Before reading this novel I happened to tune in to a National Public Radio re-broadcast of an interview with the author. She described her book as a fictionalized account of her family history based on difficult and lengthy research conducted with the aid of a professional genealogist. She decided to write it as an historical novel rather than as a work of non-fiction in order to explore character motivation. The author documents the book's historicity, however, with photographs, news clippings, copies of wills and bills of sale, and records of births, baptisms, and deaths.

In addition to her desire to fill in the gaps in her knowledge of her antecedents, Tademy stated that she had two other goals. First, to give specific voice to the mullato experience of slavery, a voice that she feels has not been heard. Second, to provide a portrayal of the society of the Cane River region in its unique place and time in U.S. history. Moreover, she stated that she wanted to achieve these goals without passing judgement on the real individuals or on her characterizations of them. She succeeds in drawing her characters as both simple and complex in personality and motivation. They are neither all good nor all evil, neither completely weak nor completely strong, but simply all too human.

Before the Civil War the people who lived along La Riviere Cannes were French speaking, Roman Catholic, and formed a three-tiered society. French Creoles made up the majority of the upper class/caste of planters. Les Gens de Couleur Libres (Free People of Color, or Creoles of Color) occupied the middle class/caste. Some of them owned property and slaves while others were artisans and tradesmen. Slaves and poor whites made up the underclass/caste. Although slaves were primarily Africans, some were indigenous. It is from the first and third tiers of this society that Tademy's forbears derive, and they embodied the inextricable relatedness and interdependence of slaveholders and slaves.

The story unfolds through the experiences of four generations of women struggling to keep their extended family together while enduring heartbreak as well as the grinding hardships of daily survival. It is a story of social and family bonds during slavery, the Civil War, and the Jim Crow era. Two motifs emerge as central to plot development. First, because of the laws restricting marriage, this family evolved as matrifocal, matrilocal, and matrilineal. Not only were "whites" and slaves prevented from legal marriage, but slaves also could not legally marry one another. Second, because of the increasingly European proportion of their ancestry, the family developed a singular sense of their identity and heritage. The author and interviewer discussed this second motif under the rubric of "colorism" and as "the bleaching of the line." Tademy shows that this "bleaching" occurred in different ways. While in the first and second generation it was the outcome of nonconsensual unions, and in the third generation it was semi-consensual and calculated, by the fourth generation it was fully consensual. "Colorism" refers to the idea and practice of allocating favors and privileges according to the degree that lightness of skin approached "white" and grew out of the custom of French fathers providing for their "side" mullato children. Regardless of any material benefits occasionally conferred on these families, however, hypodescent functioned to ensure that their numbers increased the total slave population. As slaves, mullatos, quadroons, and octoroons were subjected to the conditions of that status irrespective of their degree of European descent, appearance, primary language, or culture.

After the war, the quality of life for former slaves was often just as harsh as before, and segregation laws took over where chattel slavery ended. The nature of "colorism" changed as well. Two young female characters faced a dearth of acceptable or available potential husbands and remained single and presumably celibate. At a certain point one says "if I knew then what I know now I would have married the blackest man I could find…" How is the reader to interpret this statement? Does it imply that despite freedom and her European appearance she would never be accepted as "white" on Cane River? Or does it imply that the "bleaching of the line" had come to naught and that, as deliberately as some of it had occurred, she might as well have sought to deliberately undo it? Eventually one of her brothers married a "black" woman and another married a "white" one. "Colorism" began to take on a different expression. Racial integrity laws were enacted to recover a mythic "white purity" that had already been lost. A mixed person with any degree of known African ancestry was barred from legal marriage with a "white" person. A "white" that married or lived with anyone designated "black" became socially "black." The prevention of marriages between people of mixed and unmixed European ancestry and the shortage of potential mixed mates resulted, in effect, in a socially forced reversal of amalgamation. The marriage of mixed people who looked European to "blacks" generated an enduring "black" obsession with shades of skin color and the development of what has elsewhere been termed a "mulatto elite."

Without institutionalized slavery to reinforce their dominance, southern "whites" grew increasingly vicious in their ultimately futile attempts to re-establish the long eroded "color line." Ironically, their relentless racism brought about what they feared most, the loss of their putative "purity." Under this pressure of exclusion, the numbers of mixed people who moved to areas where they were unknown and could blend into the white population heavily increased. As an example of this trend, one of the minor male characters moves to Texas to find better employment and falls permanently off the family tree. It would be interesting indeed to know what became of the collateral branches of the family and who their descendants are in Tademy's generation.

While the author referred to her story as part of "African American" history, she and the interviewer failed to note that it is also, perforce, part of "European American" history. If it were not, there would be no mullato "voice to be heard." The plot of Cane River (Warner Books, 2001) exemplifies the kinds of relationship scenarios, social forces, complexities, and contradictions that were part of the slavery period in American history. In order to maintain the economic class/caste system it became necessary to fabricate a national mythos in which "races" must be conceptualized as mutually exclusive regardless of the abundance of evidence to the contrary. That these exploitative and archaic attitudes persist in 21st century America was evident in listening to Lalita Tademy and KPPC's Kitty Felde who, in discussing "race," spoke in 19th century terms. The author's grandmother was 1/16 Native American, 1/16 African, and 7/8 French yet they both described her as "African" American. Based on the personality of her novelized character it seems highly doubtful that Emily Fredieu would have identified with that description had it existed when she was alive.

For those who may be curious about the second social tier of the Cane River Lake region, I recommend the following sources -- The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color, by Gary B. Mills, Professor Emeritus of History, UCLA, and the Creole Heritage Preservation website.

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