Cane River
by Lalita Tademy

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Book Reviews of Cane River

Book Review: Beth Gray's interracialvoice.com Commentary on "Cane River"
Summary: 3 Stars

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...

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 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.

Summary of Cane River

The author makes it clear exactly where these prohibitions came from. Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical, after all, particularly on the heels of the Civil War and the economic hardships that came with Reconstruction. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive, and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way. In the wake of a visit from the 1880 census taker, the aged Elisabeth reflects on how far they had come.

When the census taker looked at them, he saw colored first, asking questions like single or married, trying to introduce shame where there was none. He took what he saw and foolishly put those things down on a list for others to study. Could he even understand the pride in being able to say that Emily could read and write? They could ask whatever they wanted, but what he should have been marking in the book was family, and landholder, and educated, each generation gathering momentum, adding something special to the brew.

Historical Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical