Brief Summary

Emille Jackson, nicknames Aunt Millips, was reared a slave girl on a plantation from the age of five. She was a mulatto whose mother was of Ethiopian descent and whose father was a white man she never knew. When she was fifteen her slave owner gave her to his twenty-one-year-old son for a concubine. She gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl. Although they were white in color, they were black by race. Shortly after the abolishment of slavery, the children's father, Colonel Jackson, secretly went to East Texas and deeded two hundred acres of land to Aunt Millipus and their children.

He gave the deeds to her for safekeeping, realizing that at his demise, his legal wife and their son would inherit Jackson Plantation. After his tragic and untimely death, his brother-in-law came to operate the farm. During a drunken spell, he sexually attacked Aunt Millipus' teenage daughter, and a fight ensued with the girl's brother. Aunt Millipus persuaded the boy to leave before he was attached by a vigilante mob. That same night, Aunt Millipus and the daughter gathered a few clothes, the deeds to the land and fled to New Orleans.