Born on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarite - known as Tête - is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tete finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves.
When twenty-year-old Toulose Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint Lazard, is neither glamorous nor easy. Although Valmorain purchases young Tete for his bide, it is he who will become dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.
Against the merciless backdrop of sugar cane fields, the lives of Tete and Valmorain grow ever more entwined. When the bloody revolution of Toussaint Louverture arrives at the gates of Saint Lazard, they flee the brutal conditions of the French colony that will become Haiti for the raucous, free-wheeling enterprise of New Orleans. There, Tete finally forges a new life, but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not easily severed.
