Madame Margot

Though praised as a jewel-like masterpiece after its publication in 1921, Madame Margot, when first told to a 1908 Charleston, South Carolina, audience was called shocking, "unfit" for ladies and lurid and revolting trash. It is the story of a true woman of color who lived in Charleston before the Civil War who bartered for her daughter{u2019}s happiness by giving the devil her soul in order that her daughter be "white to all eternity." When John Bennett first heard the tale from ex-slaves who saw the work of the devil in the magical fable, he knew he had found something lovely and strange, unique in the annals of American Folklore.