I had a hard time when I started "Cane River" by Lalita Tademy. I hadn't really prepared myself emotionally for what this book was about, so I was shocked and grumpy at first, but settled in to really enjoy this story about strength, love and the absolute importance of family.
"Cane River" is the historical fiction story of three generations of colored women in the south. It starts out with the first of these women, Suzette, as a young slave girl and her view of the world and her struggles to fit in. She lives in the big house and is servant to the daughter of her master. A visiting relative takes notice of her and when she is 13, he catches her alone and rapes her. It isn't violent, for which I was grateful, but a rape nonetheless. This was the part where I was not too happy about the story, but once I accepted what the story was about, it was easier to take. Suzette has two children by this man by the age of 15 and then he leaves her alone to go live with a free colored woman who was Suzette's godmother.
Suzette's daughter, Philomene, is the second woman we follow in the book and she is strong willed and bold. She falls in love with and eventually marries another slave who has dark skin, something her mother, Suzette, doesn't approve of. The general belief is that the whiter your skin is, the better off your prospects are, though I don't ever see that idea truly realized in the book. Philomene and her husband, Clement, have twin girls before he is sold to a plantation in a different state. She is crushed and then catches yellow fever. When she recovers, she is told that her twins died of the same ailment while she was sick.
She withdraws into herself for a while, but then comes out of it when a relative of her master lays claim to her sexually and she realizes how advantageous that could be. She bears eight children to him and he treats her and them quite well, and he is an attentive father and is criticized for it. Philomene, when she was young, had premonitions of the future and uses that power to convince this man to be good to her and the children, though she invents the premonitions to serve her purpose at that point.
During Philomene's story, the Civil War leads to freedom for the slaves and the difficulty that brings with it. She convinces her man to deed her some land and she takes most of her family with her to live on that land. Her daughter Emily "Tite" (pronounced Teetee) is educated and falls in love with a white man and they live together for many years despite the problems it causes with the white townsfolk. They have five children together and then he gives in to social pressure, moves Emily out of the house and marries a white woman. This satisfies the townsfolk for a while, but he is miserable and they fight a lot. In the end he is murdered and his white wife as well. It is officially called a murder-suicide (with the man doing the murdering), but in the book it is told as a murder for a relative to inherit his land instead of him willing it to his mulatto children, which he wanted to do.
Mixed in to all of this is the drama of the white families as well. Of wives who hate the women their men impregnate, masters dying and plantations being liquidated, slave families being split up and crop failures and sickness.
At the end of the story you see these three women together and battered by hard lives, but strong. It was a good book that really moved me emotionally. I loved to see the love these women had for their children regardless of where they came from. I loved to see them support each other through some of the hardest of situations, their determination and kindness. I highly recommend this book, but beware, it is not a happy, flowery story. It is gritty and heartbreaking in places, but there is always hope and even quite a bit of happiness.
Questions to discuss:
Do you feel you could love a child that you conceived against your will?
Which character was your favorite? Why?
Do you think the men were cowardly for not standing up to people for the women they loved?
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Our book for December will be "March" by Geraldine Brooks
