Lyle Saxon
Children of Strangers
Lyle Saxon's only novel vividly captures the lives of the Cane River's people of color. Children of Strangers is the powerful and moving novel of love in a community bound by race and class. Famie is a mulatto girl, a half-breed. Her ancestors were free blacks who rivaled the white planters in wealth and culture. But on a Louisiana plantation in the 1920s, Famie is an outcast, rejected by whites because of her black ancestors and unwilling to associate with the sharecroppers who are descendants of slaves. An illicit love affair with a white landowner leaves Famie with a son, Joel, to raise. Her dream is that Joel will someday become accepted into white society. But in her struggle to transcend race and class, Famie must sacrifice the last links to her past.