Cane River [Hardcover]

Lalita Tademy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2001

Lalita Tademy was a successful corporate vice president at a Fortune 500 company when she decided to embark upon what would become an obsessive odyssey to uncover her familys past. Through exhaustive research, interviews, and the help of professional genealogists, she would find herself transported back to the early 1800s, to an isolated, close-knit rural community on Louisianas Cane River. Here, Tademy takes historical fact and mingles it with fiction to weave a vivid and dramatic account of what life was like for the four remarkable women who came before her. Beginning with Tademys great-great-great-great grandmother Elisabeth, this is a family saga that sweeps from the early days of slavery through the Civil War into a pre-Civil Rights Southa unique and moving slice of Americas past that will resonate with readers for generations to come. Well-researched and powerfully written, Cane River is just the kind of family portrait that will appeal to the same diverse audience as Alex Haleys bestselling phenomenon Roots (Dell Books, reissue 1980) and the New York Times bestseller Sally Hemings (Buccaneer Books, 1992), which sold over one million hardcover copies and inspired the feature film Jefferson in Paris, starring Nick Nolte and Thandie Newton.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lalita Tademy's riveting family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable "bleaching of the line" as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area's white French planters. In many cases these children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them to inherit wealth or property, a fact that gives Cane River much of its narrative drive.

The author makes it clear exactly where these prohibitions came from. Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical, after all, particularly on the heels of the Civil War and the economic hardships that came with Reconstruction. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive, and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way. In the wake of a visit from the 1880 census taker, the aged Elisabeth reflects on how far they had come.

When the census taker looked at them, he saw colored first, asking questions like single or married, trying to introduce shame where there was none. He took what he saw and foolishly put those things down on a list for others to study. Could he even understand the pride in being able to say that Emily could read and write? They could ask whatever they wanted, but what he should have been marking in the book was family, and landholder, and educated, each generation gathering momentum, adding something special to the brew.

In her introduction, Tademy explains that as a young woman, she failed to appreciate the love and reverence with which her mother and her four uncles spoke of their lively Grandma 'Tite (short for "Mademoiselle Petite"). She resented her great-grandmother's skin-color biases, which were as much a part of Tademy's memory as were her great-grandmother's trademark dance moves. But the old stories haunted the author, and armed with a couple of pages of history compiled by a distant Louisiana cousin, she began to piece together a genealogy. The result? Tademy eventually left her position as vice president of a Fortune 500 company and set to work on Cane River, in which she has deftly and movingly reconstructed the world of her ancestors. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Five generations and a hundred years in the life of a matriarchal black Louisiana family are encapsulated in this ambitious debut novel that is based in part upon the lives, as preserved in both historical record and oral tradition, of the author's ancestors. In 1834, nine-year-old Suzette, the "cocoa-colored" house servant of a Creole planter family, has aspirations to read, to live always in a "big house" and maybe even to marry into the relatively privileged world of the gens de couleur libre. Her plans are dashed, however, when at age 13 a French ‚migr‚ takes her as his mistress. Her "high yellow" daughter Philomene, in turn, is maneuvered into becoming the mother of Creole planter Narcisse Fredieu's "side family." After the Civil War, Philomene pins her hopes for a better future on her light-skinned daughter, Emily Fredieu, who is given a year of convent schooling in New Orleans. But Emily must struggle constantly to protect her children by her father's French cousin from terrorist "Night Riders" and racist laws. Tademy is candid about her ancestors' temptations to "pass," as their complexions lighten from the color of "coffee, to cocoa, to cream to milk, to lily." While she fully imagines their lives, she doesn't pander to the reader by introducing melodrama or sex. Her frank observations about black racism add depth to the tale, and she demonstrates that although the practice of slavery fell most harshly upon blacks, and especially women, it also constricted the lives and choices of white men. Photos of and documents relating to Tademy's ancestors add authenticity to a fascinating story. (Apr.)Forecasts: The success in recent years of similarly conceived nonfiction, like Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family, proves readers can't get enough of racially themed family history. Tademy, who left a high-level corporate job to research her family's story, should draw larger-than-average audiences for readings in 11 cities.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books> C/o Little Br; 1ST edition (April 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446527327
• ISBN-13: 978-0446527323
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,237 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

LALITA TADEMY is a former vice-president of Sun Microsystems who left the corporate world to immerse herself in tracing her family's history and writing her first book, CANE RIVER.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book kept me up all night, May 5, 2001

By 

Kathie McLaughlin (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cane River (Hardcover)

Lalita Tademy pulled me right into her family. I came to care so much about these women that I couldn't stop, I had to see what came next. She handles the different cultures represented (slave to free, free creole, French emigre, white southern) so well that everyone's motivations seem to make perfect sense as you move through the changing scene. In 2001 it's not easy to understand the fathers' abilities to separate their emotional ties from their social "obligations," but this book leaves me with no doubt that's the way it was. If this were a novel, I would want the family to leave Louisiana and marry the men they love, but history wrote it another way.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, Beautifully Written, Wonderful Work!, May 12, 2001

By 

Mary (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Cane River (Hardcover)

I was completely drawn into Lalita Tademy's history of her family. Weaving her own fictional narrative to tie together the real family tree and history that she has researched, she has created a beautifully written, compelling story that illuminated a world I knew little about. Elizabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily are all such rounded, interesting, strong women, and they would be proud of this book and the latest strong, talented woman in their lineage!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Not-to-be-Missed Novel of the Year!, April 18, 2001

By 

Julie A. Earhart (St. Louis, mo United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cane River (Hardcover)

We know all the stories-how white men forced themselves on their black female slaves; the octoroon and mulatto who resulted from those unions; the hope of freedom; the field work; the housework; the cruel overseers. There's nothing new in that arena in Lalita Tademy's debut novel, Cane River. But what makes this work stand out from any of the others in this historical area, which takes place along the Cane River in Louisiana, is the women who pepper this compelling family saga.

First we meet Elizabeth and her daughter, Suzette. In her late thirties, Elizabeth seems much, much older, worn down by the burden of being a slave and her position as cook. Her motto is "We do what we have to to survive." Suzette is a high-spirited girl who has enjoyed being the shadow of her owner's daughter, Oreline Derbanne. Suzette cannot understand why she and her family are slaves, when there are free colored people living nearby. An white French immigrant and neighbor, Eugene Daurat, rapes Suzette and begins an affair with her that is rather odd, but intriguing. Suzette bears him two children. As time goes by, the plantation, Rosedew, the master, Louis Derbanne, dies. Suzette and her daughter, her mother, and her deaf-mite sister go in one direction; her son in another.

Suzette's daughter, Philomene, grows up with a gift---the ability to see into the future----"glimpsings." Philomene is about to marry Clement, the love of her life, but she is forced into intimacy with a white man, Narcisse Fredieu. Before Clement is sold away, she bears him twin daughters, but bears Fredieu eight. Philomene makes sure that Fredieu cares for his children by making certain the property on which he built them a home is in her name---security she calls it. The white stain Daurat started with Suzette is becoming more and more evident in each child that appears.

By the time we reach Emily's (Philomene's daughter) stage of life, there are four generations of colored women living under the same roof. The children come from all over the Cane River area to have the dinner with Elizabeth and any other family member who can make it. Emily's tale goes up to her death in 1936 and is the frame of the novel.

Tademy, who quit her vice-presidency position at a Fortune 500 company to research her family roots, has done an excellent job in portraying each individual woman. The names of the men, because they are French and resemble each other, are confusing and difficult to keep distinguished. However, Cane River is a wonderfully-written novel that moves at a dramatic pace and digs deeper into the soul's of these women and their era with remarkable richness and complexity.