Cane River

A beautifully told family history about four generations of slave women on a Louisiana plantation in the nineteenth century. Lalita Tademy takes the dry dates and pieces of paper that go into genealogy research and crafts them into a story of strong women, family and the trials of slavery and freedom. Her writing is powerful and poetic - 'She watched words float past, plump and ripe, before they burst just outside her line of vision' - but never purple, and she effortlessly recreates another time and place with evocative descriptions of Cane River in the 1800s.

It is jarring to read about the lives of these vividly drawn 'characters' in a story, coming to know and care about them, only to turn the page and find a facsimile of a bill of show more sale for a slave auction and find their names listed, or look into the eyes of Narcisse and Emily in a photograph after imagining them. Combining fact and fiction, or grounding a poignant slave narrative in the shameful reality of history, somehow makes more of an impact than reference books and novels. But the saddest part of this family saga is not the vicious circle of illegitimate children or the 'bleaching of the line' when Suzette, Philomene and Emily had children with white men, whether by force of choice, but that nothing really changed for them after risking their lives for a hundred years to break free of slavery and provide for their families. In 1936, an elderly Emily takes the bus into town to buy her own snuff and some peppermint candy for her grandchildren. The store owner doesn't know her, but takes her for a white woman, long the ambition of her mother Philomene and her grandmother Suzette, because she is only one-quarter black. When another customer recognises her 'colour', however, the man turns on her and rudely makes her wait, at over seventy years of age, while he serves the white customers. She 'knows her place', he tells another woman who offers to let Emily go first. Emily leaves without her snuff, and returns to the house by the river - sitting at the front of the bus. The importance of colour, and the treatment of the women and the white fathers of their children, both distressed and angered me, more, if truth be told, than their lives on the plantation.

This is how family history should be told, with heart, pride and affection. show less

This book gave me not just food for thought but a banquet for thought. The first big thing my brain had to chew over was the family tree of the author tucked at the beginning of the book. Although this book is historical fiction, it is based on a significant amount of research that the author did on her own family. The thing about her family tree that really got me was to see how close the author, who resigned as a Vice-President of Sun Microsystems to take on this project, was to a generation born into slavery. Her great-grandmother was the first generation of her family that was not born into slavery. This brought a whole new dimension to my thoughts about those sociology classes I took in college that discussed the link between show more slavery and some of the difficulties faced by modern African-Americans.
Aside from fueling my interests in social issues, this book also provided a very emotional, multi-generational story of a fantastic family of women. Although we all know, factually, the horrors that accompanied slavery and that continued after the Civil War, it is a whole different thing to experience these horrors through the eyes of characters that you have come to care so much about.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in African-American or southern history or anyone who just loves a good sprawling family novel. show less

Cane River, despite its glowing reviews ("phenomenal" "beautiful" "as perfect as a book can be") and its four- and five-star ratings, I found to be more in the three-star range. It might have to do with reading it on Kindle, where the family tree, newspaper clippings and photographs are very poorly visualized. However, I was not enamored of Tademy's writing either, and found what I thought were some anachronisms in the speaking voices. I did not think the author connected me to the time and place.

Cane River paints a family portrait with strokes of the strength of women, the power of family, and the determination of the human spirit to be free in the lives of four unforgettable women. As these four women struggle through slavery as well as freedom, they are faced with the sexual advances of white men, loneliness, societal restrictions, prejudice, and a desire to provide their children more opportunity than they had. As Tademy envelops you in their lives, she brings humanity to history.

It sounds overly simple to say that this book is beautiful, but that is precisely what it is. Though its language is not overly ornate, and its characters not always sympathetic, "Cane River" is five-hundred pages of a slowly unfolding, highly emotional saga. This book causes the reader to address ideas of race and family in new, old, and surprisingly simple ways. A quick read, but a wonderful and very powerful book.

In some ways, this was a good novel. The injustices of slavery is starkly written about in here - husbands and wives being sold apart, or children being sold apart from parents, or white men who casually force themselves on slaves and don't bother to free the children.

I only wish the author had gone more into how the slaves felt when the Civil War was over and they were freed. For a novel that centered so much on freedom and equality, I expected more in this aspect.

I did like the family pictures and other information that the author put in here.

A trip to the south, visiting Natchitoches, LA and the area near there, I surprised to see this this book about the area, I'd meant to read long ago. I was totally captured by the story of these 4 women. Tademy does an excellent job capturing the lives of this extraordinary family as they struggle through. Based on Tademy's research into her own family heritage, she manages to recreate their heartbreaking, lives without attacking what happened and continues to happen. I agree that this is historical fiction of the highest order.