- When did you decide to write a book?
It was when I faced that incredible silence that comes with not having a job and not having to answer e-mails or telephone calls. I was just trying to fill my day, so I started doing more and more genealogy research.
I never intended to write a book. That came a year and a half after I left my job and that happened because the stories that I was uncovering were so incredibly interesting and fascinating. I decided that I wanted to share them.
- Why did you leave your high-powered job as vice president of Sun Microsystems?
I didn’t leave (my job) to write a book. I had done the corporate life for a long time and I just wanted something different. I was working so many hours and working so hard that I couldn’t figure out what the next step could possibly be, so I just decided to take a year off to figure out what to do next. (Quitting my job) was the only way to change my life.
- What led you to begin researching your family history?
My mother and father were both born in central Louisiana near Colfax, which was just across from Cane River. They moved after they were married and had two children. So my two older sisters were born there, and my brother and I were born in California.
My mother was very homesick, and every summer she would put four kids in the car and drive cross-country to Louisiana.
I began doing the research years ago, off and on, in between the major slices of my life, starting from when I was small and listening to the stories I heard when we went to my family reunions in Louisiana. I listened to those stories and observed family
members and the members of that small town of Colfax, La. Then I started to ask questions about how things happened and who was related to whom. I started to piece some of that together and started to write it down. I never did this for more than a few days at a time and then I would get back to my real life.
I had heard about my great-grandmother Emily. Everybody had a story about Emily Fredieu. And they were all so lovingly told. After doing some research on her, I came to the realization that she was born a slave and that she was born in the backwoods of Louisiana.
From the stories that my mother told me, I knew that she kept gallon jugs of homemade wine in her house and that everyone, including children, had to take a sip. But this just didn’t fit the stories that I had heard that compared her to Jackie O. That really led
me to want to know more about her and who her mother was and who her mother’s mother was. By the time I was finished, I started to tell family members more about the family than what they were able to tell me.
- What tools did you use to research your family history?
I began with the census, which is a 10-year snapshot. The problem was that 1870 was the first year that African Americans were considered citizens. Before that, they did not show up on the census. Sometimes they showed up on an auxiliary (list) to the census and not
necessarily by name, but just by plantation record, which said a certain plantation had seven slaves—three males, four females. So I went back to Louisiana and searched court records. I looked for land deeds. In many cases, the names of the fathers of the subsequent
children would show up. I would track what they were doing, where they lived and what property they owned in order to find out about my family, which was often a side family. Back then, many of the (white) men who owned land had a white family and a black family.
In the early ’90s, I hired a professional genealogist. A lot of the records were in Creole French. I had to hire not only a specialist who understood genealogy, but someone who was very familiar with the Cane River area and knew the families and the intersections
of the families and could recognize that in private records. It took 18 months to find the 1850 bill of sale of my great-great-great-great-grandmother and three generations of women.
I also did some research online, but at the time I was doing my research, it was before a lot of these records were on the Internet. I spent a lot of time at the National Archives in San Bruno.
- What was a typical day like when you were working on Cane River?
When I wrote Cane River, I was a lot more disciplined. I was single then. My time was 100 percent my own. I wasn’t working a 9-to-5 job. I would get up at 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m., I’d get something to eat, go to the gym to exercise, come back and I would be
sitting in my chair by 8:30 a.m. For the next three hours minimum, I would not get up from my chair. That was everyday.
I wrote the entire manuscript by hand. I couldn’t write on a computer because as soon as I saw the blinking cursor, I would flip over into spreadsheet mode to do something else. I had to write everything out by hand. I would do that for three hours, have lunch,
type what I wrote, print it out, take a pen and edit, then type the edits in and print it out again.
I was so bedeviled by demons—saying ‘why aren’t you out looking for a job?,’ ‘no one wants to read this,’, ‘you can’t write’—that if I hadn’t been so disciplined, I would have found something else to do.
- How much of Cane River is fact and how much is fiction?
All except for two of the names are real and are based on real people. Most of the larger events are real. That’s also why I wanted to put real documents, photos, newspaper articles and records in the book. As the reader is thinking that I’ve gone off onto some fictional tangent, they turn the page and
see the bill of sale and know that really did happen. In the interest of narrative art, I had to make sure that it was readable and that a reader was flipping the pages and that there was suspense. But 80 percent of it is real and based on real events.
- What was the most challenging part about writing Cane River?
I had never written so much as a short story before. I was full of insecurity about whether I could deliver this story. I knew that I had hold of an incredibly powerful story. I just didn’t know whether I was up to the task of telling it. So, everyday I felt a tremendous responsibility and burden to teach myself to write in time to deliver the story.
I must have written about 14 drafts, but I had to keep rewriting and rewriting.
- What kept you going?
I felt one of the characters looking over my shoulder—it was my great-great-grandmother (Philomene). When I was discouraged or tempted to stop or thought that this was too hard or told myself that no one wants to read this, she was the one to keep me going. I was afraid of her. Even though
I never met her, I felt her presence in a big way and I felt that it was my responsibility to tell this story.
She was the strong force. I could see that in the records that I uncovered. She was the one that got the land that allowed the family to come back together again. She was an amazingly strong-willed person with real determination. That’s what I felt and that’s what kept me telling the story.
- These women endured some terrible incidences—abuse by their masters, watching their family members being sold away, rape—what was your reaction when you found out about these atrocities?
It was very difficult. I had to take a lot of breaks. I wrote the first draft in about nine months. That was writing everyday, seven days a week. During that time, I was in a very dark place. I took a lot of walks. I tried to make sure I exercised and ate properly, because it was emotionally draining.
Trying to tease out the characters was also draining because I not only became these women, I became the villains in the story as well. I became all of the parts in order to flesh them out.
I was trying to portray a time. I wasn’t trying to look back, I was trying to act as if I was there. The truth is, slavery was an economic institution that people grew up with. While I could not forgive it, I had to go deep to try understand it. Some of the people who owned these four women were my ancestors.
- Which of the four women in Cane River do you most identify with?
When I flatter myself, I would say Philomene. She had so much determination and she visualized a world that was beyond anything that you could conceive of her having and she got it. I admire that so very much. I would like to think that I have some of that determination as well.
- How did your relatives react to Cane River?
They were very proud. They had never met an author before and they were happy that I told our story.
I stopped the story in 1936 for a reason. I did not want to challenge the memories of folks who were still alive. I didn’t have as many challenges as I would have had, had I gone more forward in time. A lot of what I had was based on research that I had uncovered that my own family didn’t know.
The biggest push-back I got was about how I portrayed my grandfather (T.O.). You can’t have all characters be heroic. Part of the fictionalization of his character was not in keeping with the way people remembered him.
- What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
I wanted to put history in a different context. I wanted to deliver it from a different point of view. I wanted to show the strength of women, specifically, and of family in general. I wanted to show what resilience and sacrifice can do for generations.
What I tried very hard to do was to write a book that you could enjoy on any level you chose. If you what you want is a page-turner, that’s what I wanted to give you. If you want to get a sense of American history during this time period—slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow South, pre-civil
rights—then great, I hope you get that. If you can go for deeper themes, then that’s great, too. A reader is going to take from it what they want.
- What does it mean to you that Cane River was selected as this year’s One City One Book selection?
I cannot tell you how flattered I am by this. It was a wonderful surprise. To be selected by my hometown is huge to me.
- What’s your advice to those readers who think they might want to completely change the course of their lives—perhaps start a new career as you have done?
You have to prepare—financially, emotionally and spiritually—and then you have to take the leap and not look back. People have to know what their own limits and tolerance level of uncertainty are before they leave.
- Do you have plans to go back to the corporate high-tech world?
No, I don’t. That’s a place where you pour yourself into. You have really stay fresh and on point in that arena. I had to let go of what made me successful in that world in order to tap into my creativity.
- Your second book, Red River, was recently published. What are you working on now?
I’m about 75 pages into a new novel that’s not based on family or genealogy or history. It’s contemporary and frivolous and we’ll see where it goes.
- Are you more comfortable with your writing now that you’re a published novelist?
I don’t think I’ll ever be totally comfortable. I am more comfortable with this third project in that it doesn’t feel as much responsibility as the first two books where I wanted to make sure I was being authentic to history as well as to family.
In this one, I’m just being flippant and having a great deal of fun. I am feeling more confident that I can turn out pages that are fun without turning out six outlines.
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