The Farming of Bones

The Farming of Bones Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

The Farming of Bones begins with the narrator describing her lover Sebastien Onius. Sebastien is a cane cutter. He is one of many Haitians who came across the border to find work in the Dominican sugar cane mill settlements. Sebastien's body and face are scarred from the cane, but he is handsome to Amabelle, the servant companion to a wealthy Dominican army wife. Amabelle admires Sebastien's size and the strength of his body after four seasons in the cane fields.

In Amabelle's little square room, by the light of her oil lantern, Sebastien tells her to take off her clothes and be just herself, without the uniform "they" make her wear in the house of Senora Valencia and Senor Pico. He sits in the shadow outside of the lantern light so that Amabelle will learn to sense his presence even when she cannot see him. Amabelle is afraid to be without Sebastien and believes that she does not exist when she is not with him. She is convinced that only Sebastien knows her and without him she might disappear into the world of nightmares that haunt her.

When Amabelle awakes in the morning Sebastien has gone to the fields. Amabelle can still feel his presence, his smell of cane syrup, the feel of his rough hands on her skin, the silky smoothness of his coffee bean bracelet as it rolls across her back. Amabelle remembers how as a child, to relieve the loneliness of being without brothers and sisters, she made a playmate of her own shadow. She came to prefer her shadow to real playmates even though her father warned her that nightmares could come from lingering with shadows.