Sunday, January 14, 2007

RED RIVER

A Novel

By Lalita Tademy

Warner. 420 pp. $24.99

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"