Here are the true and dramatic stories of two nineteenth-century Brazilian women - one young and born a slave, the other old and from an illustrious planter family - and how each in her own way sought to have her way: The slave woman struggled to avoid an unwanted husband; the woman of privilege assumed a patriarch's role to endow a family of her former slaves with the means for a free life. But these women's stories cannot be told without also recalling how their decisions drew them ever more firmly into the orbits of the worldly and influential men who exercised power in their lives. These are stories with a twist: In this society of radically skewed power, Lauderdale Graham reveals that more choices existed for all sides than we first imagine. Through these small histories she casts new light on larger meanings of slave and free, female and male.