The nineteen-mile length of central Louisiana’s Cane River provides the setting of Lalita Tademy’s best-selling fictional account of her family’s history, Cane River. The book has been featured in Oprah’s Book Club, and has a captivating story that begs recollections of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and even Gone with the Wind. But for family historians, the novel is something more.

he impetus for Cane River came like so many other family history projects. Lalita Tademy had grown up hearing stories about her great-grandmother, Emily, known as "Tite," short for Mademoiselle Petite. Emily was the first child born to slave Philomene Daurat and Narcisse Fredieu. But Tademy wondered how the family stories could be true. Emily seemed to be a woman of contradictions.

"How could a woman be as elegant as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis but at the same time be a backwoods woman who dipped snuff and drank homemade wine every day?" Tademy asked herself. "I had to reconcile the two."

Her curiosity about Emily’s life urged Tademy to embark on her genealogical journey. It wasn’t long before the obsession took hold of her.

At the time, Tademy was a vice president of Silicon Valley high-tech company Sun Microsystems. But the family called to her, especially Philomene, Emily’s mother and one of three women featured in the novel. "It’s really hard to explain," Tademy says. "It’s not logical. She was pushing me to uncover facts, always with a hand at my back, pushing me to peel the layers away."

As Tademy sat in meetings, her thoughts gave way to her ancestors. "I began to develop a nagging and unmanageable itch to identify Philomene’s mother, to find out if she lived on a plantation as someone else’s property, a slave, or if she had been born free," she says. Tademy quit her job in 1995 to devote herself full-time to her family’s history.

After two years of research, the professional genealogist Tademy hired found the Rosedew bill of sale in a private collection of French plantation records. Rosedew was an 800-acre plantation located on the Bayou Derbanne off the river.

The document provided the basis for the story. On 6 February 1850, Frenchman Eugene Daurat executed the bill of sale that sold Rosedew’s slaves according to the last will and testament of Françoise Derbanne, Creole widow of Louis Derbanne and plantation owner.

The bill of sale recorded the purchase of Tademy’s third great-grandmother, "Slave, Suzette, Negress age 26 and child Philomene, mulatto, age 9," by Joseph Ferrier, husband of Oreline Derbanne, Françoise’s daughter.

The bill of sale recorded many more family members and showed that Tademy’s family had been dispersed along the river. That discovery alone made the information noteworthy, but there was more to it than that. Eugene Daurat played a larger role in the family than simply the executor of the sale. He had raped Suzette, fathering her two children.

And later, Narcisse Fredieu fathered Philomene’s children, which was part of Philomene’s plan to protect herself and her family after Fredieu deliberately sold her husband to a Virginia plantation.

"I had to reconcile the fact that my family was on the selling side and on the to-be-bought side. The bill of sale laid the foundation for wanting to spin the story," Tademy says.

The document provided her with the first piece of evidence that identified Suzette as Philomene’s mother. It also gave her the first evidence that her ancestors were not free people of color. "It was then that I resolved I would not allow Suzette or her family to be lost from memory again," recalls Tademy.

The novel focuses on three generations of women in her mother’s family: Suzette, born in 1825, Philomene, born in 1841, and Emily. Cane River deliberately focuses on Tademy’s female ancestors.

"They were strong to me," she says. "They were the caretakers of the children. They were raised as a family. Fathers had some long-term and short-term participation," she says. But the common thread throughout the family’s history is the women and their determination to make sure their children would have a better life. The family stayed in tact for 135 years.

Tademy’s siblings were interested in the story of Emily. After all, their mother, Willie Dee, had spoken of her with much fondness. However, as her research progressed, Tademy became interested in the ancestors without a story. In 1978, she and her father traveled from California to Louisiana. They had made the trip to Louisiana every summer, but this trip was different. It was her first "roots" trip. Tademy was meeting Gurtie Fredieu, her maternal first cousin twice-removed, who lived about 100 miles from where the Tademy family usually visited. Gurtie was then about seventy-three years old.

The conversation with Gurtie made a huge impact. "I later realized that the documentation that guided me through Cane River came from her," Tademy explains. "She could spin a story. She loved exploring and passing on old family stories. I remember her flashing eyes."

During the interview, Gurtie had trouble remaining focused but then she would segue into some remarkable stories. "She told amazing stories–blood on the walls, suicide, wagons rolling through," says Tademy. The meeting lasted about three hours. The documentation from Gurtie was a two-page account of the family history–just enough to get started.

Tademy decided to write a rich, fictional account of her family. The result of her obsession is Cane River. "I didn’t want to be held accountable for whether this particular event happened on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Instead, I wanted to convey the mood of the time, how my ancestors reacted."

She also knew that if she had stayed close only to the actual documentation, the story would not have been as compelling. "I had little to go on in terms of why they did the things they did and what motivated them," she says, "and it was the motivation that pulled me in."

To create the history, Tademy pored over more than a thousand documents, mapping the story to real events. She joined the Natchitoches Genealogical and Historical Association, and interviewed family members and local historians. It took nine months to write the first draft and two years of editing and rewriting before the manuscript was ready.

One of the first things Tademy did was write diary entries for Suzette, Philomene, and Emily so she could hear their voices and get to know them. "I wanted to put it all down and preserve the family history," she says.

Suzette was difficult to discover. "She had a different last name every ten years in the census," says Tademy. "The last name to her was the sign that she wanted to have her own identity and be able to have self-respect. I was joyous that she selected DeNegre. It’s not a common name. I think she made it up."

Census records were helpful for other reasons as well. "These records were enormously powerful–finding the family, the neighbors, where people were living in the parish. The information was critical. I needed to go beyond just names," Tademy says.

Before 1870, the only African Americans included in the census were free people of color. Tademy devoted more than three pages of Cane River to the reaction of Elisabeth, Suzette’s mother, to the 1880 census taker.

In these pages, Elisabeth reflects on "five generations under one roof, all women, in an unbroken sequence, starting with her and descending down to Angeline. From coffee, to cocoa, to cream, to milk, to lily. A conscious and not-so-conscious bleaching of the line." Elisabeth was proud of her family. She wanted the census taker to understand and note in his book "family, and landholder, and educated, each generation gathering momentum, adding something special to the brew."

Catholic registers also figured prominently into Tademy’s research. "That’s how I put the plantation together. Making sure souls were accounted for. I used private papers there as well."

And because her ancestors owned land, courthouse records were also important. Furthermore, Tademy used newspapers to get a feel for the mood of the time and facts about particular events.

Moving accounts of Suzette, Philomene, and Emily striving to keep their families together against the odds fill the book, which is built upon a solid foundation of painstaking research. Descendancy charts, photos, and documents provide evocative evidence of the prose’s reality. It’s a book that will thrill family historians not only with its rich documentation, but with a story that is entirely American, and until now, entirely unknown.

And what of Lalita Tademy? She hasn’t slowed down. Tademy is hard at work on her second book, a historical novel set along Louisiana’s Red River, based on the men on the paternal side of her family. There is every reason to believe that this work will be just as compelling a family history as Cane River.

Barbara Krasner-Khait, avid genealogist, lecturer, writer, and researcher, is the author of Discovering Your Jewish Ancestors (Heritage Quest, 2001). She is the contributing editor to Family Chronicle and the contributing editor on Jewish genealogy to Heritage Quest.

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