On the morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turns seven, a huge wave is spotted in the ocean outside the village of Ville Rose. Her father Nozias runs to the water, hoping to save a fisherman aboard a boat that is destroyed by the crashing wave. Nozias runs home and hugs his daughter, whose mother died in childbirth. Thus, her “birthday was also a day of death” (9). On the day she turned six, the town’s undertaker, Albert Vincent, became the new mayor. He continues to hold both positions in the small Haitian town of “about eleven thousand people, five percent of them wealthy or comfortable” (10). The rest are poor. Claire watches Albert’s inaugural speech, where Nozias whispers to the town’s fabric vendor. That night, she appears at the shack where Claire and her father live. The woman makes Claire twirl for her in the lantern light and realizes that “her father was trying to give her away” (11). The woman refuses, and Claire overhears her father whisper that he is “going away […] to look for a better life” (11). He is a poor fisherman whose nets now only catch fish “so small that in the old days they would have been thrown back” (12).