When Cane River was published in 2001, Lalita Tademy established herself as the chronicler of her own family's life, since their arrival here as slaves in the 1800s. Mixing family history, fiction, and fact made the story rich and unforgettable enough that Cane River became an Oprah's Book Club®. Now, with Red River, Tademy has done it again. Writing is a second career for Tademy, who is a former vice-president of Sun Microsystems. She left the corporate world to immerse herself in her family's history--and the history of the south. In 1873 in the small southern town of Colfax, Louisiana, history tells us there was a riot. The Tademy family knows different. "1873. Wasn't no riot like they say. It was a massacre..." The blacks are newly free, just beginning life under Reconstruction, with all its promises of equity, the right to vote, to own property and, most importantly, to decide their own future as individuals. Federal Government troops are supposed to arrive to protect the rights of the colored people--but they are not yet on the scene.
In one wretched day, white supremacists destroy all the optimism and bright promise by taking Colfax back in an ugly and violent manner. The tragedy begins with the two sides: the white Democrats of Montgomery and the colored and white Republicans of Colfax in the courthouse, finally meeting face to face to discuss their differences. Then, a group of white thugs kills a colored man who was not involved in the courthouse struggle. He was home minding his business and the ugliness came and found him.
The confrontation that follows results in the death of more than 100 black men, killed by white supremacists bent on denying them their voting rights and keeping in office those who uphold the status quo prior to the Civil War. The massacre is only the beginning of Tademy's story. Using reliable sources wherever they may be found, she tells the hard and proud story of Sam Tademy, Israel Smith and their families as they fight their way back from the massacre. They get a foothold in Colfax, finally starting a school, owning land and businesses and becoming full-fledged citizens, as they were meant to be.
Tademy tells part of our history that we would like to forget; she also tells the story of her family, which is a story worth remembering. --Valerie Ryan
Tademy, author of the highly acclaimed Cane River (2001), revisits her fascinating family history in this fictionalized account of the family's survival of a riot in 1873. Colfax, Louisiana, was the site of a massacre of more than 100 black men by white supremacists determined that the voting rights of former slaves not be honored, keeping in place political officials who upheld the racial hierarchy of slavery even during Reconstruction. Tademy family legend credits Sam Tademy with reclaiming the closest phonetic pronunciation of his original African name following the Civil War, and passing it along in the family. Sam is a major figure in this recollection of the events leading up to the massacre and the struggle thereafter. Tademy draws on family legend, official documents, and newspaper accounts to chronicle the determination of the Tademys, the Smiths, and other black families to take a stand against rising racial brutality in the years following slavery. The Tademys were among the black families who sought to make a place for themselves in the town, buying land, opening a store, starting a school, braving continued attacks by racists, marrying, and continuing their family lines. Tademy brings drama and pathos to an epic account of her family history and a shameful account of our nation's history. Tademy is establishing herself as a compelling chronicler of the complex history of slavery and race in America. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
This production is an extrodinary accomplishment. Rich, tender, and deeply moving, it tells the saga of an African American family from Colfax, Louisiana. The enhancements of audio are significant in this production, beginning with the rich elderly voice of Gammy Singer inviing listeners to gather round to hear a tale that needs telling. The musical accompaniment at certain moments adds a heartfelt poignancy.
About the Author
Lalita Tademy is a former vice president of Sun Microsystems.
From The Washington Post
Like her wildly successful first novel, Cane River, Lalita Tademy's Red River is historical fiction -- rooted in her own family's saga but as much the result of imagination as of research. That approach allows her to avoid the charges of falsifying that plague Alex Haley's 1976 controversial masterwork, Roots, and, more important, to fill in the gaps of a tale some family members were reluctant to discuss. As a novel, Red River is flawed, if entertaining, but as a much-needed illumination of a shameful and often hidden moment of American history, it is compelling indeed.Turning this time to her father's side of the family, Tademy opens Red River during Reconstruction in Colfax, La. Two of her great-great-grandfathers join a group of black farmers determined to see that the candidates they elected will take office despite white opposition. They stake out the courthouse, intending to hold it until federal troops arrive to enforce the election result. The troops never arrive, but a clutch of heavily armed white men does. What happens next becomes known, among local whites at least, as the Colfax Riot of 1873.
"The ones with the upper hand make a story fit how they want, and tell it so loud people tricked to thinking it real, but writing down don't make it so," says Tademy's great-great-grandmother Polly. "Eighteen seventy-three. Wasn't no riot like they say. We was close enough to see how it play out. It was a massacre."
Tademy spends the first half of the novel leading up to this brutal event, and when it comes, she renders the moment with emotional restraint and tough, heartbreaking detail. But because the reader knows full well what's coming, her efforts to build tension and suspense face an uphill climb. The pace drags until the second half of the book, when it suddenly picks up speed and threatens to gallop away. There are lots of relatives to introduce, lots of members of the Smith and Tademy families to establish between 1873 and 1937, when her great-great-grandfather dies and the novel ends. In the rush, some characters emerge thinly drawn, especially the mothers and wives. (And please let us all agree to cease the practice of introducing black characters first and foremost by the color of their skin. Failing that, let us at least stop comparing those lovely shades to food; in Red River, characters are, variously, the colors of caramel, walnuts, burnt-custard, ginger and pecans.) But Tademy does a wonderful job bringing to life Sam Tademy, the backbone of the novel and the family, and his proud, determined wife, Polly. Her voice -- vivid, lyrical, clear -- shines out above all the rest. Readers may wish more of the novel had been told through her eyes.
Tademy also manages to straddle the line between glorifying her ancestors and humanizing them. The Tademys of Colfax not only survived the oppression and brutality of post-Reconstruction America, but they prospered, confronting racism, accumulating land and building the first colored school so that the local black children might build themselves better lives. Lalita Tademy has every right to be proud.
-- Kim McLarin, author of "Jump at the Sun"
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Red River
By Lalita TademyGrand Central Publishing
Copyright © 2007 Lalita Tademy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-446-69699-9
Prologue
1935Come closer. This is not a story to go down easy, and the backwash still got hold of us today. The history of a family. The history of a country. From bondage to the joy of freedom, and almost ten hopeful years drinking up the promise of Reconstruction, and then back into the darkness, so fearsome don't nobody want to talk about the scary time. Don't nobody want to remember even now, decades removed, now things better some. Why stir up all that old mess from way back in 1873? I don't hold with that point of view. I was there, watching, like all the women done, up close some of the time but mostways from a distance. They all dead and buried now. I outlast each one, using up my time on earth and some of theirs too. One hundred last birthday, trapped in this wasted body. All I do now is remember and pray the story don't get lost forever. It woulda suit Lucy fine, everybody forgetting. Lucy and me, that the only thing we usta argue about, when we was both clear-minded and had more juice to work up, but those talks never last too long. She just shut her mouth and shut her mind, refusing the truth. I still got heat around the subject, but where to put it now? Lucy gone last year. She turn one hundred five before she left this earth. Was two of us held on for such a long time, me and Lucy. Outlasting our men-our husbands, our sons, even some grandsons. We all had it hard, but the men, they had it worse, 'specially those what come up on life from the front. Women is the long-livers at the base of the Tademy family tree.
They don't teach 1873 at the colored school. Wasn't for my husband, wouldn't be no colored school for Colfax, Louisiana. That the kind of man Sam Tademy was. Could carry a vision in his head and stick to it no matter what the discouragement. Some men good providers, got a way with the soil or a trade. Some men been given a singing voice take you to glory, or magic in they bodies to move in dance and make you feel alive. Some men so pretty you gaze on them with hunger, or so smooth they get hold of words and make you believe any nonsense come out they mouth. Some got the gift to make you laugh out loud, and others preach strong and spread the word of God. My man, Sam, he quiet after his own way, look after his family, not afraid of the tug of the plow. He done some preaching, and some teaching, but always thinking about the rest of the colored. Not wanting to get too far ahead without pulling forward everyone else willing to work hard at the same time. Education mean everything to that man. Once he set his head on a colored school in Colfax, wasn't nothing could crush the notion. He mortgage his own sons to the plan, and it come to pass.
We been writ out the history of this town. They got a metal marker down to the courthouse tell a crazy twisting of what really happen Easter Sunday sixty year ago. The ones with the upper hand make a story fit how they want, and tell it so loud people tricked to thinking it real, but writing down don't make it so. The littlest colored child in Colfax, Louisiana, know better than to speak the truth of that time out loud, but the real stories somehow carry forward, generation to generation. Those of us what was there catch a retold whisper, and just the mention got the power to stir up those old troubles in our minds again like they fresh, and the remembering lay a clamp over our hearts. But we need to remember. Truth matters. What our colored men try to do for the rest of us in Colfax matter. They daren't be forgot. We women keep the wheel spinning, birthing the babies and holding together a decent home to raise them in. We take care of them what too young or too old to take care of theyself, while our menfolks does battle how they got to in a world want to see them broke down and tame.
Was a time we thought we was free and moving up. When forty acres and a mule seem not only possible but due. First we was slave, then we was free, and the white call it Reconstruction. We had colored politicians. Yes, we did. It was our men vote them in, before the voting right get snatched away. We losing that sense of history, and it seem wrong to me. Young ones today, they don't carry memory of our colored men voting. Like those ten years of fiery promise burn down and only leave a small gray pile of ash under the fireplace grate, and don't nobody remember the flame. Not like the locals made it easy, but we had our rights then, by law. We was gonna change the South, be a part of the rebuilding after the War Between the States. We owned ourself and was finding our voice to speak up. Some on both sides of the color line talked about us going too fast. No matter how hard times got then, when wasn't food enough for the table and the debt growed too fast to pay off at the general store, or a homegrown pack of the White League terrorize us or string up one of our men to keep us in our place, still our hearts and heads swole up with the possibilities of Reconstruction. Our men was citizens. We had the prospect of owning a piece of land for ourself. Ten years. Don't seem so long when you reach over one hundred years in your own life, but more hope and dreams in those ten years than the slave years come before or the terror years after. Back then hope was a personal friend, close to hand. Seem anything could happen. Seem we was on a road to be a real part of America at last.
I think on those colored men in the courthouse every day. They was brave, from my way of seeing, dog-bone set to fight for a idea, no matter the risk. Not all the old ones see it the same. Lucy used to say by stepping up, the colored courthouse men bring the white man down on us, but what foolishness is that? Some white folks never change from thinking on us as they own personal beasts of burden, even after freedom. Those ones down on us already.
But we got the strength to outlast whatever trials is put before us. We proved it. There a special way of seeing come with age and distance, a kind of knowing how things happen even without knowing why. Seeing what show up one or two generations removed, from a father to a son or grandson, like repeating threads weaving through the same bolt of cloth. Repeating scraps at the foot and the head of a quilt. How two men never set eyes on each other before, and, different as sun and moon, each journey from Alabama to Louisiana and come to form a friendship so deep they families twine together long after they dead. How one set of brothers like hand and glove, but two others at each other throats like jealous pups fighting for the last teat. How two brothers from the same house marry two sisters, sets of bold and meek. How men come at a thing nothing like what a woman do, under the names dignity, pride, survival. The words alike, but the path not even close between man and woman, no matter they both trying to get to the same place. Making a better way for the children. In the end, making a better life for our children what we all want.
Eighteen seventy-three. Wasn't no riot like they say. We was close enough to see how it play out. It was a massacre. Back in 1873, if I was a man, I'da lift my head up too and make the same choice as my Sam and Israel Smith and the others, but there was children to feed and keep healthy and fields to harvest and goats to milk. Those things don't wait for history or nothing else. But I saw. I cleaned up after. I watch how 1873 carry through in the children that was there, and then in they children years later.
My name is Polly. I come to the Tademys not by blood but by choice. Not all family got to draw from the bloodline. I claim the Tademys and they claim me. We a community, in one another business for better or worse. How else we expect to get through the trials of this earth before the rewards of heaven?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Red Riverby Lalita Tademy Copyright © 2007 by Lalita Tademy. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Tademy once again mixes family history, fiction, and fact in this story of the 1872 Reconstruction riot in Colfax, Virgina. As the story opens, Lucy, a centenarian, looks back on "the scary time." Her voice is portrayed by Gammy Singer with rhythmic cadences as rich as gospel. The historic part of the novel focuses on Sam, one of a handful of black men determined to fight for his rights and the safety of his community. Tim Cain's voice is strong and deep as he recounts the horrifying details of the massacre of more than one hundred black men by white supremacists. Then he follows the families' struggles for betterment in succeeding generations. S.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
