Why a Booktrail?
2009: The swamps and plantations of Louisiana hold some deep dark secrets that refuse to stay buried..
The Cutting Season
What you need to know before your trail
Ascesion Parish, Louisiana 2009
One morning, Caren walks the grounds of Belle Vie, the historic plantation house she manages, and inspects the land as usual. What she finds there however, half buried in the soil is both shocking and gruesome. A woman is lying face down in a shallow grave, her throat cut clean. Who is she and where did she come from?
Caren cares more than most for her own identity and history is interwoven into this place. And now murder has darkened its doors. Keen to find out what has happened, she is spooked by the sense that someone is watching her. Someone who may not want her plantation’s secrets to come out…
Travel Guide
As a setting, the plantation of Belle Vie is one of huge significance. this is a land and landscape which has borne witness to so much historical oppression, slavery and which represents America as whole as it is weighed down with historical significance too.
Whilst Belle Vie is not a real plantation of course, the town of Ascension Parish is very much real –
“The plantation proper sat on eighteen acres, bordered to the north by the river and to the east by the raw, incorporated landscape of Ascension Parish”
Life here is evoked by the sweat and toil of the workers and the dark, high fenced plantation. The general atmosphere is one of hard work and literarily slave labour based on the history of its workers and its dark place in US history –
“Over the fence line, puffs of grey smoke shot up out of the field. The machines were out in the cane this morning, already on the clock.”
Life here for the workers is hard and oppressive and this crime will open up so many old and previously covered historical scabs. For the wounds of the past have never quite healed
Caren’s great-great-great grandfather, Jason, decided to stay on at the plantation after the Civil War ended slavery, but one night he mysteriously disappeared. What happened to him? certainly the area is known for its violence –
“..a slave revolt took out half the French Creoles in Ascension Parish”
A stunningly evoked time and place both in a geographical and historical sense.
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