Book Details

It’s 1916 in the city of New Orleans when Andre Boulanger is born to an octoroon prostitute and a Creole man of high social standing. The child’s grandmother hires a hit man to kill baby Andre and his mother to eliminate the “taint” in the bloodline, but Andre is spared... He looks white enough to sell to a childless white couple, and the hit man finds that couple in Arthur and Hannah Arcineux. The Arcineuxs change Andre’s name to Sebastian. He becomes a sculptor, a man about town, and, after serving as a Navy lieutenant in WWII, he marries a high society New Orleans woman, Lucinda O’Rourke. But when Lucinda gives birth to a black baby, Sebastian renounces her and the child, thinking she has been unfaithful to him with a black man. Sebastian leaves for Jamaica, and Lucinda’s father concocts a plan to pretend the baby died at childbirth. He pays Cally, the family maid, to take the baby away and keep it hidden. Cally names the child Vincent and raises him as her own. After finding his great-grandmother’s diary, Sebastian must come to terms with his true identity—and come face-to-face with Vincent, the black son he abandoned years earlier.

 

About the Author

Norton Girault

About the Author: Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Norton Girault got his BA and MA in English at LSU. He served in cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers in World War II and the Korean War. After retiring from the Navy in 1969, he taught English at Norfolk State University for 15 years. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Soundings Review, MSS, Snake Nation Review, Webster Review, Timbuktu, Old Dominion Review and other magazines. In 2012, he published Out Among the Rooster Men, a collection of stories. He has been a regular contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference since 1974 and has taken writing courses at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he now resides.

Also by Norton Girault

Out Among the Rooster Men