A year and a half ago, when Ronetta Billy, 39, first thought about writing a memoir, she was confronted with a past peppered with painful memories.
“I started having to dissect the experiences and go back and relive them. It was like a movie being played in front of me and that was the most painful thing I had to go through,” Billy told St Lucia Times, recounting first the initial hesitance she felt towards immortalising her story in print and then the harrowing ordeal that unfolded when she attempted to unearth years of suppressed memories to undergo the task.
It was the realisation that with each passing day, more children would be enduring the tough circumstances she once did as a child that motivated her to keep going.
It took a year and a half to complete the project. A Plucked White Orchid, the first part of her memoir series, takes readers from her mother’s homeland in Guyana to Saint Lucia, where the rest of her family lives.
The story recounts her childhood in Saint Lucia, marked by poverty as her mother navigated the challenges of settlement. Billy lived across multiple communities then, including Faux A Chaud, Leslie Land and Maynard Hill.
School was no refuge. At Marchand Combined School, she recalls being othered because of her Guyanese background and accent. Her early academic success only increased the target on her back.
Now, in 2026, Billy is married, a mother of three, a home educator, regularly engages in community outreach, and enjoys the fruit of a faith-filled life in Ontario, Canada. But in between it all, she found time to share her story, wrapped in the careful symbolism of a flower’s journey.
“The word plucked sounds a little violent in a sense,” Billy said, reflecting on the book’s title. “It sounds a bit graphic; it sounds a bit blunt. It is what I went through as a child, and for me, that was the worst thing that someone could go through at the time.”
The first instalment explores themes of migration, family, sexual abuse and betrayal, amidst details of Billy’s life from ages 3 to 18.
An orchid, like all flowers and people, needs to be nurtured to grow and thrive. White also symbolises purity, and in Canada, she says, white orchids are often gifted in honour of important moments and transitions, particularly when someone is grieving.
Billy says it’s this poetic exploration of the flower as a memento, and of its journey from sprout to bloom, that lines the pages of the book.
“I have not spoken about a lot of what I wrote in the book…I have been married for, let’s say, 11 years, and my husband probably knows a very small fraction of what I’ve been through,” she says. The remainder of the series will explore her journey through adulthood thus far, facing hiccups along the way, becoming a woman in the process, navigating the trials of romantic relationships and overcoming odds.
Although this is her first self-published book, Billy promises stories crafted carefully, backed by years of immersing herself in the literary work of others and indulging in her own creative expression through painting, dance and drama.
A box filled with copies of the book is now making its way to Saint Lucia by freight. Billy hopes people will read it because, beyond the challenges, her story shows that glorious endings are still possible despite a life fraught with early difficulties.
The project is also charged with the same energy and purpose that brought her to the task in the first place: to address the skeletons in the closet of Caribbean paradises.
“It’s taboo in my family to speak about abuse, especially sexual abuse, despite so many people, even people I know, having those experiences…I thought about the little kids in Saint Lucia, who are being molested,” Billy said. “I started thinking of me depriving them of their healing and me, lengthening their suffering… So, I just wrote the book.” A Plucked White Orchid was published in June and is available on Amazon. Billy has paid for shipping and duties herself to bring copies to Saint Lucia. The books are scheduled to arrive in Saint Lucia soon. She is currently arranging local deliveries across communities in Gros Islet, Castries, Vieux Fort and Soufriere.
Interested readers can follow ‘Ronetta Billy’ (@ronetta.billy) on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok or visit her Linktree page for updates.
