The Feast of All Saints

Marcel, a member of New Orlean's mulatto elite in the 1840s, yearns to pursue his education and one day go to Paris, while his raven-haired sister, Marie, would willingly defy the traditional wisdom of her class and marry a youth darker than herself

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.