This book focuses on enslaved people on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th/early 19th century. As such, descriptions of violence, especially sexual violence, are detailed and nearly constant throughout the book. Most instances of sexual violence are white men forcing Black women to have sex, but there are also instances of Black men being the aggressors to both Black and white women. Also, slaveholders’ punishments of enslaved people often involve genital mutilation. At one point, a white woman says she is jealous of Black women because of their supposed ability to “bewitch” white men. Her statement invokes the notion common at the time that Black women constantly wanted sex and were therefore impossible to rape. The protagonist was conceived when an overseer raped a 13-year-old girl.