St. Mary's Estate Summary
Dionne Brand’s hatred and pain towards the history of African slavery shines through the pages of her short story “St. Mary’s Estate”. The story starts off with the narrator driving through a small Caribbean island. Looking out onto the sea in the horizon, the narrator figures that “this must have been the look toward the sea that slaves saw as they pulled oxen, cut and shelled coconut, [and] dug provisions from the black soil…this must have been a look of envy” (45). Brand uses a foil between the sea and the slavers, with shackles around their feet, looking out onto an ocean, vast and wide, with waves moving about free. As the story progresses, the narrator is in deep thought about their grandfather. They recall that “he rode two horses,