Though her childhood of slavery on Saint-Domingue is one of brutality and fear, Tt? finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770 to run his father's plantation, he purchases young Tt? as his bride and becomes dependent on the services of his teenaged slave. The lives of Tt? and Valmorain become intertwined through a bloody revolution and into the free-wheeling enterprise of New Orleans.