Isle of Canes (2004) is an American historical novel by Elizabeth Shown Mills about the communities of Creoles of color and enslaved persons that lived there in the 18th and 19th centuries.
[1][2] This book follows an African family from their enslavement in 1735, through four generations of freedom in Creole Louisiana to effective re-subjugation by Jim Crow at the close of the nineteenth century.
Contemporary Lit describes the focus as "Gone with the Wind from a vastly different, more important perspective ... not that of the plantation owner or the poor white ... but homme de couleur libre and slave ... capturing the agonizing decisions which tore families and communities apart."
[9] Mills's Isle explores the colonial roots of the community and the experience of slaves who achieved freedom prior to the Louisiana Purchase and a wave of Americans settling in the area 's Creole-Anglo conflict.
She suggests that they envied, respected, and resented the free status of the Isle's Creoles de couleur libre, especially as they shared ancestry and family relations.
Saxon's era was one in which the chatelaine of the family's last remaining manor house (Melrose Plantation, a National Historic Landmark since 1976) was an Anglo patroness of the arts.
"[citation needed] Historians struggle to understand the complexities of the "Peculiar Institution"—particularly the motivation that compelled a significant number of freed American slaves to purchase other humans once free to do so.
Isle of Canes reconstructs the world of a historic family to define a radically different but equally uncomfortable trajectory by which more than a few ex-slaves survived a status many historians consider "neither slave nor free.