Antoinette Cosway, the narrator of this section, is living at Coulibri Estate in 1830s Jamaica up the road from Spanish Town, the capital at the time. She lives with her mother, Annette, her younger brother Pierre, and her nurse, Christophine. Her father, Old Man Cosway, a former plantation owner, is dead. He fathered other children on the island with enslaved black women, but Antoinette has been taught not to acknowledge the half-black members of her family. Antoinette is white.

Coulibri Estate looks wild and overrun with vegetation, now that enslaved black people have been freed by the British Emancipation Act. While most of the black servants leave the Cosways, Christophine stays. Godfrey, an old man whom Annette despises for supposedly pretending to be deaf, also stays. A third, a boy named Sass, stays only because his mother has abandoned him, but eventually, he departs, too.

The end of slavery has impoverished the Cosways. They become subjects of ridicule to the black people on the island, where whites are greatly outnumbered. They call the Cosways “white [cockroaches]” and tell them to “go away” (13). Some new white people, however, are arriving—wealthy émigrés from England looking to capitalize off of the depressed Jamaican economy.