Krik? Krak!

Danticat writes the final story in the collection as a second-person address to an unspecified “You” describing the experiences of her past. She lists the rules her mother taught her to live by: Learn to cook and clean, and abstain from sex before marriage. She was forbidden from writing as a child because her mother thought she had better work to do. She says despite her mother’s disapproval, writing was her companion as a lonely child.

Danticat compares the act of writing to braiding hair, bringing unruly chaos into order and alignment. While braiding her own hair, she thinks that she looks like her mother, who was disappointed when she became a writer, because women writers are raped and killed in her country. She says women in her family are connected by their violent deaths, by the sacrifices they have made to ensure their own survival and that of their daughters. Telling their stories is Danticat’s way of keeping them with her. When her mother was braiding her hair, she told her to repeat their names. Danticat wrote them down instead.