How did she do it!

My bee pet!
I am having breakfast on my balcony, overlooking the Hudson and the GW Bridge, high up on the 21st floor, facing the  North/East, enjoying the morning, and there it is —  a bee nesting on this flower or that flower apparently in constant search for more, resting here, resting there.  Now I wonder how did this bee make it all the way up the windy 21 floors to my terrace? How I ask did this bee know that my place offered more than plenty of colorful flowers. Amazing. 

 The book I have just finished was a real page turner as all her books are, Isabel Allende "Island Beneath the Sea" refers to Saint Domingue when it was owned by France, the later name is Haiti, the time is 1770 - 1830 approximately. As always Isabel Allende breathes life into history: the topic is the incredible cruelty and viciousness of slavery, about the sugar plantation owners, the rebellion and emancipation. Narration is by one slave, the main character, and the wealthy and white plantation slave owners exercising  the cruelest treatment of slaves. Slave mothers would rather kill their children than allow them to suffer alive. There are free blacks, mulattoes, maroons, all fine differences in class. The white owners feel extremely superior and are overcome with lust for violence and rape, or maybe they just closed their eyes not to see how overseers handled the slaves to get the most out of them and to increase their harvest. It's a painful story to read and you assume that the white class (with exceptions) were made from a different material,  plastic for instance. The main character Zarité, the slave girl ends up as a young girl with the plantation owner. He rapes her and has two children with her whom he refuses to recognize. When the slave rebellion begins in Haiti it is up to her to save her white master/rapist, her children the white children of the master. There is a long and hard fought journey to freedom, she is unable to disconnect from her master, and surrounded by a series of resilient women. The story continues in New Orleans where they fled to, before New Orleans was part of the States. Voodo inspired folklore and Christianity mix easily. I always like historical novels. For me they work brilliantly in conveying in this case the collision of the forces of enlightenment against the forces of capitalism, greed and prejudice.