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American Morning

Author Traces Her Family History

Aired April 30, 2001 - 09:22   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, the Internet has made tracing your family history easier than ever.

And earlier this month, ellisislandrecords.org was launched. Descendants of immigrants who came to America through Ellis Island and the Port of New York can research their ancestors at that Web site, which includes passenger records and ship manifests.

Now, back in February, the Mormon Church opened its extensive family history archives to the Internet, and FamilySearch.org contains more than 700-million names. It's also one of the only sites where African-Americans can trace their ancestry.

Now our guest this morning was so intent on pursuing her family genealogy that she left her job in corporate America to trace her roots. She tells the story in the novel "Cane River," which combines fiction and family history, and the novel is based on four generations of an African-American family.

It starts with Elisabeth, born in 1799, and follows the lineage through her daughter Suzette, Suzette's daughter Philomene, down to Emily, the author's great-grandmother.

And the author, Lalita Tademy, is here with us this morning to talk about the book.

Pleasure to meet you.

LALITA TADEMY, "CANE RIVER" AUTHOR: Very nice to be here.

PHILLIPS: Everyone's been talking about your book.

Why don't you set up the "Cane River" for us, OK, and give us a little history of your great-grandmother and how it inspired you to do this.

TADEMY: Cane River is a very unique place in the center of Louisiana, not New Orleans but in Louisiana, and it was -- in the 1800s, it had its heyday, and it really contained three classes of people -- whites who could be poor or rich, slaves, and a middle class that considered themselves neither white nor black called free people of color.

And I began to trace my roots. I got back to Cane River. I wasn't sure whether my ancestors came from slaves or the free people of color, and it was only when I found the bill of sale of great- great-great-great-grandmother Elisabeth, who was sold for $800 in 1850, that I knew for sure that my roots were slave roots in Cane River.

PHILLIPS: All right. I want to talk about those documents and letters in just a moment. But, first, I have to ask you, because this was a personal venture for you, was there ever a time where you got angry, kind of...

TADEMY: Very much so. There were days when I locked myself in my house, and I continued to write, but I really didn't speak to people. I wasn't fit company, and I was angry, and I was exhilarated, and I was proud, and I was depressed, and I went through every emotion that you can conceive of, and I actually had to rewrite the book many times and write the anger out.

PHILLIPS: Wow.

TADEMY: I wanted to present the facts as I had them based on the thousands of documents that I had but fictionalized. But I didn't want to tell the reader what to think. I figured they could -- they could assume whatever they wanted to from the facts as presented.

PHILLIPS: All right. Let's talk about the documents that you did get, OK, the letters and the specifics you mentioned, because it's not easy to trace African-American history, is it?

TADEMY: It's very, very difficult, and I had a few breaks in my case. One is that this area in Cane River is very French. It was very Roman Catholic, and the Roman Catholics like to document souls. So if -- if there's a birth or a death, they're going to capture it...

PHILLIPS: It down.

TADEMY: ... somewhere, and that was very, very fortunate. The biggest thing was actually finding the plantation where these women were born and where they lived. Once that happened, I could go back and reconstruct many of the other records of the period so that I could relate what it was look in the 1840s and '50s and '60s and '70 and '80s. This covers over a hundred of years.

PHILLIPS: And by talking with relatives, you probably came across some pretty interesting stories. Any specific one that really moved you or really drew you in?

TADEMY: The first story -- the trigger for all of this was really my great-grandmother Emily, and she was remembered by my mother very vividly, and my mother just adored her, and she remembered her dancing alone in the middle of her living room in her farmhouse to her victrola, and she was just a really lively woman, and she -- she had little, teeny feet, and she was under five feet tall, and she drank homemade wine every day...

PHILLIPS: Oh, that sounds good. TADEMY: ... and so she had a lot of stories, and I started to wonder what she was like. That was the trigger. But then I started to want to know what her mother was like and what her mother's mother was like and how she came to be.

PHILLIPS: Life strategies -- let's talk about that for a minute -- within the black culture. Very different than -- than it is now, do you think, or did you find similarities?

TADEMY: I found differences and similarities, and the thing that was the most interesting to me in doing a lot of the research and then also in fictionalizing this and writing the book was that each one of these four generations of women had to have different life strategies because circumstances were so different.

So in -- in slavery times, they were just trying to survive. In -- in -- after slavery, they were trying to thrive. And they were trying to provide more and more opportunity for their children. And they succeeded.

PHILLIPS: Well, it's an incredible book. Once again, it's called "Cane River." Lalita Tademy, thank you so much for being with us and talking with us about it.

TADEMY: Thank you.

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