Isle Brevelle tells the true story of an African woman, a slave for forty-four years, who is freed, then struggles against a racist society to become the matriarch of the wealthiest family of free blacks in the United States by the beginning of the American Civil War. 

SYNOPSIS:

Isle Brevelle takes place in the 1700s, in Natchitoches Parish, the oldest settlement of the royal French colony, Louisiana. It tells the true story of an African woman christened Marie Thereze, but called Coincoin, the name given to all second-born daughters of the Ewe tribe in Togo, her parents’ native country.

Isle Brevelle is a love story, but it is also a story that chronicles the struggles of an African woman, Marie Thereze Coincoin, against injustice and adversity. The story begins as Coincoin enters her sixteenth year; her mother, Francoise, her father, Francois, and their owner, Emmanuela de St Denis, all die of yellow fever.

Coincoin and her nine siblings are quickly partitioned. Coincoin and her brother, Jean Baptiste, become property of Pierre Antoine, de St. Denis, the young and insufferably arrogant son of Madame Emmanuela de St. Denis. Years pass. At twenty-five, Coincoin becomes the property of Marie de St. Denis de Soto, Pierre Antoine’s older sister, and experiences a dramatic shift in her life - she is captured by the passion of a young French merchant, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer.

Claude Pierre leases Coincoin from Madame de Soto, and then defies the Catholic Church when he takes eCoincoin into his home where they live as husband and wife and from that union produce ten children.

As their relationship grows so does Claude Pierre’s yearning for legitimate heirs to this vast estate. Marriage to Coincoin is out of the question, and he cannot claim their children without losing them, Coincoin, and his entire fortune - all according to Louisiana’s Code Noir. To circumvent the Code, Claude Pierre purchases Coincoin, then frees her, but inexplicably keeps custody of their children. Love and guilt compel Claude Pierre to provide Coincoin with an annual life-long stipend and a narrow strip of fertile land known as Isle Brevelle.

Once powerless, Coincoin is now free, after forty-four years in slavery, to determine her own fate. Armed with Claude Pierre’s gifts and life-long support, she becomes landowner, tobacco grower, and paradoxically, an owner of slaves.

By the beginning of the American Civil War, the descendants of Marie Thereze Coincoin and Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer become the wealthiest family of free blacks in the United States. They become the embodiment of the French-speaking gens libre de couleur, or free people of color, whose Creole culture distinguishes Louisiana today.