Lolita Tademy gave up a successful career to concentrate on writing this absorbing, informative and moving book, which looks at four female generations of her family, women who were born into slavery in Louisiana.
It wasn't an easy read....books about the evil inhumanity of slavery are never easy to read....I felt angry many times, not only about how those sold into slavery were treated, but also at the unfairnesses shown to these men and women after emancipation....I fail to understand how otherwise decent people could behave in this way.
I've read quite a few books set in this era, each with a different perspective, this book gives a very personal view of those times, as we see it through the eyes of real people, and the author's use of original family documents and photographs really did give substance to the story she wove around the lives and experiences of her ancestors.

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.

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.

Cane River is a wonderful novel, which I highly recommend. I learned a lot about the slave/plantation/small farmer experience of Creole Louisiana. Especially interesting are the details about the gens de couleur libre and the long line of interracial unions (both forced and chosen) among Tademy's ancestors. An important thread that runs from beginning to end in Cane River is the impact of skin color biases within the black community, and Tademy's family specifically.

San Francisco Bay Area native Lalita Tademy has a unique story to tell about her family lineage, and I'm glad she took the time to research and write this novel. She convincingly portrays strong, interesting, complex women -- starting with her great-great-great-grandmother Suzette, whose nine-year-old fictionalized character launches the novel in 1834. Lalita Tademy brings a cast of memorable characters to life, with a great literary flair.

I selected this novel for the February 2009 meeting of my library-based Mostly Literary Fiction Book Discussion Group. Book group participants described the book as a "page turner," and recounted many passages that moved them to tears.

Lalita Tademy visited the Hayward Public Library for a special event on March 11, 2009, as part of our NEA-sponsored Big Read of A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines -- a novel set in Cajun Louisiana in the late 1940s. It was a memorable opportunity to meet Tademy and hear more details about her research and writing. I also recommend her second novel, Red River, which explores (again in fictional form) her father's ancestors, and the devastating Colfax, Louisiana, Massacre of 150 black freedmen in 1873.

The author weaves together a wonderful story based on her research of her family history. I love the fact that along with the story are wonderful photos of those she writes about. These women have endured so much sadness, hardships and heartaches yet remain so strong until the day they died. This is a touching and powerful read. I definitely rec this one. I'm still on the fence about the rating...4 or 5 stars...for now a 4 but I may change to 5 later.

2.5/5

n  [A]s much as she would do to protect the new life inside her, their making had nothing to do with how careful she was allowed to be.n

Judging by the fallout, this work spent too much time on my shelves, but then again, I don't think I would've put up with the level of the quality and structural integrity of the writing even back when I first acquired the book, or even when I first digitally added it to my shelves. I've read critiques of the handling of swinging back and forth between fiction and non, and I have to agree that the composition, however well intentioned, merited a more thorough editing, even on the level of fixing dangling pronouns and properly punctuating clauses. The story is fascinating when one takes into account the context, but considering the amount of money and time and ideals that went into this piece and the fame that resulted, it should have stood well on its own, rather than as a patchwork monotone structure whose contextual story of gumption merits the reading more than the reading actually sustains itself. It is laudatory to rescue one's history from a land which has spent so much time denying said history ever occurred, but the hype this work has receives does a disservice to the rest of the books of the genre, of which this is likely the most well known representation. There are no A's for effort in literature; just a violently enforced imbalance of demographics.

n  What am I to do with a white man's heart?...I want his head, his mind.n

It does well for my reading if I have something to fall back upon when my energy is low and my mood is not in for any of my more intense works, but it doesn't bode well for the appraisal of the fall back work itself. For all that this work is 500 pages, it is either less densely packed in typography or more familiar in historical context than the other works I had on hand, so it was a breather in more ways than one. However, the number of mistakes made in grammar, as well as the too blurred consistency between dialogue and description made for a disappointingly crafted piece, especially when taking into consideration that the two more arduous works I had on hand were both translation and thus, theoretically at any rate, should've been more prone to such mistakes. In addition, the history the story covers was not too me, and while following the family tree and related historical records added a measure of intrigue, I didn't come away with feeling of having gained anything. Again, I may have learned more had I read the work when i first acquired it, but this is no children's book, and a few choice quotes can't justify how poorly the fiction elements were handled. I didn't expect the level of Memoirs of Hadrian, but reading historical fiction shouldn't feel like trawling through poorly disguised plagiarism.

n  They can make me marry, but they can't make me live.n

This is the second to last work that I have leftover from Black History Month 2018, the penultimate being Queen Margot. I'm rather disappointed, to say the least, more so because I know for a fact that many will treat this work as their one and only knowledge bank with regards to US-centric slavery and freedom in blackness, seeing as how it's both technically fiction and non and on an acceptable respectability politics platform. To be perfectly honest, Tademy's doing some interesting things in her later books than she is here, but the lack of editing that went into this work is off-putting, and doesn't bode well for the future of her prose. It's admirable to look at the sections of history that are the most commonly passed over, but I hope Tademy's grasp on historical fiction has improved over time, no amount of The More You Know justifies choosing poor fictioning over less easily fudgeable nonfictioning.

n  Generations had been sacrificed for his look.n

Enjoyed reading this knowing the author had the satisfaction of pulling this from her family’s history. I’m curious about the modern bend/perspective that may have been imposed upon the lives of the generations. I like the different focus placed upon each of the generations of Mamas and how that played out in their expectations and experiences. I was hooked and enjoyed a fairly quick read of what could have been a very long book.

I read this one a while ago and did not jot it down in my Book Lover's Diary Journal, so I will relate what I remember. This was an Oprah Book. It has such an interesting backround in that the author Lalita Tademy, wrote this after quitting her job to research her own family heritage. Real documents and photos of the characters, her ancestors, fill the book. The author successfully researched back to her what I think was her great-great-great-great grandmother. A slave.
The narrative is broken into three parts. Told from the perspective of her ancestors, spanning three generations.
This is a heart-wrenching book; very similar to Uncle Tom's cabin.
I think that the fact it is written by a black woman, and about her own heritage and family makes this story more compelling and personal. Uncle Tom's Cabin did the remarkable job of bringing to light the horrors of slavery and prejudice through a fictional cast of characters. Cane River is about a real family and their very real experiences. The dynamics of creoles, blacks and whites, living in Louisiana at that time, somethig I knew nothing about, was very interesting and enlightening as well.
The cruelness of humans to others humans is staggering.
Yet, it shows the strength of woman, and the power of mothers to survive for their children.
Great, sad, read.

A work of historical fiction focusing on the lives of 4 generations of women in Creole Louisiana, from the slave woman matriarch brought to Cane River from Virginia in 1820 to the early 20th century, with a brief epilogue in 1936. All but the first generation had children by white fathers--one by force, one by a coldly calculated relationship intended to benefit the children, & one by a long-term loving relationship hampered by ostracism & legal constraints. The special challenge of these mixed-race relationships is--along with the resources of family strength--the main focus of the book. Moderately engaging & somewhat didactic, with serviceable but not inspiring prose, it's worthwhile reading but not worthy of the enthusiastic recommendation it got from Oprah, Darlene, & my Mom.

As a Black American from the South, I am proud of my family’s story of survival. With roots in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida, I can relate to different accounts by people a few generations from slavery. The things that our people endured back then don’t always feel real. It wasn’t until my time at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that I found myself surrounded by people from families such as Lalita Tademy’s in Cane River. This book has been on my to-be-read shelf for a decade and after reading it, it should be a contemporary American classic, especially of Southern Literature.

Cane River is about four women; Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily who spent much of their lives surviving and creating a world for their offspring. These are all formidable women throughout Lalita Tademy’s family history and each part of the book details their trials and tribulations on a small plantation during the back end of slavery and the era of reconstruction until Emily died in 1936. It is a family saga filled with reverence and an honest portrayal of what many “Creole” or mixed-race Black people went through during this time. Early in the book, a white man raped Suzette, and by the end of this book, Suzette’s granddaughter Emily is fighting for her children’s inheritance after the death of her beloved, a white man who is the father of her children. It details the complexities of what “Black” and “white” is and the relationship between Black and mixed-race women with white men as lovers and enslavers. Because interracial relationships were illegal, white men might love their children but they could not inherit.

As I mentioned, there is a rape that occurs early in this book that was disturbing to read but unfortunately, that was the reality for Black enslaved girls of the time. What holds this book together is the enduring spirit of these women. It is a family saga based on hundreds of documents of research and word of mouth. I was jealous that something like this doesn’t exist in my family. I don’t want to detail the entire book in this review because it is a family epic with so much happening. What I can say is that the writing is strong and engaging. These are real people but since they lived in a different time, they could have been caricatures but they don’t feel like that.

My only complaint is that it was a little hard to follow at times. Early in the book, there was a year listed but as it continues, there’s nothing that tells us what year it is besides some documents here and there. I would have liked to be able to follow the story along better. I realize that because of the lack of documentation on Black families, a lot of it is guesswork so I don’t want to focus too much on that complaint.

Another complaint is the fact that this is marked as historical fiction but it’s not as literary as I would have hoped. It is more like a family history or memoir which is also not a huge complaint, just something that made me question publishers. There is a lot of recounting in this book but it does not flow like a more literary historical fiction.

All in all, this was an excellent read that will stick with me for a long time. I am a big fan of stories like this, particularly in Louisiana which is a state filled with so much haunting, magic, pain, festivity, and complexities.

Cane River is an odd mix of fiction and non-fiction, and I'm not sure it entirely works. It feels like trying to find the balance between the two constrains the narrative in ways that either one by itself would not. As non-fiction, it is limited by the availability of sources, and it truly seems like there is much that has to be speculative. As fiction, it is equally limited by the sources - the author is hemmed in by what she does know, and that structure seems binding.

Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

This was a pick for my face to face book club. I generally either love or hate Oprah's picks. Upon reading the synopsis, I thought this might be really interesting, but unfortunately, it never got off the ground for me. The author is writing about 4 generations of her family who started out as slaves in the Cane River area of Louisiana. While there was some interesting explanations about the hierarchy of the people in that area (free people of color, mulattos, Creoles, etc), the characterization a of the main characters fell flat for me (a sentiment shared by other bookclub member).

Under full disclosure, I did mostly skim the last sections of the book since book club so that I "finished" before my bookclub meeting.