“DONDON, Haiti — Adrienne Present steps into the thin forest beside her house and plucks the season’s first coffee cherries, shining like red marbles in her hands. The harvest has begun. Each morning, she lights a coal fire on the floor of her home in the dark. Electricity has never come to her patch of northern Haiti. She sets out a pot of water, fetched from the nearest source — a mountain spring sputtering into a farmer’s field. Then she adds the coffee she has dried, winnowed, roasted and pounded into powder with a large mortar called a pilon, the way she was taught as a child. ...”
In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible. They ousted their French masters and founded a nation.
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