Moonlight is light-skinned and takes advantage of the breakup of the plantation system after the Civil War. She marries a wealthy landowner, the son of the plantation master upon whose plantation she grew up a slave orphan. Moonlight starts a school for young children and writes the first primer for children of former slaves. Always unaware of her beginnings, she pursues her task and lays the foundation for an educational system that would endure well in to the twentieth century. Moonlight, boldly crossing the line between black and white, man and woman, sends her daughter, Biddie, to school in theEast. Biddie, ever the childher mother, joins the radical wing of the Suffrage
Movement, meets Miss Alice Paul, and helps to build several Settlement Houses. Biddie does not hide her race, rather makes great efforts at letting the world know that she is a black woman.
But where did Moonlight come from? She is descended from Alois and Solange
Sonnier, of French Canada, and Benit and Sallie who escaped the purge of French
Catholics in Canada and eventually settled in the section of Louisiana called Acadiana (Louisiana). Benit and Sallie give birth to Josephine, mother of Philo Marie Sonnier called The Savage Fox, serial killer for the Confederate armies. Moonlight is the daughter of Philo and an unknown slave, a fact she will never know; the only glimpse any of her ancestors ever had of her was Josephine’s quick glance at a dirty blanket wrapped around a baby.
Abandoned, like Faulkner’s Light in August, speaks of new generations of women,still touched by racism, prejudice and hatred, but ever enduring.
