I come from two long lines of strong women. They survived the hard life of settling in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, the pain and loss of childbirth, disease, economic hardship, the Depression, the helplessness of dealing with alcoholism and many other tragedies and difficulties of life. But none of them, to my knowledge, had to suffer the indignities of slavery. Lalita Tademy's book, Cane River, tells in fictional form the stories of four generations of the women in her family.The story, focusing on the women that raised children, mostly by white men, in rural Louisiana during the years before the Civil War and into the 1930s, brings home the true tragedies of slavery. The first woman of the family to come to Cane River was Elizabeth, torn from her two children in Virginia and shipped South, still a slave with no control over her fate or the fates of her children. Generation after generation struggle with the truth of being of dark skin in the South, as her daughters and granddaughters bear children to white plantation owners against their will, finally using the desires of these white men against them to better the lives of their children.The great tragedy for me in this book was that these wonderful women, each beautiful and strong, was unable to realize the glory of their color. Being dark was a burden, and lightening the skin of the next generation became an unacknowledged goal for Suzette, Philomene and Emily as they fought for security in white society for their children. Being able to "pass" as white made life easier, but the resentment that built up in the community against the white men who lived openly and acknowledged their children by these black women shattered lives. Tademy's search for her heritage began in a resentment against the attitudes of the earlier generation against dark skin. What she discovered was that each generation dealt with prejudice and hardship in the only way they knew, and her respect for these women and their difficult choices becomes a wonderful story of their lives.Although this is fiction, there is a lot of truth in this portrayal. The story doesn't end with a "happy ever after", and it sometimes seems to me that the struggle is still as hard as ever. It's long past time that we learned lessons from our tragic history.
This was such a powerful book. I absolutely fell in love with every single one of the characters. Cane River chronicles the family history of the author, starting in 1834 with her great-great-great grandmother, Suzette, followed by Suzette's daughter, Philomene, and finally, ending with Philomene's daughter, Emily, in 1936. All three women began their lives as slaves and ended being free, but not without heartache and tears and the notion of being attracted by white men whom they couldn't say no to. They were all very strong women whose first order in life was not to obey their masters or mistresses, but to make sure their family stayed together, even when there was the threat of being sold on the auction block.Slavery was the darkest time in American history, and it boggles me that people felt the need to own others because they were (there is no other way to say it) too lazy to do their own work. Slaves had nothing to themselves, and they couldn't even call their family and loved ones their own, because they could be so easily taken away. It surprised me immensely that even free blacks owned slaves, and instead of helping to free their brethren, perpetuated the "peculiar institution". One thing I didn't like about the novel, though I know it's still going on in our society today, is the idea that lighter skinned African Americans are better than those who are darker skinned. The closer an African American was to being white, the better standing they had in the world. The characters in this book also held this idea. Emily even runs off her daughter's suitor because he was dark skinned, and she thought he had no standing. It's something that annoys me today, but that's a whole different story for a different time.I truly admire Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily, and I know it had to take courage, faith, and family to get through what they had to go through. While I read, they became my family, and I was eager for each of them to have a happy ending, despite the time period being so against them.
What do You think about Cane River (2002)?
I don't ever remember reading Roots, by Alex Haley. I do remember liking the miniseries when it came out, more for the experience of understanding how lives so different from my own unfolded in times very different from my own. Cane River is like Roots. Maybe not quite as non-fictional, but nonetheless a compelling story of the lives across three generations of African-american women in the 1800's and early 1900's. It's thick, very thick. It touches upon the issues of "bleaching the line", the reasons for lack of strong male presence in many African-american families during that transitional time in history, and of course the racism of the south. The nice thing about the book is that it does this without hitting the reader over the head -- it is quite matter-of-fact. The detracting thing about this book is that it doesn't set up these issues as issues very well or in any intellectual sense, thus the importance of these issues in shaping future generations is lost to most readers. It might have been better as a series of stories, and continued on through to the author's generation and their struggles. Then a comparison of the struggles of each generation, and the different paths chosen in order to overcome those struggles, would really have added importance or some intellectual meaning to the work.
—Corby
I should divulge that I formerly lived along Cane River (the in-town part) and was given a free copy by our local National Park unit at a public symposium. I started the book that night at bedtime, thinking I'd read for an hour or so, per usual. Well I was up until well after 4:00 a.m. finishing this thing! When I showed up slightly bleary-eyed for class the next day, one of our observant grad students (thanks, Melissa!) asked whether I'd been up all night finishing "the Book of Crack" as she called it. So true--you just couldn't put it down. It was a wonderful story--kind of an Alex Hailey's _Roots_ set along the region surrounding Cane River in northwest Louisiana (roughly spanning Natchitoches to Cloutierville). For anyone not from the region (as with Mom and mother-in-law who both received and loved their copies), it's a great introduction to a region and to the complexities of Louisiana's creole communities. And the fact that the author wrote the book as something of a voyage of discovery of her own family roots, just makes it that much more bittersweet after you become so invested in characters from whom she is actually descended. This is a beautiful book about a beautiful and complicated place.
—Julie H.
I have 2 personal connections to this book. One, I went to college in Natchitoches, LA, the oldest settlement in the LA Purchase, where the action in this book took place, and two, the author is an aunt of former high school students of mine in Lake Charles, LA. I was attracted to the book by it's name because I recognized it from my college days. I remembered many of the family names of the white people discussed in the book -- they are the names of prominent people who still live in the area.Tademy is an unusual name that I had never come across before until I taught a brother and sister by that name in my high school class. Their mom also worked at our school, so I asked her one day at lunch if she had ever heard of the author. Boy, was I surprised when she told me it was a relative of her husband's!I found the book fascinating. The addition of family photos and actual legal papers from the parish records made the fictional accountvery believable, and I often wondered where the lines between reality and fiction were drawn. It did remind me of Alex Haley's "Roots."
—Anne
