Lalita Tademy was a successful corporate vice president at a Fortune(r) 500 company when she decided to give notice and embark upon what would become an obsessive odyssey to uncover her family's past. Through exhaustive research, interviews, and the help of professional genealogists, she would find herself transported back to the early 1800s, to an isolated, close-knit rural community on Louisiana's Cane River. Here, Tademy takes historical fact and mingles it with fiction to weave a vivid and dramatic account of what life was like for the four remarkable women who came before her. Beginning with Tademy's great-great-great-great grandmother Elisabeth, this is a family saga that sweeps from the early days of slavery through the Civil War into a pre-Civil Rights South-a unique and moving slice of America's past that will resonate with readers for generations to come.