Lalita Tademy Gives an Historical Account

“...the kernel of truth was always, always there. And, I compared every line to the factual documents that I could get ... the truth is that I far more often believe Gurtie’s letter than I did a lot of the factual sources that very often had errors in them, as well. Gurtie was a spiritual advisor.... It was just a very thoughtful thing for her to leave these footprints. Really, she opened the doors that I could push through and find out more about my family and where they came from.”

[Best-selling author Lalita Tademy is a former vice-president of Sun Microsystems who left the corporate world to take stock of her direction and goals in life. During this time, she began tracing her family’s history using a variety of genealogical resources and ended up publishing the novel Cane River. In it, Tademy covers 137 years of her family’s history in fiction format, focusing on four generations of strong Creole women and the injustices they fought to create a legacy for their offspring. The book looks at the evolving relationships between blacks and whites--particularly the complex bonds between slave-owners and slaves--and free blacks and slaves in the South through a fresh lens.]

To the student:

As you read this historical account of life during slavery, ponder the following:

• What were the various methods and tools Ms. Tademy used to trace her family’s history? Can you name at least six? Why do you think she was inclined to “more often believe Gurtie’s letter” than the “factual sources?”
• Why does Ms. Tademy say that “there was a great loss of ground for free people of color” after the Civil War?
• What does Elisabeth mean when she tries to explain to Suzette that they’re all caught in the spider’s web? Do you agree that, even today, we are still caught in that web? Why or why not?
• Why would slaves engage in small acts of defiance? Can you think of other ways this type of behavior could happen today?

In this passage, Lalita Tademy talks about how she came to write Cane River. She discusses, for example, how she started tracing her family genealogy based on stories that had been passed down through her family.

Cane River was really born before I knew that it was even being born. I was working as a corporate executive, and I just had thoughts of my genealogy, my roots, my great-grandmother, and the stories that I had heard about her. But, I was very busy doing something else. I was working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and I just thought that there was something else that I was supposed to be doing.... I ended up quitting my job, not having any idea what I was going to do next, and I made a deal with myself that I was going to take a year and find out.

During that time, I did genealogy work, and I began to uncover the stories of my ancestors. And, they were amazing. I traced back from my great-grandmother, [since] I had stories of her. She was born in central Louisiana right as the Civil War was breaking out. I knew her mother’s name, Philomene DeRott, and, for 18 months, I searched for her grandmother, whose name I did not have. I hired a genealogist [and] paid her by the hour for 18 months and ended up with a bill of sale of my great-great-great-great grandmother Elisabeth, who was sold in 1850 for $800. This document was so amazing, so impacting. It shattered so many myths that I had about the South and the history of the South and my own ancestors, my own history ... I needed to write it out as a book.

I had grown up as many people had, with Gone With The Wind being my image of what the South was. And, I knew that that’s not the story that I was uncovering. And, I wanted to tell the stories of four generations of colored Creole slave women from a different point of view. I wanted to tell it from their point of view, not a point of view of the big house ... not a point of view that had them as stereotypical figures. And, that’s really how Cane River was born. It was a very deep and abiding desire to tell a story from the point of view of my ancestors ... a marginalized voice not often heard....

Tademy discusses her own upbringing, where she was born, what she knew of her broader family, what assumptions she had held about her family and Louisiana. She also talks about gathering stories about the family through her visits with relatives in nursing homes.

...Cane River takes place in ... central Louisiana. I was born in Berkeley, California ... very much a California girl. My exposure, though, to Louisiana came very early and very often. My mother had been transplanted. Both my father and mother came to California from Louisiana. And, my mother was so homesick that she insisted on going home every summer in July to Colfax, Louisiana. Very humid, very hot. And, we were six people crammed into a very small car for three days driving across country. But, we went back every summer. And, it gave me very much of a feel of the rural nature of this area. The back woods nature of the area. The greenery. The slow pace. The dialect, the talk, the thought processes. And, we did that every summer until I was a teenager.

When we first started going back to Shreveport, we started going back to Colfax. My father and I actually took a trip that was just the two of us ... it was a roots trip that I ... wanted to take. And, that’s when I met cousin Gurtie. [She was a] great-cousin, but we called her Cousin Gurtie. She lived in Shreveport, which is about 100 miles away from the little town where my mother and father met. And, she was an elder ... and one of several [elders]. Over time, I ended up talking to people in nursing homes that were extended relatives ... anyone who had a story that could possibly relate to our family and just open up the knowledge of who they were. Most were of my mother’s age. Most were my mother’s [family], her brothers, my grandmother, my grandfather, my great-aunts, and they were still alive when we first started going back.

Great-cousin Gurtie not only had wonderful stories to tell, she also had written down a couple of pages of the family’s history, which allowed Tademy to trace back another 50 years of her family’s history to her great-great- grandmother.

...I had met her [great-cousin Gurtie] in the 1970s when I had gone back to Louisiana. She was a woman who was so incredibly alive and vital, even in her 70s. She still told these stories with great wonder and amazement and animation. She had written two pages of our family history, and she was determined--she knew her time was getting near for her to pass, and she had written down what she knew of our family.... That two page document ... really went back ... it was sort of a biblical, so-and-so begot so-and-so begot so-and-so; but, it also had a lot of the flavor of the family stories and talked about murders and suicides and blood on the walls and a lot of the more fabulous and outsized stories in our family. She put those down and gave them to my uncle. Fortunately, my uncle sent the two-page letter to me. It was that document that allowed me to push back an extra 50 years in my search and allowed me to find the way back to my great-great grandmother. And then, I could take it back another two generations, back to, actually 1799, when Elisabeth was born.

The document itself was really amazing. When I met Gurtie herself, I was absolutely convinced that she had embellished these stories. I mean, dramatically embellished because these kinds of things just didn’t happen ... the blood on the walls, particularly.... I tried to track down every single line in that two-page letter. What I found repeatedly is that there would be some slight fact that was a little bit off; but there was always the germ of truth in every line she wrote. There was nothing idle ... that could be totally tossed out. Anything that appeared there might have been off by six months, or it might have [had] a name slightly wrong. But, the kernel of truth was always, always there. And, I compared every line to the factual documents that I could get ... the truth is that I far more often believe Gurtie’s letter than I did a lot of the factual sources that very often had errors in them, as well.

Gurtie was a spiritual advisor. Let’s put it that way. It was just a very thoughtful thing for her to leave these footprints. Really, she opened the doors that I could push through and find out more about my family and where they came from.

The Cane River Community

Tademy talks about the community of Cane River before and up to the Civil War, based on what she learned through family stories, as well as her research into private and plantation records, and even census records. She also discusses the categories of social groups and the economics of the town.

Cane River is a very, very interesting place, and it really needs to be distinguished from New Orleans. This was a small community. Cane River, itself, was fascinating before the Civil War. It was one of the largest collections of free people of color in the country. It had fundamentally three buckets of people. It had white planters. It had free people of color, who very often owned plantations that were larger than their white planter neighbors. And, it had slaves that could be owned by either one of the first two groups. Even though, economically, the free people of color had amassed a great deal of land and ... wealth, culturally, they kept to themselves. And, it was very much a hierarchy in each one of these three groups.

For the free people of color, they did not consider themselves white; [but] they also did not consider themselves black. They were a third class in the middle. They had legal rights before the Civil War. They would sue ... take the white planters, sometimes, neighbors, to court and win. One of the characters in the book, who was the godmother of my ancestors [and] a free woman of color, got a divorce from her husband that went through the courts. And so, they used the legal system and had legal rights. They also showed up in the census.

Before 1870, black people just did not exist, according to the Federal Government. They appeared in private papers and plantation records. Free people of color actually were in the census records. They were considered whole citizens of the United States. So, this was a very different kind of concept than a lot of the other parts of the country had. There were very hierarchical [structures], even within the free people of color. So, there were those who had more wealth, who were more highly thought of, [who] came from the better families within the free people of color just the same way that there were in the white bucket. There was a hierarchy of those who had larger plantations, more slaves, who were considered more upper class than some of the lower class white people.

Just as in the slave [categories] there were hierarchies of whether you worked in the field, whether you worked in the house, whether you had a ... specific trade or you didn’t have a trade, whether you were the cook. The cook, for example, was one of the most powerful of the slave categories because you handled the food for the entire plantation. And, there was some risk in that. And, there was some trust implied in being the cook of a plantation. So, there were hierarchies in all of these categories. And, there were both close interaction and limited interaction between the three groups. So that, for example, the free people of color, the men would go to horse races together. They would loan each other money. The women never really consorted with one another ... there was more of the men mixing with one another than there was the women mixing with one another.... And, this was a difference by gender ... as well as by race, as well as by class. It was a very complicated hierarchical society....

Relationships Between and Within the Societal Structures in the Slavery-era South

In this passage, Tademy uses church records to glean information about the status and relations between the three categories of persons (whites, free blacks, and slaves).

...One of the very interesting things about Cane River specifically is that one of the earliest churches founded by a free person of color was a Catholic church called St. Augustine’s in Cane River. And, at that church, because it was really built and funded by one of the founders of the free people of color in Cane River, the first few pews ... were reserved for his family, his extended family. And behind them sat ... he had eight rows reserved for white planters. And, they actually sat in the presence of white planters, which really wasn’t done in very many other places. And behind them, were other free people of color. And, out along the perimeter, standing along the perimeter, standing outside, were the slaves. And, this is in the early 1800s ... 1830s or so. Over time, each decade, the society got more and more segregated. And, the nature of the relations between these groups changed. So every decade, the 1820s were different than the 1830s, less free, more restrictions, more legal rules of what you could and could not do. By the 1840s, it had tightened even more. By the 1850s, it was getting to be very tense, and obviously with the Civil War, that catapulted the entire country into questioning this economic and social system....

Based on her understanding and knowledge of her great-great-great-great grandmother Elisabeth’s family, Tademy explores the complexities of status among slaves in relation to the type of work they did.

...Elisabeth’s family on the Derbanne plantation is actually very interesting because she was the cook. But, her family was literally split up in terms of where they lived, what they did, what their tasks were. So, the father of her children worked in the field. He was also a fiddler, but he worked in the field, and he lived down in the quarter. Her daughter Suzette lived in the big house, because she was a companion to the girl that was her age, who was the niece of the owner of the plantation. And so, she slept actually at the foot of the bed of Oralene, who was her charge. Even though they were the same age, she was responsible for Oralene as her companion and nurse and servant, in effect. But, she had an elevated status because she did work in the big house. She also, just because of Cane River being so Catholic and her proximity to the white family that owned the Derbanne plantation, was confirmed in the Church ... so that she went through and learned the catechism.... She aspired to be able to talk like someone she considered to be not only her charge, but also her friend. Over time, it proved that they weren’t really friends, that there was huge social chasm that couldn’t be bridged. But, there was very much of a difference between Suzette, who lived in the big house, and her brother, who lived down in the quarter ... or, her father, who lived down in the quarter and had a different experience.

...Suzette assumes that if she tries hard enough and if she puts enough effort into it, that she can have a different life than her mother’s life, than her brother’s life, than her father’s life. That she has come up a way from being an ordinary slave. Her mother, Elisabeth, who has been around for longer and understands how circumstances can change--understands very clearly that they’re owned, that they are property and that they ... can be dispensed with at the discretion and whim of their owners--tries to make Suzette understand that, although she has things a little better and a little different than the rest of her family, she is still in danger. And true to form, as children often do, Suzette does not understand this until she has her own experiences and understands how much she is at the mercy of the people that own her....

...What Elisabeth says when she’s trying to explain to Suzette is that they’re all caught in the web. Everyone is caught in the spider’s web. Just waiting for the spider to get home. And really, she’s not only talking about the slaves that are caught in the web. She’s talking about every single person on the plantation. Because there are so many different domination/subordinate relationships, so that women have a place, and slaves have a place, and free people of color have a place, and white males have a place, and they’re all caught in this spider’s web, waiting for the spider to get home. And, that really is a metaphor for, I think, the country. Then and now, where by subjugating an entire class of people, we’re all caught. And, we’re paying the price for that still today. There’s still the aftermath of a lot of those kind of thinking processes that play out today.

Tademy takes the discussion of status and societal structure further by presenting the view Louis Derbanne, the plantation’s owner, had about his role as a slave owner and his relationship to the slaves. Louis is not able to grasp the concept that it is wrong to “own” people, to have another human being as property.

...The owner of the Derbanne plantation, Mr. Derbanne, really believed that he was a good master. [He] never used the word “slave;” he used “family.” And, I actually got this from a lot of the research I had done where, very seldom, was the word used.... He considered himself an enlightened master. And as such, these were his family ... the slaves on his plantation he considered to be his extended family. They had souls, because that was taught in the church. If they needed to be punished, he would have to sign off [on it so] the overseer couldn’t just whip them arbitrarily. If [the whipping] was more than 20 lashes, he would have to actually be involved in that. And, he considered himself to be in keeping of their physical bodies and their souls. Because they were like children ... it was up to him to marshal them [and] to protect them from birth to death. And for that, he considered himself to be above some of his neighbors who beat their slaves, who starved their slaves in many cases in trying to save food. The truth was that he was not that enlightened, and that he was still treating people as property. But, he could not see that. And, he very often gave extemporaneous lectures to all of his friends and his extended family on just what a wonderful plantation owner he was....

In this passage, Tademy looks at the complex relationships between white men and the children they fathered with slaves.

The reason that I wanted to write Cane River as a multi-generational saga is that I got to tell the story different ways, through different people at different times. And, ... the interesting parts, actually, were the relationships between the men, the women, and the children that they produced together. In three ... out of the four cases of the women that I follow, these are white men with--“colored” was the term at that time--with colored women. In two of those cases, they’re slaves.... The first case is between Suzette and a friend of the master, Eugene DeRott. And, this is someone who literally takes Suzette, who rapes Suzette when she’s just 12 years old and feels perfectly free to do this. She is captive ... she is there and he uses her. The children that are produced from that are acknowledged as his children and somewhat provided for, but not that extensively. This is at the heart of slavery time ... during the 1830s, 1840s.

The next generation, which is Suzette’s daughter, Philomene, is not exactly a rape; it is a deal. It’s a bargain ... a manipulation. And, it’s because Philomene knows that she is vulnerable, she knows that it will probably be someone who comes to her, and she wants it to be more on her terms. So, she uses that to form a relationship with a white planter, and I won’t say that it’s voluntary; but it’s also not technically a rape. She knows what’s happening, she knows what she’s getting into, and this is best of options for her. Because she believes that she can manipulate him in to actually taking care of the children that are produced. And, she does. And ultimately, she gets land ... she gets money ... she gets the children acknowledged and she gets the last name for those children....

The following subsection looks at the legal responsibilities, if any, white fathers had towards their children with slave women during the era of slavery.

...Very early on, there were black codes that dictated what behavior was supposed to be for slaves. And, this was more in the 1700s ... early 1800s. And, they were very often ignored. But, the black code said that you really weren’t supposed to do that at all ... that the men were not supposed to have children by the slaves. There were no legal requirements for how these children were to be taken care of ... whether they were to be acknowledged. It was [on] a case-by-case basis. It was what the individual man decided he was going to do. It’s what the individual white man decided he could afford to do. Most of the time, he was married. Very, very seldom was it a case of having children and having those children live under the same roof as the only acknowledged children of the man. Very often, the children produced by a white man on his own plantation ... ended up being servants to his legitimate children by a white wife. But again, a lot of this was by practice, not by law....

Tademy talks about how, by engaging in acts of defiance and compliance, slaves surreptitiously asserted a sense of control over their lives.

...One of the interesting things when I was doing a lot of research on Cane River was I read a lot of slave narratives. And, the things that struck me in many of these recollections by former slaves or slave narratives written before the Civil War was that, almost always, there was some small act of defiance that the person would recall. And, a lot of the very large sorts of acts almost paled in comparison to the real joy that someone got in spitting in the food or just doing something that they knew exerted control in a time when they had no control. I wanted to make sure that I reflected that in the book. Also, many of my family stories involved these little teeny acts of defiance, even to current times. I’ll come back to that.

But there were things that slaves did in the field. Suddenly, tools would show up broken, and you couldn’t figure out what had happened. There were certainly instances where a cook could cook in a certain way and could slip things in and no one would know. But, they would know. And, I think that this became really important because there was a huge issue in knowing your place. And, part of knowing your place was downcast eyes and being submissive ... never, ever posing a challenge. That was the creed. And if you did, there was the threat, very real threat, of immediate, often brutal physical danger involved....

...And so, these little acts of defiance were really re-establishing portions of oneself that I really wanted to project. And, I know this didn’t appear in the book, but it was one that helped me to link the current day ... more modern day going all the way back to slavery times....

Tademy’s Next Book

...I’m now writing a new book, and again, it’s an historical novel, multi-generational. Where Cane River was the story of multiple generations of my mother’s people, this next book is about multiple generations of my father’s people ... it is more man to man to man to man where Cane River was woman to woman to woman to woman. But, it also takes place off of the Red River, just 30 miles away from Cane River. But, it might as well be Pluto or Venus, because the mood and feel [of the] circumstances are so very different. And, a lot of it takes place during reconstruction. And again, it’s based on real stories that I uncovered when I was doing my research. So, I’m about 250 pages in and looking forward to getting back to it so I can finish it.

Click here to read Ms. Tademy's account of life under Jim Crow: http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/resources/narratives/Lalita_Tademy.htm