The only person that Marie-Ursule couldn't sacrifice to this fate was her daughter Bola, who escapes to live relatively free. Bola hides in an abandoned monastery on the tip of the island, but emerges when other islanders move nearby. She becomes the mother of nine children for nine different men. Wanting to be free, she stays with neither of these men. She doesn't intend for her children to remain in one place either, and they are eventually scattered across the Americas, living in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.
Brand tells the stories of the children in the rest of the novel.
They live through two world wars and into the present day. The story ends with Bola mourning her mother's death. This saga is wide in its expanse and Brand does well to draw in the individual stories while telling the larger story that helps readers experience the story of Africans in the Diaspora. Broun, Kenneth S. Ohio University Press. He has included narratives of oral interviews of 27 of the lawyers who fought the system in their struggle against apartheid.