Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a "quadroon," she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans's free women of color.

Father of Waters! I know thee well. In the land of a thousand lakes, on the summit of the “Hauteur de terre,” I have leaped thy tiny stream. Upon the bosom of the blue lakelet, the fountain of thy life, I have launched my birchen boat; and yielding to thy current, have floated softly southward. I have passed the meadows where the wild rice ripens on thy banks, where the white birch mirrors its silvery stem, and tall coniferae fling their pyramid shapes, on thy surface. I have seen the red Chippewa cleave thy crystal waters in his bark canoe—the giant moose lave his flanks in thy cooling flood—and the stately wapiti bound gracefully along thy banks. I have listened to the music of thy shores—the call of the cacawee, the laugh of the wa-wa goose, and the trumpet-note of the great northern swan. Yes, mighty river! Even in that far northern land, thy wilderness home, have I worshipped thee!...FROM THE BOOKS.

What if you discovered something from your past that was so dark, so sinister, it caused you inescapable humiliation? In this brilliant suspense thriller - Nine Notches captures the accounts of two friends: Brandon Fortier & Sherman Campbell who set out on a journey to discover the truth about their families, only to realize that past revelations can cause current scars. What was it like being an enslaved woman: only to give birth to another slave? What was it like to receive your freedom, but you've lost too much to leave? Nine Notches is more than just another novel; it's an introduction to life in New Orleans as told by a descendant of a French Quarter Slave. Spanning from 1835 New Orleans to present day - this riveting novel explores the gratification of finding the answers to all of your questions, and the consequences of knowing too much.Nine Notches will grip you from the first few pages, and never let you go. From the auction scene of a beautiful mulatto slave named Beatrice to the final confrontation: you are invited to enjoy a classic New Orleans Novel.

In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern histroy. Though descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who enslaved them. Called the Free People of Color, this dazzling historical novel chronicles the lives of four of them--men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.