Cane River by Lalita Tademy
October 20, 2010
I. Introduction
I loved the book but then I would because Cane River is set in Louisiana. As the crow flies, Natchitoches, LA is possibly no more than 80 miles from here which heightens my interest because it is so near yet so far away considering the contrast of Texas and Louisiana culture.
I have been intrigued with Louisiana culture since I was a little girl traveling to Lake Providence, LA to visit my grand daddy Phylander Mills who owned a general merchandise and grocery store right on the banks of the Mississippi River. I can remember back to at least the mid 1940's seeing cotton pickers scattered over what looked to be 100's of acres of cotton field. They were all dragging long, light-colored sacks in the midst of clouds of dust and intense heat and humidity. And I also remember staring at the little shacks where those cotton pickers lived all set in a row near the road that we traveled - no trees - no shade - just miles and miles of cotton and dust. Of course they were not slaves, not in the 1940's, but generations of their ancestors were.
I guess my roots are in Louisiana because that is where my grandparents lived and where my mother grew up. When my mother married my daddy, who was from Mississippi, he brought her to Texas where she spent her entire life longing to return to Louisiana. I've often thought that if I had my life to live over, I would live in or near New Orleans in a wooden pier and bean creole house with 12 ft. ceilings and a metal roof and I would go to LSU. For what it's worth, that give you an idea of my connection to Louisiana and why I found this novel so intriguing.
II. Lalita Tademy
Cane River is her first novel. Tademy was born in 1948 and exactly how she happened to find her way to California, I don't know. She was a real achiever though because she climbed the corporate ladder all the way to the position of vice president of Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley California. She said that for two decades she hoisted herself upward professionally always looking for the next promotion that brought all-consuming work, status, long hours, and stock options.
I did gather that she knew her roots because she described visits with her parents back to Colfax, Louisiana located not far from the Cane River. On one trip with her father in 1978 ( at that time she was thirty years old) she describes visiting with a cousin named Gurtie Fredieu in Shreveport, LA who had written a 2-page history of her family. Lalita was, to say the least, intrigued by Gurtie's stories of distant ancestors, grisly murders, suicides, and forbidden love. Gurtie was light-skinned with sharp features and according to a photo in the book Gurtie was very beautiful when she was young.
Lalita figured that Gurtie exaggerated for effect, but that did not matter. Lalita was hooked and spent the next 17 years on the job at Sun Microsystems day-dreaming about her past. She gives an account of her great, great grandmother Philomene coming to her in her dreams demanding that she do whatever necessary to understand the generations of her family. So in 1995 when she was only 47 years old, Tademy quit her high profile job to follow her great, great grandmother's demands. She spent the next 10 years researching, interviewing family members, writing and promoting Cane River which was completed in 2001 but not mass marketed until 2005.
This is a direct quote, "It is important to know that Cane River is a work of fiction deeply rooted in years of research, historical fact, and family lore. The details of cousin Gurtie's accounting weren't always supported by other documents I uncovered. Some of the dates were off, some facts twisted, but I found that each precious line of Gurtie's history had at least a grain of truth, and a family story had arisen around it. Many official and historical documents had inaccuracies in them as well. MY challenge was to marry all of the data. In piecing together events from personal and public sources, especially when they conflicted, I relied on my own intuition, a sometimes daunting experience when I felt Philomene's judgmental presence over my shoulder. There were gaps that I filled in based on research into the events and mood of the place and time. I presupposed motivations. Occasionally I changed a name, date, or circumstance to accommodate narrative flow. I hope I have captured the essence of truth, if not always the precision of fact, and that the liberties I have taken will be forgiven." she concluded. Today Tademy is 63 years old.
The Book Cane River
Cane River covers 137 years of family history. It begins in slavery, sweeps through the Civil War and brings us into the pre-Civil Rights South. Those pre-Civil Rights years are years that we can all relate to. The book garnered critical acclaim and became a New York Times best-seller. The San Francisco Chronicle said Tademy had written "The quiet unmapped stories that make up history," and Oprah made Cane River one of the most popular picks of her book club. Now, what this book is about is those quiet unmapped stories which are about what went on in the kitchen, in the field, in the big house and down in the quarter. Those quiet unmapped stories are also about the generational and gradual lightening of the skin of some of the black slaves. It's about the mixing of the races into a group called gens de couleur libres. Here's a little bit of Louisiana history before the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. In the early days when French planters immigrated to the French Colony known as Louisiana, many of them took African women as mistresses or common-law wives. Even when more women of European descent were in the colony, wealthy young white Creole men often took mixed-race mistresses before, or in addition to, their legal marriages, in a system known as placage. Creole, by definition, "means born in the colony." So anyone born in the colony of Louisiana was a Creole. John James Audubon was a white French Creole. Creole originally had nothing to do with skin color. If you were born in the colony as opposed to born in France or other European countries, you were Creole. Because those French planters had union with blacks, Cagens, whites, Indian, Creole also took on a meaning of "mixing of the races" and" lightening of skin color." And that's what happened to the main characters of Cane River: Suzette, Philomene, and Emily all were chosen by their masters and became common-law wives. Their skin color was lightened from one generation to the next as was the skin color of their off spring. The young women's mothers often negotiated a form of dowry or property settlement to protect them. The white men would often transfer social capital to their mistresses and children, including education and freedom for those who were enslaved in the early years.
With enough numbers, the free people of color or also called "Creoles of color" also married among themselves to maintain their class and social culture. Under French rule, Louisiana developed a three-tiered society. This three-tiered society allowed for the emergence of a wealthy and educated group of mixed-race Creoles. Their identity as free people of color, Gens de couleur libres was one they had worked diligently towards and guarded with an iron fist. By French law they enjoyed most of the same rights and privileges as whites. These Gens de couleur descended initially from male planters and wealthier merchants and their African or mixed-race mistresses. They acquired education, property and power within the colony, and later, state.
The main character is probably Emily in the third section of the book. Emily was described as having flawless skin, thick chestnut hair, high cheekbones, a thin sharp nose and an impossibly narrow waist. Painstaking research uncovered Emily's mother to be Philomene who was definitely the strongest character. On back through the generation, Tademy discovered Philomene's mother Suzette and Suzette's mother Elizabeth who was born in the year 1802 in Virginia. As Tademy gathered information she was haunted by one nagging question: Were Philomene, Suzette and Elizabeth someone else's property, a slave, or were they for one reason or another free. Or were they free people of color, light-skinned Creoles known as gens de couleur libre.
Here is a recap of the story line: The book is divided into three sections: Suzette, Philomene, and Emily. Tademy's great grandmother Emily was born, in 1861, a slave on the Derbanne Plantation in Cane River, just as the Civil War was beginning and she was freed at the end of the war when she was about five years old. Emily's mother Philomene and her grandmother Suzette were also born there on Cane River. Emily's great grandmother Elizabeth came from Virginia, not Louisiana. In Tademy's own words, "A few years ago, after a long search, I found the Bill of Sale of my great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth. In 1850 she was sold for at least the second time, away from her Cane River family, for $800. Holding that bill of sale in my hands was a life-changing event. As I examined the bill of sale my slave relatives who were being sold were listed on the left side of the ledger and on the right side of the ledger were listed the buyers and plantation owners who many were my relatives as well.
As I read the book, my observation is that Tademy did not sensationalize the lives of either the slaves or the slave owners who owned the plantations. She did not go into detail of the sexual relationships that were an everyday event between slave and plantation owner. She did not really place blame because that's just the way things were. The slaves owned nothing not even themselves and the planters and owners had everything. The slaves had no choice concerning any aspect of their lives and that's just the way things were. She tells a story of resilience and strength and the everyday events of plantation life in the fields, in the kitchen, in the master's house and down in the quarter. It's a story about what happened and how it happened. It's a story about fun, pain, joy, cruelty, love, comedy and sorrow. It is remarkable....riveting...a rich blending of historical fact with beautifully written and factually accurate fiction....it is compelling and enjoyable capturing the intricate rhythms of plantation life in all it harshness and beauty. The book is very well written and most certainly worth your time to read.
IV. Natchitoches Parish and Historical Cane River trip:
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