She added, "Today a lot of slavery is portrayed from the 1850s. People haven't realized how well-established it was back in 1778, right after the revolution. In Colonial Louisiana, a slave couldn't be freed. With this book I tried to answer the question, 'How would it feel to own your children and not be able to free them?' "

When Straight read Louisiana's first slave code, written in 1724, she was stunned at the first sentence: "All Jews will be expelled from the colony." This, even though the rest of the document was about slavery. "It is a bloodless document," Straight said. "It's so strange to read this kind of thing about human beings."

It took her almost five years to write this novel. "It was a hard story to write, and when I do a reading from the book now, I get very emotional. While writing it I was so immersed in the characters. Most people forget how many kids came from forced relationships. Life was so random and arbitrary then. It was mysterious."

Straight plans two more volumes about Moinette's descendants, making the book into a trilogy. But she will never give up her pleasure-reading. She loves the mystery genre, especially Walter Mosley and James Lee Burke, and there's a book she re-reads at least once a year, "Ceremony," by Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American writer from New Mexico.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com