Into this half-real, half-reproduction world comes a grisly development: Out behind the slave quarters, Caren discovers the body of a murdered woman that police identify as a migrant worker employed by the agribusiness that leases the fields. Nowadays, Caren’s office is in the main house, a place she never set foot in as a child-even her mother “never made it past the foyer”-where she enjoys a scenic view of the “fields where her ancestors had cut sugarcane by hand.” Her mother was the plantation’s cook for nearly three decades, and Caren, who grew up playing with the children of the white owners, is descended from slaves. Overseeing the day-to-day operations and staff is Caren Gray, a single mother and law-school dropout who has returned, in a way, to her roots. Freedom weren’t meant nothin’ without Belle Vie.” Including costumed “slaves” who give tours and also perform twice-daily in a play about Belle Vie’s history, delivering lines like this one: “Dem Yankee whites can’t make me leave dis here land. Its long-time owners have turned the estate over to weddings, corporate events and tourists, who flock to it by the busload, eager for a surreal but “authentic” taste of the South before the Emancipation Proclamation. Far from having gone with the wind, Belle Vie is still a thriving industry in 2009, when the book opens.
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