01.01.70
Moinette will require you think twice before uttering a racial slur or thinking that African Americans are auspicious because they got free passage here. She is the principal character in Susan Straight's fascinating historical novel, A Million Nightingales , about slavery in Louisiana in the at daybreak 1800s. "I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing deregulation," Straight writes as her introduction, quoting a folk song suiting of the poem Defiance," by Mahmud Darwish and acknowledging the book's water theme.
The reader is introduced to Moinette while she is under the watchful care of her progenitrix, Marie Thérèse to whom she refers as Mamère, a slave in the household of a typical sugar cane plantation proprietress. The setting is near a Louisiana bayou where it was deemed easier to die than to run.
Source: Joplin Independent