We wouldn’t even have vanilla ice cream, vanilla perfumes, vanilla flavors and desserts without a boy—specifically a twelve-year-old enslaved child named Edmond Albius. Edmond’s mother died when he was a baby on the island of Réunion, off the coast of Madagascar, and the man who enslaved Edmond was a botanist who fussed and fumed over his vanilla orchids, which simply would not bloom.
