A tour-de-force from three-time National Book Award finalist Rita Williams-Garcia, this story of an antebellum plantation--and the enduring legacies of slavery upon every person who lives there--is essential reading for both teens and adults grappling with the long history of American racism. 1860, Louisiana . After serving as mistress of Le Petit Cottage for more than six decades, Madame Sylvie Guilbert has decided, in spite of her family's objections, to sit for a portrait. While Madame plots her last hurrah, stories that span generations--from the big house to out in the fields--of routine horrors, secrets buried as deep as the family fortune, and the tangled bonds of descendants and enslaved. This astonishing novel from award-winning author Rita Williams-Garcia about the interwoven lives of those bound to a plantation in antebellum America is an epic masterwork--empathetic, brutal, and entirely human.