English practice 34

A Journey on Cane River

Growing up, I knew for an absolute fact that no one on the planet was stronger than my mother. So when she told me stories of people she admired growing up, I paid attention. She was clearly in awe of her grandmother, Emily. her grandmother as iron-willed and devilish, physically beautiful and demanding of beauty from others, determined to make her farmhouse in central Louisiana a fun place to be on Sundays when family gathered, and fanatical and unforgiving about the responsibilities generated from family ties. On one hand, soft-spoken, and classy. On the other, she was a woman from the backwoods of Louisiana, possibly born a slave, unapologetic about dipping snuff, who buzzed on her homemade muscadine wine each and every day.

Emily puzzle of this woman simmered on the back burner of my conscious mind for decades, undoubtedly questions about who I was as well.

Hooked, I traced my mother’s line to a place in Louisiana called Cane River,

I decided to hire a specialist on Cane River find my great-grandmother Emily’s grandmother.

In a collection of ten thousand unindexed local records written in Creole French, she found the bill of sale for my great-great-great-great-grandmother Elisabeth, sold in 1850 in Cane River, Louisiana, for eight hundred dollars.

I had no choice. I had to write their story and document their lives—my history. after all, real flesh-and-blood people. I pieced their lives together as best I could, re-creating what life must have been like for them during the 1800s and 1900s.

Cane River, a novelized account covering one hundred years in America’s history and following four generations of Creole slave women in Cane River, struggled to keep their families intact through the dark days of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the pre-civil rights era of Jim Crow South.