Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-Jos was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France.
A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant.
Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.
Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean.
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