Part 1 Summary

Antoinette and her mother, Annette Cosway Mason, live on the decaying Coulibri plantation in Jamaica in the late 1830s. Annette, a Creole woman from Martinique, had been the second wife of the estate's owner. Mr. Cosway was a much older slave owner who was generally thought to have wasted his life and his wealth on alcohol and women. After her husband dies, Annette is left penniless and isolated on the plantation with her two young children. Antoinette is the daughter whom she frequently ignores, and Pierre is her sickly son, on whom she lavishes her attention.

The other white Jamaican landowners look down on the family because of its reduced circumstances and because of Cosway's penchant for having children with black women. Annette and her children are also hated by the black Jamaicans, who view them as part of the slave-owning establishment recently...