Foreign Body

Bee, a resilient young woman with an infectious narrative voice, travels from her Caribbean home to Brooklyn, in search of safety, employment, and a truly rewarding partnership

IN FOREIGN BODY, BEE TELLS HER STORY IN THE LILTING VERNACULAR voice of a young Black West Indian woman—wise, humorous, resourceful, and resilient. She is the victim of multiple assaults in her brutally patriarchal village, with the sole support of a stalwart grandmother. In spite of this, Bee becomes a record-winning sprinter, expert seamstress, trusted housekeeper, a successful “cutterman” in the sugarcane fields, and a voracious reader.

Along the way, Bee falls in love with Cherry, a beguiling character equal parts tender and violent. With Cherry, she discovers another side of sex: their pleasures heightened to ecstasy by their custom of cross-dressing. But, eventually, Cherry’s tender qualities are subsumed by the violent ones and Bee flees; she leaves their son and daughter with her grandmother and escapes to Brooklyn, New York to take a job as the caretaker of an Orthodox Jewish family. In Brooklyn, she forms a special bond with Mistress Kuchinski—particularly after an attempted assault on Bee by Kuchinski’s rabbi-husband that ends up resulting in Bee’s own imprisonment.

After she is released with Mistress Kuchinski’s help, Bee starts a lucrative sewing business and sends for her two children. Despite herself, Bee falls deeply in love with Pastor Amy, the Jamaican-American minister of an Anglican church—and an outspoken lesbian. Pastor Amy moves into the brownstone with Bee and her children, and together they take a mortgage as joint owners. Bee feels the longing to become a mother again—in vitro, the child to be raised with Pastor Amy—with a rehabilitated Cherry, freshly arrived from the West Indies, as the donor-father. In the final pages it becomes clear that it is this unborn child, along with the reader, to whom Bee tells her unforgettable story.