The Placée’s Daughter: a Novel of Old New Orleans

New Orleans, 1849. In a city where a free woman of color cannot marry the man who fathers her children, nineteen-year-old Célestine Aubert is raised to a single hard art: survival inside an arrangement designed to use her and discard her. When she enters her plaçage with Henri Beaumont, a young Creole heir weeks from a respectable white marriage, he believes it is love. She knows it is a contract — with the date of its ending pinned to it before it begins.

What follows is a story told across three generations of women and one man who never once has to see clearly. As marriage, motherhood, and finally war remake the world around them, Célestine builds in secret the one thing the law cannot take from her — and guards, for her daughter, a freedom no woman of her blood has ever possessed: the right to choose her own life.

A sweeping, intimate novel of love, survival, inheritance, and the hidden history of old New Orleans.