Josephe, safe in Canada, watches the television images of Haiti's descent into chaos following the collapse of the Baby Doc regime. She sees an angry mob stone to death a tonton macoute, whom she recognises as the youth who molested her as a child. In her isolation, despair and guilt she begins to recreate the stories of those who were once close to her.
There is her grandmother, who dies terrified over her family's future; her cousin Alphonse who flees to the USA where he hopes to escape the dark shadow of his father and a life of domestic servitude; Alphonse's half-brother, Delphi, who joins the rebels and pays the heaviest price; Josephe's best friend, Desiree, who abandons her comfortable middle-class life to join the underground and finds there both a community and the mysteries of voudun, with the power to breathe new life into her veins. Behind them all is Delphi's mother, Mami Celeste, the mambo who has lived and died four lifetimes and whose tongue can speak the whole history of Haiti.
In giving voice to these individuals and interweaving the story of her own childhood connexions with them, Josephe begins to close the distance between present and past, Canada and Haiti and the painful divisions within herself.