Suárez reads Jean-Robert Cadet's memoir Restavec as testimony rather than confession, and places it inside the African American tradition of writing the self into history that runs from the slave narrative to Richard Wright. Her evidence is the book set against everything else that has spoken about children sent from poor rural families into unpaid domestic service: sociological reports, a 1947 labour law and a 1987 constitutional article, radio drama, documentary film, and the campaigns of Haitian rights organisations. Haitian fiction, she shows, long presented such children as morally soiled by what was done to them. Cadet's own case was atypical, since he had a wealthy father, schooling and a route to the United States, and Suárez argues that this is precisely why his book matters, because the ordinary victims of the system leave no written record. Drawing on scholarship that treats life writing as an act with political work to do, she sets aside disputes over his factual accuracy.