Exiles at Home
Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth
New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of "les bons temps." Despite its image as a place apart, the city played a key role in nineteenth-century America as a site for immigration and pluralism, the quest for equality, and the centrality of self-making.In both the literary imagination and the law, creoles of color navigated life on a shifting color line. As they passed among various...