Your mother was insane. If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native. It is never clear to Elizabeth whether this cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown. In the darkness of a country where the people turn and look at her with curiosity as an outsider we are taken in and out of sanity and plunged into the deepest depths of the mind.