Today we have a sneak peek of Renee Goudeau’s historical novel, Dangerous Secret:
In 1922, a time when Jim Crow and its offshoot, the One-Drop Law, are at their height, a dangerous secret from the past rises like a cottonmouth to strike in the present. In Lake Badin, Louisiana, Odette Montagne Grandpierre discovers just how dangerous the secret is. Threatened with blackmail for her “one drop” of black blood, faced with losing her lifelong identify, being stigmatized as a member of a disdained race and stripped of her civil rights, she decides her only way out is to murder her tormentor. But she can’t follow through with it. When her niece by marriage, Giselle Richards O’Connell, discovers the blackmail and the jeopardy in which it places Odette, she takes up the cudgels in Odette’s defense. Using her weekly newspaper column Giselle tries to fight fire with fire—never dreaming that she, herself, will be caught in the firestorm she creates.
Dangerous Secret is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon.com.
And now, from Dangerous Secret:
January 25, 1835
For a week I have enjoyed myself among Middenmound’s other guests. Among them are a poet, a musician, a teacher, and surprisingly, a New Orleans Free Man of Color: Eduardo Villon, a fencing master two years my senior whom the others treat with almost equality. A startling social aberration. Mais perhaps understandable since they are so soon from France where the color line is not so strongly drawn. . .
. . . To you only, Diary, I admit that despite the disapproval that would be loudly voiced by others. . . I fervently hope to be able to see him again after I have returned to. . .Belle Terre.
~~~
Odette finally looked up. “I think I waste my time.” She tapped the page with her forefinger. “There is nothing here.”
She rose from the love seat. “I must again insist that you leave. And your empty threats take with you. It was not just today that I was born!
“You must think me a stupid donkey to fear exposure of these pages. They offer the proof only that Mémère Célèste was an unfortunate woman weaker in constraint than even the most flagrant lover of joie de vivre. And I can assure you that is all they offer.”
He looked up at her. “Well, suppose I just cut to the chase. To put it in as few words as possible, those pages prove your socially respected maman, Eugénie de la Saville Grandpierre Montagne, had a Colored man for a father.”
Pointing at the double doors to the hall she screeched, “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!”
He suddenly jumped up from his chair and moved to within a foot of her. “You trying to raise the dead with your screaming? Or get Callie in here?”
She leaned back to get further from him and clenched her teeth to try to speak calmly. “For you to make such a claim disgraces not only me, your maman’s longest-time friend, but even the more so yourself! It is too preposterous! My grandmaman, Célèste was a respectable married woman. Her husband and my maman’s papa, my grandpère, was Christophe de la Saville.”
He smiled. “Maybe so. But before you try to take the high road and throw me out, maybe you oughta read a few more pages.”
Her voice still trembling with rage she said, “It is of no necessity that I read more. I have had enough of your lying.”
“Enough, hell!” He shook his head. “You haven’t heard the half of it, you can bet your life on that! I’ll give it to you straight from the shoulder. If it’s not your choice to go any farther into this—well, I feel I have a duty to broadcast the facts to the people of this community. Sorta like what happened to that little Broussard girl, got thrown out of her school.”
Her knees suddenly weak, Odette reseated herself on the love seat. “You are threatening me with blackmail?”[subscribe2]
Thank you, Kat, it looks nice.
Renee
Sounds like a powerful novel. All the best with it, Renee.
From your fingers to God's ears, Diane. Thank you for the good wishes.