Confessions of a Blacklisted Femme Fatale

In 1961, Thelma Blake was the first Black woman to play a villain on network television, and thirty million viewers knew her as Nightshade until she spoke about civil rights at a Kennedy fundraiser.

Hollywood blacklisted her, destroyed her career, and branded her crazy, so she drove off Mulholland Drive and disappeared.

Two years later she is Elle Brown, a mousy waitress keeping her head down in a New Orleans bar, when Dominique LeJeune arrives in a sharp suit and an easy smile.

Dom is a street boxer using her earnings to keep her grandfather’s struggling bar afloat, a civil rights activist, and a single mother who took in a boy from an abusive father who could not accept that his child was a boy.

Dom knows nothing of Hollywood or Nightshade and only sees a woman who needs protecting, and Elle falls for her as they build a family at the bar organizing the Canal Street sit-ins.

When the movement needs a fearless voice and someone may recognize Nightshade’s purr, Elle must choose between speaking and risking everything or staying silent to keep her anonymity.