Like Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Heidi, Maryse Condé also writes of a pregnant Black woman, Hester, who chooses to commit suicide rather than bring a child into the world. Unlike Heidi, Hester chose her lover (whereas Heidi was the victim of rape), even though she is married to another man. Having committed adultery, Hester is convicted of witchcraft and imprisoned, where she meets Tituba. She laments to her new friend, “‘while I am rotting here the man who put this child in my womb is free to come and go as he pleases.’” (Condé 97). When Tituba tries to console her, by saying “‘You must live for your child,’” Hester “shook her head firmly” and responded, “‘she must simply die with me’” (Condé 98). Like Heidi, Hester chooses to respond to her situation by killing herself. This act underscores the particularly female experience of choosing whether or not to bring a child into the world. The context of the terrorism of enslavement and imprisonment is hardly a welcoming place for a child. Rather, both women demonstrate their present hopelessness in life by choosing to enact their resistance via death. 

It is significant that both deaths are not the end of the story, however. Heidi and Hester both continue to impact the narrative of their respective stories from the realms of beyond the living. Tituba continues to converse with Hester even as they remain separated by life/death, challenging the very binary of living/dying. When she returns to Barbados, Tituba keeps Hester’s name alive by naming an orchid she finds “among the mossy roots of a fern” after Hester (Condé 157). This use of Hester’s name blurs the line between life and death, as her spirit is kept invoked despite her physical departure. At the end I, Tituba, Tituba laments her separation from Hester, although she is consoled by the fact that “we do communicate, of course. I can smell the dried almonds on her breath. I can hear the echo of her laugh. But each of us remains on her side of the ocean” (Condé 178). Again, Hester, like Heidi, operates in a space where she has taken on the elements of her environment, even after her death. Condé’s use of the ocean as a metaphor for the line between life/death further underscores the fluidity of that western binary, and allows for the ongoing flow of communication between Hester and Tituba, despite their physical separation. In this way, these women embody a hydrofeminism which cannot even be contained by the bounds of life/death.