This is the story of a free black Creole family with beginnings in French Louisiana in 1740. It's a story of struggle and triumph with an indomitable cast of characters. The narrative traces the family's beginnings from the union between a litigious runaway slave of African descent and a conniving French settler who is an early colonizer in the Louisiana territory. The book is a tribute to the slave matriarch who managed to obtain and secure her own freedom and that of her four children who advanced quickly from being slaves to slave owners. Their children become members of a land owning elite black planter class which ultimately finds itself out of place in the slave holding Deep South with the dawn of the Civil War. The book explores the plight of generations of the family's fight to remain free and in the period immediately before and after the Civil War. Some become guerilla fighters and resist Confederate attempts to induct them into service. Others go in exile in Haiti to escape the vigilante movement in Louisiana. In the post-Reconstruction period and most of the twentieth century, the family is up against the Jim Crow laws and periods of pervasive violence against blacks. Discrimination is pervasive and the effect is harsh but the family does not give up. Land is preserved and with it independence. When the state fails to provide schools, the family put up its own schools. The fight for civil rights goes on. They march, they sit-in, they find a way to educate their children and protect them from the harshest effects of discrimination. The determination to remain free and the tradition of land ownership are the glue that holds the family together throughout the saga. The author follows leading characters that preserved these traditions over a period of more than 200 years and passed them on to her generation.
