Author transforms genealogy search into best seller

By Janet McConnaughey
Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS — A century and a half after Harriet Beecher Stowe set Uncle Tom's martyrdom on a central Louisiana plantation, the story of real slaves from the same area has taken root and captivated readers.

Lalita Tademy reconstructed the life of her great-grandmother, Emily Fredieu, second from left, and her slave ancestors in "Cane River." Associated Press

Tademy named her book after the river that splits from the Red River just above Natchitoches, the oldest continuously occupied city in the vast Louisiana Purchase, and rejoins it at Colfax.

The area between and along the Cane and Red rivers is where "Uncle Tom's Cabin" builds to its climax, where many Kate Chopin stories take place, where "Steel Magnolias" was set and filmed, and where Tademy's ancestors were slaves.

Chopin is best known for "The Awakening," which takes place on Grand Isle, La. But her first novel, "At Fault," and many of the short stories she wrote in the 1890s were set along the Cane River.

Stowe's book, written as the nation headed toward civil war and first published as a serial starting in June 1851, was meant to convince people that slavery was wrong. But she wanted to show all sides: Tom's first mistress was portrayed as a caring Christian; his second master as indulgent; Simon Legree, Tom's brutal final master, was an import from Vermont.

Unlike Stowe, Tademy began with only the desire to learn more about her family — an urge so strong she quit her position as a vice president for Sun Microsystems and spent two years digging through records in central Louisiana.

She started with family letters and stories, and a typewritten two-page family history by her cousin Gurtie Fredieu.

She wound up with more than 1,000 documents, including newspaper articles, oral histories, baptismal records, auction receipts and "bits and pieces and scraps."

"Once I found the 1850 bill of sale where three generations of these women were sold, that really allowed me to push back another 50 years," Tademy said.

"I was able to push back beyond that, find the plantation and sometimes go back and look at those plantation records, to find a lot of those everyday occurrences on the plantation."

Out of all of this, she began trying to sort through her puzzle. Why, for example, did her great-great-great-grandmother Philomene return after she was freed to have children with a man who fathered her child before the Civil War?

"I had to grapple with that," Tademy said. "I had to try to figure out what would make her do that. If I had been writing this as straight fiction, I don't think I would have ever come to that quandary."

She also started with a bias against Emily Fredieu because family stories described her as a woman who favored her lighter-skinned grandchildren and "barely tolerated being called colored, and never Negro."

"I had to let go of a lot of my judgment ... and come to terms with the time and place in which she was living," Tademy said.

Getting to know Emily as a character, she came to see her as a flawed person, but one who was dealing with her world as it was. "I came to love her far more than when I started, and to embrace her in all of her aspects," she said.

Emily, born in 1861, was the first family member who did not grow up a slave. The matriarch was Elisabeth, a cook on the Cane River plantation of Louis and Francoise Derbanne.

Her daughter, Suzette, dreamed of reading, freedom and a young freeman of color. But Suzette lost those dreams to a white man's lust when she was 13.

Suzette's daughter, Philomene Daurat, took her white father's surname, though he ignored Suzette's pleas for the child's freedom. After the Civil War, she used another white man's fascination with her to win land and a house for her family.

Philomene was the character Tademy "feared the most" at first, and she became her favorite. Philomene never learned to read or write. But documents showed clearly that she took care of everyone — her mother, grandmother, brother, children, and grandchildren, Tademy said.

"She was the one going to the courthouse, she was the one paying the property taxes, she was the one going nose-to-nose whenever she had to — first to ensure there was land, then to ensure it was current ... and could be passed down."

And Philomene entered her dreams, demanding that she understand all the women and the complexities of their lives.

"As difficult as that is for me to admit — I really believe in just what I can see — but I definitely felt a presence," Tademy said in an interview. "I did feel that this is a story that she wanted told, as well. And I didn't dare disappoint."

The slave owners in "Cane River" order slaves to have sex with them. They give the children that result from these liaisons their surnames and sometimes their love, but abandon them for white heirs.

The man with whom Emily lived, Joseph Billes, was different. He courted Emily and loved her and their children. Night riders murdered him because he insisted that his black children inherit his land and goods.

The official verdict was suicide. As the Colfax Chronicle of March 2, 1907 explained it, Billes had shot himself in the head, cut his throat, and then shot himself in the head again, "managing in his death struggle to fall across the bed before life left his body."

Like many other documents, the newspaper article is reproduced in the novel.

An editorial a week later, also reproduced, concludes, "In letters of blood he has left written the inexorable law of this Southland, that the taint of the inferior race forever debars admission into the social precincts of the Caucasian home. Let us hope and pray that poor Billes is the last in this parish that will ever follow in this footpath of evil."

That ending, and the editorial, hit Tademy hardest of anything she learned.

"They were in the backwoods, and they really ... wanted to be left alone to raise their children," she said.

Tademy began writing for herself and her family, planning to self-publish.

"As I began to flesh it out and began to get deeper and deeper into the story, I decided this was really an American story — broader than 'Cane River' and broader than my family. It's one that I wanted to share."

Thirteen agents turned her down. Then her teacher in an evening course at the University of California at Berkeley read the first chapters of her proposed manuscript and introduced her to his agent. Warner Books published "Cane River" in April with a publicity push unusual for first novels. TV personality Oprah Winfrey made it her summer selection, catapulting it to the top of every best-seller list.

"All of it was wildly exciting," Tademy said. But, like many new authors, "the biggest rush for me was the first time that I held the book in my hands."

Tademy is working on her next novel, about her father's family.

"They were not French, not Creole. It's a very different story," she said. "People in that family were mostly farmers and educators. I can't trace them back nearly as far. So I really picked them up after the Civil War."