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She remembered everyone called her Lis Cherie. That was long ago in a time of distant memory. She never actually learned her real name. She was only six, and she walked the halls of the mansion dressed like a porcelain doll. Her daily task was to carry a small velvet pillow upon which she delivered cakes and spoons and coffee for the madames. The plantation she and her parents lived on, Destrehan, was said to be as large as a palace and worked by a thousand slaves. The gardens around it were the envy of the Cotes des Allemands, which was up the River Road from New Orleans. They were said to rival the beauty of the Tuileries itself.

 
Her masters may have been conscientious about her Catholic learning, but at night in the fields she reveled in the ring shouts and the bonfires of her brothers and sisters. She was born in Saint Domingue during its revolution when her family fled unspeakable horrors she was too young recall. Their creole master resettled in Louisiana. For Lis Cherie, New Orleans was the stuff of dreams. Never had she seen so many people before in her life, and everyone and everything moving so fast. Her first memories was of the city. She and her parents were auctioned off to Jean Noel Destrehan to pay their master's debts. Standing on a platform in her little blue dress, she was sold for 200 francs under the rotunda of the Passage de la Bourse, on the Rue de Iberville. She thought she was being sold to a king. Instead she was sold to monsters.

 
Formerly planting indigo, Destrehan was replanted with sugar cane following the revolt in Saint Domingue, whose upheaval increased prices. The cane was far more intensive in labor and processing, and slaves were literally being worked to death in the mills during the season. Destrehan's managers whipped recalcitrant slaves and hung them from gibbets. Recalling how a former bondsman had become the Empereur Noir of Haiti, the slaves of the Cotes des Allemands thought they could make a claim for freedom themselves. So they revolted in the largest slave uprising in American history.

Half a thousand slaves marched by torchlight. They carried cane knives and bail hooks and sang Catholic psalms, and they prayed to Jesus and Blanc Dani and marched down the River Road towards an anxious metropolis. They looted and burned plantations, but they did not engage in the killing of whites, which mars the Haitian bid for freedom to this day. They were led by that black Spartacus, the mulatto Charles Deslondes, and beside him marched Lis Cherie's mother and father. Her mother walked in hand with her. For three days their hearts were filled with jubilee. It was a remembrance that she would never forget in all her years.

 
But along the River Road near Destrehan they encountered an army of white militia armed with pikes and muskets. Facing each other as though for battle, the mambos blessed the throng of brothers and sisters with holy water and cast spells of protection in the old tongues. Then, in an overwinter field of cane, they were run down and butchered. Her mother was hit on the first volley. A shot pierced her heart and she fell holding Lis Cherie's little hand. Her father, the last she ever saw of him, sent her away from the bedlam with other children into the swamps. When her father was captured along with Charles Deslondes, Jean Noel Destrehan had their hands cut off before they were hung. Then he had them beheaded, impaling their heads on pikes along the levee.

Lis Cherie lived several years in a maroon camp called Mackandal deep in the Bonnet Carre where a hundred fugitive slaves eked out a living from the swamps. She became the ward of an old mambo called the Queen of Wands, who was a witch of the bayous born and enslaved from over-the-water. She worshipped old gods and possessed herself with the loa. With this mysterious woman she was apprenticed in minkisi, rootwork and the auguries. It was a halcyon passing of time for her as she grew into something of a powerful and respected mambo herself. Tragedy, however, would not wait long to encounter Lis Cherie again.

 
One night during a gibbous moon, when the maroons were dancing the ring, a bateaux of armed slavers attacked the camp. Gunfire erupted, several maroons were killed and Lis Cherie was ensnared in a net and clasped in chains. Twice now her world had been torn asunder. She was then sold upriver in Vicksburg to the planter Joseph Davis, who planted over five-thousand acres at Davis Bend, Mississippi at the place called Hurricane. She had been given a new name, Esmerelda. She never heard the name Lis Cherie uttered again for all her days.