Cane River - By Lalita Tademy Page 0,2

her, a shapeless apparition, usually in the aftermath of her unrelenting hand at my back and the unnerving certainty of her voice in my ear. But the fear was always tempered with respect.

Gurtie Fredieu, circa 1928. Said to look like her grandmother Philomene.

This book is a work of fiction deeply rooted in years of research, historical fact, and family lore. The details of Cousin Gurtie’s accounting weren’t always supported by other documents I uncovered. Some dates were off, some facts twisted, but I found that each precious line of her carefully typed history had at its base at least a grain of truth, and a family story had arisen around it. Many official and historical documents had inaccuracies in them as well. The challenge was to marry all of the data. In piecing together events from personal and public sources, especially when they conflicted, I relied on my own intuition, a sometimes intimidating undertaking when I felt Philomene’s judgmental presence over my shoulder. There were gaps I filled in based on research into the events and mood of the place and time. I presupposed motivations. Occasionally I changed a name, date, or circumstance to accommodate narrative flow. I hope I have captured the essence of truth, if not always the precision of fact, and that liberties I have taken will be forgiven.

* * *

I hope you can put some of these things together better than I did, you may have heard that my Brother or I did not finish School or no one tought me one thing about Typen.but that I know I know it, Smile. My God have blessed me to be here my three scores and ten.

--Cousin Gurtie Fredieu, in a letter recording our family history written in 1975

* * *

P ART O NE

Suzette

1

C ANE R IVER , L OUISIANA —1834

O n the morning of her ninth birthday, the day after Madame Françoise Derbanne slapped her, Suzette peed on the rosebushes. Before the plantation bell sounded she had startled awake, tuned her ears to the careless breathing of Mam’zelle above her in the four-poster bed, listened for movement from the rest of the sleeping household, and quietly pushed herself up from her straw pallet on the floor.

Suzette made her way quickly down the narrow hall, beyond the wall altar, and past the polished mahogany grandfather clock in the front room, careful to sidestep the squeaky board by the front door. Outside on the gallery, her heart thudded so wildly that the curiosity of the sound helped soften the fear. Her breath felt too big for her chest as she inched past the separate entrance to the stranger’s room and around to the side of the big house where the prized bushes waited.

Barefoot into the darkness, aided only by the slightest remnant of the Louisiana summer moon, she chose Madame’s favorite, a sprawling rosebush with delicate pale yellow flowers and visible roots as long as her father’s fiddling bow.

The task didn’t take long, going and coming back, and Oreline’s breathing was still soft and regular when Suzette slipped back onto her makeshift mattress at the foot of the bed. The only evidence that Suzette had been gone at all was a thin, jagged scratch on her bare arm from a thorn she hadn’t seen in the darkness.

* * *

The day before had started with midsummer Louisiana predictability, so smotheringly hot that the spongy air seemed to push down on Suzette as she hurried to the cookhouse after church. Once there, she slipped a clean apron over her good dress, a loose-fitting dark calico with a yoke neck, one of Oreline’s last-season castoffs her mother had altered to fit the girl’s small body. Her mother had left room in the dress for a growth spurt. Every last item of Suzette’s clothing from undershift to leggings and shoes had first belonged to her mam’zelle. Although the girls were the same age, Oreline was taller than Suzette by half a head. They made an odd pair, the pale white girl, long legged and gangly as a young colt, and her tiny cocoa-colored nurse, Suzette, with skin like strong coffee after the splash of cream. Suzette’s eager smile showed off a gap between her two front teeth. The space was almost the width of a full kernel of corn, and Suzette used it to give more force to her whistle. It came in handy for calling chickens or pigs or for impressing Oreline and Narcisse when they ran the woods together in play.

The