Bayou Mallett memoir recounts seven generations

A Mallett native who recently retired as a telecommunications attorney in Washington, D.C. has written a memoir of seven generations of her family.
Lovey Marie Guillory was in Eunice earlier this summer talking to three schools about her book and her experiences.
“Born on the Kitchen Floor in Bois Mallett” is the story of a free black Creole family from 1740 on.
Guillory traces her family’s beginnings to a slave named Marguerite, born around 1740, who won freedom for herself and her children in a 1783 Louisiana court case.
Her offspring acquired land in the Opelousas area, where they farmed and raised cattle, and eventually found their way to the Mallet Woods where Guillory was born.
“It is Marguerite’s story,” she writes, “that explains our big extended family, our belief in the land and our commitment to freedom,” Guillory told an earlier interviewer.
The subtitle of Lovey Marie Guillory’s new memoir, “Born on the Kitchen Floor in Bois Mallet,” says it all: “The Story of a Free Black Creole Family from its Arrival in French Colonial Louisiana, to its Fight to Remain Free, and its Endurance Through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Exile, and Jim Crow.”
Thanks to her research and to the many storytellers who gave her insight into her family’s past, Guillory is able to reveal “an indomitable case of characters” that includes quadroons and mulattos, military officers and mistresses, free people of color and slave-holding blacks, Haitian exiles and Civil War resistance fighters, and a long line of prominent landowners and farmers in southwest Louisiana.
But while Marguerite’s heroism saved Guillory’s family from slavery, she writes, “It did not save the family from the tragedy that was segregation.” Her parents helped to shelter her and her siblings from the worst of it by maintaining a nearly self-sufficient farm, where all the kids were expected to work when they weren’t in school. Her parents also passed along the spirit of Marguerite in lessons that guided their lives: “Hold your head up high. Hold onto the land. Don’t ever give up.”
Guillory went on to attend college at a convent in Philadelphia and to graduate from Rutgers Law School. She recently retired as a telecommunications lawyer and decided to write a family memoir. The result is “Born on the Kitchen Floor in Bois Mallet,” an extraordinary book which author Louise Farmer Smith has called an “inspirational…addition to America’s story.”
The book is available at amazon.com.