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.