American Woman of Haitian Descent

A young professional American woman of Haitian descent is the narrator of the piece. She works at an advertising firm in Manhattan and she commutes from Brooklyn, where she still lives with her mother. Her mother is called a "day woman," which is roughly akin to a housewife, a woman who stays at home and who does not have a job per se. On her lunch break, this young woman happens to see her mother on the street in Manhattan. This surprises her greatly, because she thinks of her mother as never leaving Brooklyn, never leaving her small "comfort zone." Intrigued, the young woman follows her mother, unnoticed. The mother does some window-shopping at the expensive stores on Madison Avenue. She walks with a cheerful gait, not seeming to be intimidated.

The daughter discovers that her mother has her own secret life and she describes what she experiences as she reflects over who her mother is. The mother's voice also appears, however, in form of a dialogue, or as I read it, as the daughter remembering her mother's words. By seeing how the daughter responds and reacts to her mother's whereabouts, the character of the daughter is also revealed. The reader comes to see how the mother and daughter are different from each other, and the gap between the Haitian community and the American community is revealed. The mother's and daughter's relationships are influenced by the situation of being caught in the middle of two cultures, a situation that is problematic both for the first and second generation. The author addresses the difficulties that the mother's character experiences as first generation immigrants, as well as the dilemmas the daughter characters experiences as the generation of immigrants raised in "the new country" but brought up according to old traditions. The mothers and daughters are stuck between the two cultures. The differences between the cultures could make them a target of discrimination,