Night Women

Tonight I chose to blog about Edwidge Danticat’s story Night Women. It gives you an inside look to the harrowing tale of a twenty-five year old Haitian woman who is prostituting to provide for herself and her young son. Although the mother is trying to maintain her child’s innocence by not truly conveying to him her true occupation, she is running her “business” next to her young son’s bed as he sleeps.

This night in particular she allows him to sleep in his Sunday’s clothes, and her scarf that she uses to lure her ‘angel’s’. She tells him she gets made up before bedtime because she’s waiting for an angel to come. She worries he’ll someday find out the truth, especially as she sees him becoming older and more sexually aware. Sexually aware in the aspect that he mimics the sexual groans and moans he hears her and her ‘angels’ make awhile he sleeps.  

If he ever wakes to find her with one of her regular married men, she will tell him it’s his father, visiting for one night. Now, for me to not be a mother myself I try not to past judgment upon what one has to do in order to keep her family intact, but I just feel that that is a wrong move all together.

But Danticat’s protagonist has an interesting perspective on the situation, “And as long as there’s work, they will not have to lie next to the lifeless soul of a man whose scent lingers in another woman’s bed.” I feel that this line alone speaks more of painful experiences that she has with men in general. She must feel that she has no other choice but to do what she is doing.

A reoccurring theme throughout the novel is women and their ability to keep going in times of despair.