Recolte du Coton

by Kernezie Justin

From Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell

One who has attained humility, the priest was wont to say, cannot be humiliated. Furthermore, the boy should count himself lucky that the weather was always dulcet here. As a novice, Delahaye had performed his morning devoir walking barefoot across freezing flagstones of his monastary, while outside the roofs and the ground would be covered with snow, that frozen rain that fell lightly as feathers... like cotton, the priest explained, but Moustique had not seen cotton either, though once it had been grown in Saint Domingue.