Having read and loved Tainted Lillies, I was anxious to read
another by Weyrich.
This is the story of Desiree La Fleur.
It begins in 1885 when she is seven and her mulatto nurse flees Desiree’s
drunken father with Desiree and her infant sister, Innocente. In the swamps
they become separated and Desiree is recaptured by her father’s men. We don’t
learn much of her youth after that except she is taken home and though she has
a stepmother who has no love for her, Desiree is educated in the East. In 1899,
when she is 21, she decides to take the money she gained from a writing contest
and join her best friend, Nanine, in New Orleans.
As soon as she gets off the train, Desiree
is mistaken for a woman named “Garnet” who, she later learns, is a prostitute
living in “Storyville,” the red lantern district of New Orleans. It’s “the scarlet
thread” on Basin Street. Right then I realized, even if Desiree did not, that
she’d found her long lost sister.
Meanwhile Nanine plots to match Desiree
with Dr. Roman St. Vincent, dubbed “the saint of Storyville” for the help he
gives to the young prostitutes. And the prostitute named Garnet is in love with
him. Two sisters both in love with the same man. Because of their beginnings, one
is ostensibly good and the other a fallen woman, raised to believe she is a
woman of color when she is not.
Neither Desiree nor Roman want marriage
but decide, at their early encounter, to pretend they are engaged to appease
Nanine and her husband in whose home Desiree lives.
Buy on Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment