Old New Orleans

Press, 27 November 1982, Page 16

Old New Orleans

The Feast of Saints. By Anne Rice. Penguin, 1982. 729 pp. $7.95 (paperback). This novel, set in Louisiana before the American Civil War, reflects the lives of the “gens de couleur,” a vibrant people descended from African slaves and the French and Spanish who enslaved them. The “gens de couleur” were free and yet not free, fighting for a place in the white world of New Orleans, striving to become people of wealth, education and distinction. Their lives were, however, always subordinate tb their white counterparts. ' The main character, Marcel, is a boy whose black mother is the mistress of a white plantation owner. The book depicts the life of Marcel and that of his sister, Marie, both of whom were raised as aristocrats on their proud mother’s spoils, but who also had to live with the entrenched reality of being black. Marcel dreams of an education in France, promised him by his father, while his sister yearns simply for love; Each is shattered when their father’s promise to Marcel is broken and Marie seems doomed to follow in her mother’s footsteps — to be kept, by a white lover, rather than be happy with a black husband. This book is a passionate, vivid depiction of the racism, brutality and inequality of those times, -a Sue Lancaster. . ■