In the middle years of her life, Celine Fremaux Garcia recollected in this memoir her Louisiana childhood and growth into maturity--a tumultuous personal period that was transformed by violence as it was dominated by fear. The result is a detailed and sensitive portrait of a child's world of awe and wonder, color, and strife, in which the Civil War and its aftermath form the backdrop for conflict and rivalry within her French middle-class immigrant family.

CÉLINE FRÉMAUX GARCIA (1850-1935) spent her life within the ordered, traditional world of nineteenth-century French Louisiana. She belonged to a close-knit web of relations that included the Montilly, Frémaux, and Garcia families.