Isle of Canes

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Isle of Canes (2004) is an American historical novel by Elizabeth Shown Mills about the communities of Creoles of color and enslaved persons that lived there in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It was published by Ancestry, the book division of Ancestry.com.^[1][2]

This book follows an African family from their enslavement in 1735, through four generations of freedom in Creole Louisiana to effective re-subjugation by Jim Crow at the close of the nineteenth century.^[3] Mills explores the family's "struggle to find a place in [a] tightly defined world of black and white"^[4] — a world made more complex by the larger struggle of Louisiana's native ancien regime to preserve its culture amid the Anglo-Protestant "invasion" that followed the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. There was a struggle between the ethnic French and ethnic Americans (more British in background) for political and social hegemony.

Isle's central theme is the complex lives of those who escaped colonial slavery only to find they could not survive as free without complicity in the slave regime. Mills conducted research for this book for 35 years.^[2][5]