Keene fills the silence in the archive surrounding enslaved women with the crafting of numerous perspectives around the same story. He shifts the telling of the story from that of third person, to the written journal entries of Carmel, to finally the first-person perspective of Carmel herself. The story begins with a rather cut-and-dry telling of the history of Carmel’s first residence, where she serves as a slave girl treated in various characteristic ways: expected to taste the food she cooked first, whipped for some barely remembered transgression, hardly noticed as a person. All of this reads as a rendition of “official history,” but considering it is the reader’s first exposure to the chapter matter, is not so overtly violent. In the description of her wall drawings, Carmel plays a passive role, as if she is whooshed away by some explainable artistic impulse — similarly, subtly violent in its narrative distance. Her relationships with Eugenie and fellow slave “PH” are especially prominent in her journal entries, which notably lack grammar and punctuation, given her lack of formal schooling. Keene depicts her entries as blunt yet endearing in the specific way of a young woman in the world, such as when Carmel notes every day that Eugenie doesn’t speak to her, and the number of rosaries she does every day. The concrete moments of her days are noted in this perspective. We come to know much about what goes on in her life, but not so much of what transpires in her mind. Finally, Keene fills the silence with interiority into Carmel’s thoughts, and the story comes alive. The shift from her sometimes-barely comprehensible journal entries to the melodic, intricate channel into her mind nearly scolds the reader for their limited humanization of Carmel via the earlier perspectives — made most prominent by the realization that Carmel actually is in touch with these fantastical elements which allow her to control the actions of others and predict/manifest the future. In such a way, the reader is slowly lulled into a closeness with Carmel’s character, and the unique process of transition recognizes Keene’s rendition particularly successful at filling the silence in the archive without requiring the continuation of “official history.”