Born on the Kitchen Floor in Bois Mallet: The Story of a Free Black Creole Family from its Arrival in French Colonial Louisiana, to its Fight to Remai - Paperback

by Lovey Marie Guillory (Author)

This is the story of a free black Creole family with beginnings in French Louisiana in 1740. It's a story of struggle and triumph with an indomitable cast of characters. The narrative traces the family's beginnings from the union between a litigious runaway slave of African descent and a conniving French settler who is an early colonizer in the Louisiana territory. The book is a tribute to the slave matriarch who managed to obtain and secure her own freedom and that of her four children who advanced quickly from being slaves to slave owners. Their children become members of a land owning elite black planter class which ultimately finds itself out of place in the slave holding Deep South with the dawn of the Civil War. The book explores the plight of generations of the family's fight to remain free and in the period immediately before and after the Civil War. Some become guerilla fighters and resist Confederate attempts to induct them into service. Others go in exile in Haiti to escape the vigilante movement in Louisiana. In the post-Reconstruction period and most of the twentieth century, the family is up against the Jim Crow laws and periods of pervasive violence against blacks. Discrimination is pervasive and the effect is harsh but the family does not give up. Land is preserved and with it independence. When the state fails to provide schools, the family put up its own schools. The fight for civil rights goes on. They march, they sit-in, they find a way to educate their children and protect them from the harshest effects of discrimination. The determination to remain free and the tradition of land ownership are the glue that holds the family together throughout the saga. The author follows leading characters that preserved these traditions over a period of more than 200 years and passed them on to her generation.

Author Biography

Lovey Marie Guillory is a descendant of an African American family with roots in French Colonial Louisiana. Born in Louisiana, she grew up on the family farm in the heart of bayou country. Her life has been shaped by that rural beginning and a legacy coming from her ancestors' early liberation from slavery. She grew up in the segregated South but the family has a complex history with a direct line to men and women who transitioned from being slaves to slave owners. The author grew up listening to her mother and father tell stories of relatives slave and free, some who were guerilla fighters and others who were forced into exile to Haiti during the Civil War. In this memoir, she has retraced her steps to the bayou country of her youth and gone searching for the threads in her own story and what is left of the story of the matriarch of the Guillory family, a woman known only as "Marguerite." The search has taken her on a trek that spans more than 200 years of American history. Not surprisingly, this great grand-daughter of exiled American born citizens and a long family line determined to remain free and independent, migrated out of the segregated South early in life and has spent most of her life elsewhere. Before writing this book, the author practiced law. As an attorney, she and has written hundreds of pleadings and legal briefs and given lectures on telecommunications law throughout the United States and abroad.