 First edition cover | |
| Author | Anne Rice |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical fiction |
| Published | January 16, 1979 |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 571 |
| ISBN | 978-0671247553 |
| OCLC | 5171397 |
The Feast of All Saints is a historical novel by American author Anne Rice published in 1979 by Simon & Schuster. [1]
This novel is about the gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, who lived in New Orleans before the Civil War. The gens de couleur libres were the descendants of European settlers of Louisiana, particularly the French and Spanish and people of African descent. It was a common practice for the early Caucasian settlers to free their children by their slave mistresses. Their mistresses however, were not all enslaved, some were free women of color whose families had been free for several generations. The novel takes place in the 1840s, at which time there was a large population of free people of color living in New Orleans.
The story centers on Marcel, a young man who has one white parent and one parent who is half white and half black. His mother, Cecile, is the mistress of Philippe Ferronaire, a rich French plantation owner. Cecile has borne Ferronaire two children, Marcel and his sister Marie. Marie is very light skinned and able to pass as white, but Marcel, who is blonde and blue eyed, but with ethnic hair, features, and slightly darker skin, cannot. The other two major characters in this novel are Christophe, a famous author who returns from Paris to start a school for the young gens, and Anna Bella, Marcel's childhood friend. Anna Bella loves Marcel, but as he is unprepared to offer her marriage (and too young) she becomes the mistress of Vincent Dazincourt, who is the brother of Philippe Ferronaire's white wife. They have a child together, but split after Marcel, who had been expecting to be sent to Paris, learns that his father has betrayed him and wanders to his father's plantation to confront him. There, his father beats him and repudiates him. In disgrace, Marcel is sent to live with his aunt among many Creole planters on the Cane River. It is here that Marcel learns some of his (African Diasporan) history, including the Haitian Slave Revolt and the fact that his mother was stolen off the street by his adopted aunt during that time.
While Marcel is learning history, his father is in New Orleans drinking himself to death, which he eventually does, depriving the family of their source of income. Marie, who was set to marry Marcel's best friend Richard, is now told that she will follow in her mother's footsteps and take a white protector in order to get money for the family and send Marcel to Paris (Marcel is unaware of all of this). Marie confides this to her slave maid and half-sister, Lisette. Lisette is also Phillipe Ferronaire's daughter (which Marie does not know) and was promised her freedom by him, but as he did to Marcel, he reneged on his promise to her. In revenge, Lisette takes Marie to the house of a voodooiene, where she is drugged and raped by five men. Marcel comes home to find that his sister has been raped, Richard has been locked in the family attic (to prevent him from taking revenge on the men, and then, certainly, being tried and convicted of murder and executed) and Vincent Dazincourt has already confronted two of the men, challenged them to duels, and killed them.
The issue from Dazincourt's perspective is that the five men knew Marie's identity, and therefore knew that she was related by blood to the Ferronaire/Dazincourt family, but raped her anyway. The gens de couleur libre members of the extended family cannot avenge Marie's rape, but he can.
Marie takes refuge with a local madam, Dolly Rose. Lisette commits suicide to avoid Dazincourt's vengeance. Dazincourt finds and kills a third man in a duel, but the other two escape from New Orleans before he can call them out and kill them. Richard, who is finally let out of the attic, tells his family that he will marry Marie or face exile with her. The novel ends with Marie and Richard sailing to France (where they will stay until the gossip dies down) and Marcel deciding to become a photographer in order to earn his living (with the implication that once he has some success he will marry Anna Bella).
The Feast of All Saints was made into a television miniseries in 2001, directed by Peter Medak and starring James Earl Jones, Forest Whitaker, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Eartha Kitt, Pam Grier, Ben Vereen, Jasmine Guy, Jennifer Beals, Robert Ri'chard, Gloria Reuben, Peter Gallagher, Daniel Sunjata, Jenny Levine, Rachel Luttrell, and Bianca Lawson. [2]
Jean-Jacques Dessalines was the first Haitian Emperor, and leader of the Haitian Revolution, and the first ruler of an independent Haiti under the 1805 constitution. Initially regarded as governor-general, Dessalines was later named Emperor of Haiti as Jacques I (1804–1806) by generals of the Haitian Revolutionary army and ruled in that capacity until being assassinated in 1806. He spearheaded the resistance against French massacres upon Haitians, and eventually became the architect of the 1804 Haitian Massacre against the remaining French residents of Haiti, including some supporters of the revolution. Alongside Toussaint Louverture, he has been referred to as one of the fathers of the nation of Haiti.
The Sleeping Beauty Quartet is a series of four novels written by American author Anne Rice under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure. The quartet comprises The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, Beauty's Release, and Beauty's Kingdom, first published individually in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 2015, respectively, in the United States. They are erotic BDSM novels set in a medieval fantasy world, loosely based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. The novels describe explicit sexual adventures of the female protagonist Beauty and the male characters Alexi, Tristan, and Laurent, featuring both maledom and femdom scenarios amid vivid imageries of bisexuality, homosexuality, ephebophilia, and pony play.
Saint-Domingue was a French colony in the western portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the area of modern-day Haiti, from 1697 to 1804. The name derives from the Spanish main city on the island, Santo Domingo, which came to refer specifically to the Spanish-held Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. The borders between the two were fluid and changed over time until they were finally solidified in the Dominican War of Independence in 1844.
Alexandre Sabès Pétion was the first president of the Republic of Haiti from 1807 until his death in 1818. One of Haiti's founding fathers, Pétion belonged to the revolutionary quartet that also includes Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and his later rival Henri Christophe. Regarded as an excellent artilleryman in his early adulthood, Pétion would distinguish himself as an esteemed military commander with experience leading both French and Haitian troops. The 1802 coalition formed by him and Dessalines against French forces led by Charles Leclerc would prove to be a watershed moment in the decade-long conflict, eventually culminating in the decisive Haitian victory at the Battle of Vertières in 1803.
Acadiana, also known as the Cajun Country, is the official name given to the French Louisiana region that has historically contained much of the state's Francophone population.
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
Affranchi is a former French legal term denoting a freedman or emancipated slave, but also a pejorative term for Free people of color. It is used in the English language to describe the social class of freedmen in Saint-Domingue, and other slave-holding French territories, who held legal rights intermediate between those of free whites and enslaved Africans. In Saint-Domingue, roughly half of the affranchis were gens de couleur libres and the other half African slaves.
Julien Raimond (1744–1801) was a Saint Dominican indigo planter in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now the Republic of Haiti, who became a leader in its revolution and the formation of Haiti.
Zorro is a 2005 novel by Chilean author Isabel Allende. Its subject is the American pulp hero Diego de la Vega, better known as El Zorro. He first appeared as a character in Johnston McCulley's novella The Curse of Capistrano (1919). His character and adventures have also been adapted for an American TV series, other books, and cartoon series.
A tignon is a type of headcovering—a large piece of material tied or wrapped around the head to form a kind of turban that somewhat resembles the West African gele. It was worn by Creole women of African descent in Louisiana beginning in the Spanish colonial period, and continuing to a lesser extent to the present day.
Plaçage was a recognized extralegal system in French and Spanish slave colonies of North America by which ethnic European men entered into civil unions with non-Europeans of African, Native American and mixed-race descent. The term comes from the French placer meaning "to place with". The women were not legally recognized as wives but were known as placées; their relationships were recognized among the free people of color as mariages de la main gauche or left-handed marriages. They became institutionalized with contracts or negotiations that settled property on the woman and her children and, in some cases, gave them freedom if they were enslaved. The system flourished throughout the French and Spanish colonial periods, reaching its zenith during the latter, between 1769 and 1803.
Jubilee (1966) is a historical novel written by Margaret Walker, which focuses on the story of a biracial slave during the American Civil War. It is set in Georgia and later in various parts of Alabama in the mid-19th century before, during, and after the Civil War.
Jean-Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville (1785–1868), known as Bernard de Marigny, was a French-Creole American nobleman, playboy, planter, politician, duelist, writer, horse breeder, land developer, and President of the Louisiana State Senate between 1822 and 1823.
The Creoles of color are a historic ethnic group of Louisiana Creoles that developed in the former French and Spanish colonies of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Northwestern Florida, in what is now the United States. French colonists in Louisiana first used the term "Creole" to refer to people born in the colony, rather than in Europe, thus drawing a distinction between Old-World Europeans and Africans from their descendants born in the New World. Today, many of these Creoles of color have assimilated into Black culture, while some chose to remain a separate yet inclusive subsection of the African American ethnic group.
Anne Rice was an American author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and bible fiction. She is best known for writing The Vampire Chronicles. She later adapted the first novel of the series into a commercially successful eponymous film, Interview with the Vampire (1994).
Pierre Belly was a Louisiana planter, lawyer and judge. Originally a native of France, it's believed Belly arrived in Louisiana in 1774, where he received his first tract of land-for 3,756 acres in the form of a land grant from the Spanish colonial government. Pierre also received five more land grants totalling about 4,898 acres.
Elisabeth "Zabeau" Bellanton, was a slave trader. She is known to have been the most successful business woman in the French colony of Saint Domingue prior to the Haitian Revolution.
Julie Dahey, was a planter in Saint-Domingue.
Rosette Rochon (1767–1863) was an American placée and businesswoman, who was an important figure in the Gens de couleur libres society of New Orleans. She belonged to the most famous of the placées of New Orleans alongside Eulalie de Mandéville and Marie Thérèse Metoyer, and made a fortune on investments in dry goods, cattle, banking, slave trade and real estate business.
Saint-Domingue Creoles or simply Creoles, were the people who lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue prior to the Haitian Revolution.
