The Mask and the Chain began as a response to a song I’ve always found both irresistible and deeply troubling: the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar. That riff is iconic. But the lyrics? They eroticize slavery and reduce a Black woman to a metaphor—“Brown Sugar,” sweet and nameless. It’s a song written entirely from the outside, a white fantasy that never considers the humanity of the woman it sexualizes.
I wanted to write an answer to that.
Amara, the protagonist of The Mask and the Chain, is not a fantasy. She’s a free woman of color in 1850s New Orleans, navigating a world that seeks to define her by race, by class, by gender—and refusing every label she doesn’t choose for herself. She walks into the ballroom knowing exactly how they see her. She walks out having rewritten the rules.
This story is about power, pleasure, and history. It doesn’t shy away from the brutal context of slavery or the legacy it leaves in every glance and touch. But it also doesn’t hand that history the final word. It gives voice—and agency—to the woman at the center. Her desire is not submissive. Her body is not a symbol. She owns her story.
The Mask and the Chain asks: what happens when the woman in the song finally gets to speak? And what if she’s not asking for permission?
Eric