One spring morning in New Orleans, in 1843, a middle-aged German immigrant was walking through the city's Spanish Quarter when she came across a woman she recognized, a beautiful young German who had disappeared over 20 years before as a young child. Yet the woman in front of her was a slave, with no memory of a "white" past. What had happened? Had a defenceless European orphan been callously enslaved?
So began one of the most celebrated legal dramas in 19th Century America - the battle to free Salome Muller, the lost German slave girl. First published 2003.