each other for the first time in seven years. The man works as a night janitor at Medgar Evers College and a day janitor at King’s County Hospital. The couple parted after only one day of marriage, when the husband moved to New York. Neither had any idea it would be seven years before the immigration system would allow them to reunite again.
After they are reunited, the wife spends her days writing letters home and listening to the Haitian radio station while her husband is at work. One evening, she cooks a big dinner for her husband and their roommates, two young men named Michel and Dany. She wants to tell her husband about the long affair she had with a neighbor back in Haiti, knowing it will thwart their relationship if she doesn’t. However, she can’t bring herself to do it. The man comes to feel that there is a silence between them that will never be broken.
In the next story, Nadine gets a letter from her parents, which she doesn’t answer. Nadine is a nurse at an Ear, Nose and Throat ward. She has a voicemail from her ex-boyfriend, Eric, who is the father of a child she recently aborted (it is strongly hinted that Eric is the unnamed husband from the previous story). She doesn’t answer this either, but places the voicemail cassette tape on a shrine to her lost baby. At the hospital, Nadine tends to a patient named Ms. Hinds who has emerged from surgery horrified to find that she can’t speak. Nadine eventually brings herself to call her parents, but the conversation upsets her. Ms. Hinds’ parents come to pick her up from hospital, and Nadine bids her farewell. She looks at herself in the mirror and can’t recognize herself.
The next story returns to the Bienaimé family, who are driving to Christmas Eve Mass (this story takes chronologically prior to the opening one). They drive past a cemetery, and Anne holds her breath. Every time she passes a cemetery she does this and thinks about her younger brother, who drowned back in Haiti when he was three years old. Lately Anne has been regretting her and Papa’s decision not to make any friends in the U.S. She thinks it was perhaps not necessary for them to isolate themselves so completely in order to conceal the truth of Papa’s past.
At church, Ka thinks she seems Emmanuel Constant, a militiaman who raped and murdered hundreds of people but escaped going to prison in Haiti by fleeing to the U.S. Anne checks and realizes that it is not actually Constant, but she feels filled with panic that someone might recognize Papa one day, and wonders if she will need to stop attending Midnight Mass.
Dany has returned to the rural Haitian village where his Aunt Estina lives, having moved to New York from Haiti 10 years ago. 15 years before that, Dany’s parents were killed by the government, and Estina raised him instead. A villager named Old Zo takes Dany to Estina, who is blind. Dany tells her that he has found the man (Papa) who killed his parents, and that he is actually renting a room in this man’s house in Brooklyn. However, their conversation is interrupted by Old Zo, his daughter Ti Famn, and other villagers bringing them food. Later, Estina introduces Dany to Claude, a young Haitian American man who was deported back to Haiti after killing his father.
In a dream, Dany discusses with Estina his parents’ murder and his interactions with Papa. When he wakes up they talk briefly, but Estina says she is too tired to talk and goes back to sleep. When Dany wakes up again, she is dead. The funeral takes place, and Claude attempts to comfort Dany, who pushes him away. Later, Dany apologizes to Claude, and Claude tells the story of how he killed his father when he was 14 and addicted to crack. Claude admits he considers himself lucky because, after committing such a horrible crime, he had a chance to turn his life around.
In the next story, a young journalism intern at the Haitian American Weekly named Aline Cajuste comes to interview Beatrice Saint Fort, a bridal seamstress, about her upcoming retirement. Over coffee, Aline asks questions about Beatrice’s age and marital status that she refuses to answer. Instead, Beatrice takes Aline outside and tells her about her neighbors. She explains that there is a Haitian prison guard living on her street, eventually adding that back in Haiti, he tortured her after she refused his advances. She says that she has moved many times in order to lose him, but that he has always followed her. She hopes that by retiring she will finally be free of him. At first Aline dismisses Beatrice to her editor, Marjorie Voltaire, as “a bit nutty.” However, she then comes to develop more sympathy for and interest in Beatrice and others like her.
The next story is set the day after Francois “Baby Doc” Duvalier has gone into exile, marking the end of the Duvalier dictatorship. Michel (who is 12 at the time) and his mother are hiding from the chaotic, vengeful violence taking place outside. Michel is thinking about his friend Romain, whose father, Regulus, was a Tonton Macoute (a militiaman who carried out violence on behalf on the government). Now the Macoutes are being tortured and killed in brutal ways by those desiring revenge.
The water station in Michel’s neighborhood, which belongs to Monsieur Christophe, has been dismantled, and Michel’s mother orders him to go and help Christophe fix it. Michel helps for a short time before running off to find Romain. Romain announces that he wants to “escape,” and he and Michel take a taxi to a hotel. There, Romain reveals he was hoping to find Michel’s father there—who, it is revealed here, is actually Christophe. Michel cries because he doesn’t fully understand what it means for him to be Christophe’s illegitimate son, although he knows it is shameful. Romain and Michel part ways, and Romain announces he’s leaving the country. The next day, Michel learns that Regulus shot himself to avoid being captured and tortured. Michel never sees Romain again, but—speaking from the future as a 30-year-old married man expecting his first child—he says he will name is unborn son after him.
Rézia, Mariselle, and Freda are all Haitian immigrants taking a GED class together in New York. Back in Haiti, Freda was a professional funeral singer. The three women go to Rézia’s Haitian restaurant together and drink. Freda explains that her father was a fisherman who was arrested by the government and later died; her mother told her to leave Haiti after she refused an invitation to sing at the national palace. Back in Haiti, Mariselle’s husband was killed for painting an unflattering portrait of the president, forcing her to flee, too. Rézia was raised by an aunt who ran a brothel and who allowed a government agent to rape Rézia when she was a child after he threatened to put the aunt in prison.
The first time Freda sang in public was at her own father’s funeral. She sang a song he taught her, “Brother Timonie,” and after that she became a professional funeral singer. The women take their GED exam. Although they don’t yet know if they passed, they go to drink in Rézia’s restaurant together anyway. Mariselle suggests that Freda sing her own funeral song. Freda sings “Brother Timonie,” and the two women join in.
Papa waits in his car outside a church in Bel Air, a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. He has been assigned to kill the preacher, who has been broadcasting politically subversive sermons on the radio. Six months ago, the preacher’s wife died by poisoning. Papa wants to leave Haiti and move to the U.S., but he needs to prove his loyalty by murdering the preacher first. He was born in Léogâne, the son of peasants who lost their land at the beginning of the Duvalier regime. Papa joined the Volunteers for National Security at 19, and grew powerful as a result. He has gained a reputation for being a particularly skillful, merciless torturer.
The preacher, meanwhile, knows that he will likely soon be killed for his subversive activities. At his Sunday evening church service, he talks about his dead wife and begs her forgiveness for the responsibility he bears for her death. His stepsister Anne walks in to the service, but on hearing that he is talking about his wife, walks out again. After she has left, Papa and his men burst in and arrests the preacher. In a truck, they take him to Casernes, where he is placed in a cell that smells of “rotting flesh.” Meanwhile, Anne has an epileptic fit and a vision that her brother is in danger.
Papa gets an order that the preacher’s execution has been cancelled because the government is worried about turning him into a martyr. He brings the preacher into his office, preparing to let him go. The preacher accidentally falls from the wooden chair he is sitting on, breaking it, and he uses a broken leg to maim Papa’s face. Papa shoots him in response.
Papa knows he may be punished and even killed for this, and he walks out of Casernes in a daze. He collides with Anne, who ran there after hearing that this was where her brother had been taken. Anne mistakes him for a victim of the regime, and Papa lets her believe this, telling her he is finally “free.” Anne cares for his wound, and the next day Papa buys them flights to New York, where he starts introducing her as his wife. It is not until Ka is born that Papa reveals the truth about himself, although he doesn’t ever tell her the full story. The official version of the preacher’s death is that he killed himself in Casernes by setting himself on fire, “leaving no trace of himself at all.”
