Night Women

Night Women concerns a prostitute who practices her profession next

to her young, sleeping sons bed. She tells him she gets made up before
bedtime because shes waiting for an angel to come. She worries hell
someday find out the truth, especially as she sees him becoming older
and more sexually aware. If he ever wakes to find her with one of her
regular married men, she will tell him its his father, visiting for one
night. When he asks about the angels, she tells him they havent come
yet.
In "Night Women," part of Krik? Krack!, Danticat exposes the difficulties of
women who must earn a living in a country with sorely limited employment
opportunities. The heroine, like many other women in Haiti, chose to sacrifice
her values, beliefs, and body in order to provide for her young son and keep
him fed and housed. As a result, she became a professional prostitute; she
became a member of the profession practice in the night; she became a night
woman.
However, her soul remained a woman of the day. Her beliefs and values
remained sacrosanct in her soul even if they were sacrificed in the physical
world. This is what Danticat means when she writes, through her heroines
thoughts, that the heroine is caught between the two worlds of day women
and night women.
The love and care she gives her young son is testimony that her soul is still a
woman of day, even though she wears her bright, blood-red scarf on the
streets during the day to attract customers, suitors. The fact that she tells her
son stories of ghost women who "ride the crests of waves while brushing the
stars out of their hair" while letting him sleep in his Sunday best testifies to her
care and concern to disguise this secret night life from her son.
This dichotomous pull of necessity and inner essence is what Danticat's
heroine means when she says that she is caught between the day and night
worlds of women. This is what the heroine means when she answers her small
sons question, Mommy, have I missed the angels again? by saying, Darling,
the angels have themselves a lifetime to come to us.: her soul remains in the
day, so the angels will come to them eventually.

Between the Pool and the Gardenias

Marie finds a dead baby in the street. She names it

Rose and tells it about her miscarriages, her

cheating husband, and the Dominican pool-cleaner
who slept with her once. Marie pretends the
household where she works belongs to her and
imagines her female ancestors visiting her. When
the baby rots, she covers it with perfume, but she
finally decides the flies are trapping Roses spirit
and buries Rose by the gardenias. The Dominican
calls the police, claiming Marie killed the baby for
evil purposes.
Marie, Between the Pool and the Gardenias
Marie has a childlike ignorance that, paired with
her great disappointment with life, encourages her
to exist in a fantasy world, out of touch with reality.
When she couldnt take her miscarriages and her
husbands cheating any longer, she escaped her
village life for the city. When her life as a maid fails
to satisfy her, she escapes into a world where the
dead baby she finds is her living daughter and the
household where she works is her own home.
Nothing in the world matters to her, and the only
people she feels close to are the imagined ghosts
of her dead mother and ancestors. She wants to
die so she can join them. Marie sees the real world
as a cruel place and feels worthless because of her
inability to have a child and continue her ancestral
line. Marie is religious and superstitious. She
bitterly resents her employers for their comfortable
lifestyle and their dismissal of her as an ignorant
peasant. She feels anonymous and knows that no
one loves her, which gives her an overwhelming
sense of despair.
3. Its so easy to love somebody, I tell you, when theres

nothing else around.

This comment appears in Between the Pool and

the Gardenias when Marie tells Rose about her
life. It shows the loneliness of a Haitian woman who
has lost everything. In Maries case, her numerous
miscarriages and her unfaithful husband made her
so unhappy that she had to leave Ville Rose. She
has no family because her grandmother, from
Nineteen Thirty-Seven, was killed for being a
witch, and her godmother, Lili, from A Wall of Fire
Rising, killed herself when she lost her husband to
despair. Nothing good has happened to Marie, so
she looks for any good she can find or invent. Marie
goes so far as to convince herself that the dead
baby she finds on the street is alive and even her
own. She is so desperately lonely that she needs
something to love.
Love is vital to survival in the cruel poverty of Haiti.
Marie has lost every other person she has loved
and who has loved her, so she tries to create love
in unlikely places. She sleeps with the Dominican
pool-cleaner even though she doesnt know his
name, and she is saddened when he ignores her.
She pretends the dead baby is alive so she can
pretend it loves her back. This need for love is an
important motivator in many of the stories. In
Nineteen Thirty-Seven, Josephines mother looks
forward to Josephines visits because they
represent a daughters love and sustain her even
as she slowly starves to death. Lamort in The
Missing Peace needs to win her grandmothers
love by living up to her standards, and she risks
her life to win the affection of her grandmothers

foreign boarders. In Carolines Wedding, Graces

mother clings to the past because her husband still
loved her then. The suffering of loss and
hopelessness seem bearable when a woman has
love to support her.
The Missing Peace,
Emilie Gallant, Lamorts grandmothers boarder,
asks Lamort to take her secretly to a mass grave
where Emilies mother, a supporter of the old
government, may have been dumped. A soldier
tries to stop Emilie, who defies him. Lamort says
peace, a password given to her by a flirtatious
soldier, but he appears and says the password has
changed. Emilie tells Lamort she doesnt have to
please her grandmother. Lamorts name means
death because her mother died when she was
born, but when she goes home she demands to be
called Marie Magdalnene, her mothers name.
Lamort, The Missing Peace
Lamort, nave and uneducated, doesnt worry too
much about her own well-being because she has a
low sense of self-worth. Her grandmother blames
her for her mothers death and is never satisfied
with her behavior. Lamort never had a mother, and
she is desperate for approvalfrom her
grandmother, Raymond, Emilie, or anyone else.
She tries to please her grandmother by living up to
her standards of propriety and wishes she could be
more experienced and intelligent. She looks up to

independent women like Emilie and feels important

when she can help them, so she does so eagerly,
even when serious risk is involved. Lamort accepts
the violent, dangerous state of her world, so
courage comes easily to her. She thinks nothing of
bravely coming up with excuses to protect Emilie
from Toto, the soldier who stops them when they
try to go to the churchyard. Emilies compliments
and dependence on Lamort encourage Lamort to
be brave in her personal life as well, and their
adventure together empowers her to stand up to
her grandmother.