A beautiful octoroon child-woman on the auction block, the dead outlaw she's in love with, a young Kipling sent to America on a secret mission by Queen Victoria, and a perfectly dead family living comfortably in a luxurious brothel that offers the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, a lighthouse on the Irish Sea, and a sunken Spanish galleon as simple nuances. Meet Tolstoy, Gauguin, and a Russian circus giant, members of the recently formed New James Gang, as they rob the Bank of New Orleans with a magical brush stroke. Then there's Lady Richter, expatriate madam, in love with the tall black piano player dead for years, but still playing in the main parlor. And Allen Pinkerton, renowned detective, transformed into a bird, thwarted again. Invigorating ski jaunts down the ice mountains of Pluto, torrid love sessions under Big Ben, and the supernatural electrical storm that disrupts the Octoroon Ball are just a few of the defining moments necessary for these people to come in touch with the bookmarks of their souls, and the strangely simple meaning of life itself.

Judge Peyton is dead and his plantation Terrebonne is in financial ruins. Peyton’s handsome nephew George arrives as heir apparent and quickly falls in love with Zoe, a beautiful octoroon. But the evil overseer M’Closky has other plans—for both Terrebonne and Zoe. In 1859, a famous Irishman wrote this play about slavery in America. Now an American tries to write his own.

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.

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.

The first analysis of the development of the jook and other dance arenas in African-American culture.

Set in New Orleans before the American Civil War, this is the story of the Free People of Color, descended from slaves, and their French and Spanish owners. Among their number is Marcel, an artist in the making, also his gentle sister Marie and Anna Bella, a beautiful young courtesan.

The landmark story of how interracial love and marriage changed American history—and continues to alter the landscape of American politics When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good. Not just a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, Loving challenges the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated.