Male Speaker: -- eventually rising
to become Vice President of Sun Microsystems.
Then in 1995, she shocked her friends and family by deciding
to quit, leave the corporate world behind,
and just explore what she might do next with her life.
She says she didn't have a plan.
She started studying her family's history.
She searched and she traveled and she read,
more than a 1000 documents eventually, until she felt compelled
to write a novel based on the lives of her descendants, four generations
of Creole slave women in Louisiana.
Cane River went on to become a best seller and was chosen
for the Oprah Book Club in 2001.
Writing in the pages of Book World, art critics said "Her years
of research show in her careful descriptions
of the slaves' endless tasks and the physical environment,
in a slow accretion of damning details,
Tamedy [sic] shows it was hardly possible
for any slave to know contentment."
Last winter she was back with Red River, a moving, startling novel
about a massacre in 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana,
the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage
in the Reconstruction Period.
In a recent interview she said she'd like to strike out on her own,
in another direction again,
this time by trying her hand at a contemporary novel.
Her mother, she said, had told her it might be time
to "stop putting our family business in the street."
[laughter] Please join me in welcoming Lalita Tamedy.
[applause] Lalita Tademy: Thank you so much.
I do have to make a correction.   It's Lalita Tademy.
But I will tell you that you're in some good company.
As I was doing a book tour for my first book,
it was about 2 months in, I was exhausted going city to city
to city, state to state and I had a woman come up to me and say "Oh,
oh..Miss 'Tadem'y'," she said, "I so loved Cane River.
It's just my favorite book, I loved it so much."
I said "Thank you, I appreciate that.
I do have to tell you, however, that my name is 'Tademy' " and she looked
[laughter] She said "Oprah said 'Tadem'y' " [laughter] I said,
"You know, there are lots of things Oprah knows.
This is one that I know."   [laughter] So, thank you so much.
It was a nice introduction, nonetheless.
So I have a shameful admission, and the shameful admission is
that I am a California Girl -- [hoots and applause] --
born and bred, but my parents were both from Louisiana.
[applause] We have some Louisiana folk here, I can tell.
My parents were both from Louisiana and they moved to California
after their first two children were born, my two older sisters,
and they moved and had two more children, my brother and myself,
so I grew up really being a California person.
But every summer, my mother was so incredibly homesick
that she would load up the car with the four kids and we would drive
for three days straight to get to Colfax, Louisiana,
which is in the center of the state.
It's not even New Orleans, which has a little nightlife happening.
This is Colfax, Louisiana and we would go, again, in the summer --
[laughter] -- hot and humid and dripping,
but this was what Louisiana was.   I discovered at a very early age --
we did this every year from as far back as I can remember --
I discovered at a very early age that if I was very, very quiet
and very still sitting on the front porch as the adults rocked
and talked and snapped peas and did whatever they were doing,
they would forget that I was there and that is
when they would let those juicy stories fly.
I grew up listening to those stories, eavesdropping in effect,
and just soaking it up, absorbing all of it.
But there came a day, one of these years as I was getting older,
that I wanted something more.
I remember crossing the railroad tracks that divided the town
between the white part of the town and the black part of the town.
I remember crossing those railroad tracks to get
down to the city center, which is where the Court House was.
In the Court House there was --
outside of the Court House there was a very large marker,
it was actually a state historical marker, and it said,
"On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men
and 150 Negroes were slain.
This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end
of Carpetbag misrule in the South."
I must have been 11 or 12 and I was appalled by that,
I wasn't totally sure why, but I knew that something was not good.
So I went back to my Aunt Ellen's house, my father's sister,
and I said "Aunt Ellen, what was the Colfax Riot?"
She said, "Oh.   Oh. No. We don't talk about that.
We do not talk about that."
I said "I saw it on a big sign and -- " She said, "I don't know.
We don't talk about that."
You know, she was big, I was little and we didn't talk.
But the next summer when I came, and I got tired of listening
to those some of those same stories on the front porch
and I crossed those railroad tracks again,
this time I went to the Colfax Cemetery.
There was a 12-foot obelisk there, and the obelisk said,
as an inscription, "Erected to the memory
of the heroes Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot
and Sidney Harris who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting
for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873."
This was absolutely shocking to me, and I marched home and I said,
my home for the summer, and I said, "Aunt Ellen,
what was this Colfax Riot?   What was that?"
She says, "No, no.   No, no. We don't talk about that."
And I said, "No, we're going to talk about that today.
I really need to know what it is."   I could see her, sort of mulling
over in her mind whether she was willing to say anything or not,
and I could see her sort of evaluating this little pipsqueak
that she knew would just continue to bother her.
She finally leaned back and she said, "Well, you know,
some of our people were in that and some got out, and some didn't."
I still didn't know what it was,
but I knew that our family was somehow involved
in whatever this incident was.
She never, ever told me anything more than that
"some got out and some didn't."
I went on a very long, involved genealogy search to try to figure
out what the Colfax Riot was.
I wrote Red River to try to really be a dramatization of that event,
those three weeks in 1873, which were really a massacre
of over 150 black men who were defending their right to vote
and the office holders that they had voted into office.
Black men could vote during Reconstruction before
that vote was taken away.
So I reconstructed that in this book, which is the first half
of the book, and the last half of the book talks about their children,
their children's children, their children's children's children
until it gets to my father.
Then it talks about a very sweet love story between my mother
and my father and really the most harrowing incident
of my father's life, which was trying to court my mother,
who was not interested in the beginning.
[laughter] So I thought I would just read to you and then I'm going
to open it up to questions because it's more interesting to me
to know what you have interest in and what you'd like to hear about.
So I'll open it up to questions and I want to leave plenty of time
for that, but I want to do a brief reading first.
This is an incident that happens
when my great-great-grandfather Sam is in the Colfax Court House.
He's defending it, and on the outside they're amassing troops,
actually, white, not military troops,
but many white men are gathering to try to put down the change
of the government for the Republicans.
These are the radical Republicans of the 1800's, the party of Lincoln.
He's thinking back, Sam, is thinking back on when he was a little boy
and it was the first time, and the only time, he ever met his father.
He was a slave boy.   He lived in a cabin with his mother
and his brother Dough [spelled phonetically]
and this is how he got the Tademy name, which he made up,
and which is why I'm so very proud of it.
His father actually comes to the cabin under the cover of darkness.
"You not takin' them," she said, a clampdown in her tone.
The man nodded just once, full of disappointment but yielding.
"Just a few words and then I gotta get gone," he said.
His mother pushed Sam gently toward the stocky, sweating man by the door
and Dough trailed behind.
The man stooped down, eye-level with Sam and took him by both shoulders.
"I's your daddy," he said.
"Your name's Sam like the name they give me."
The man shook with the power of his message.
"And I named you Dara [spelled phonetically],"
the man said to Sam's little brother.
"They call him Dough now," Sam's mother said.
"Sam and Dough?   Those both slave names."
The man whispered, but the voice boomed
in Sam's head as if he shouted.   "Stretch out your hand."
Sam and Dough were slow to respond, looking over to their mother
for a signal of how to act.
She nodded and Sam reached his right hand out for the both
of them, feeling vaguely unsafe.
"Spread your fingers apart far as they go," the man said,
his speech thick, in a timbre unfamiliar to Sam, and Sam complied.
"It's like your arm is the river
and your fingers smaller rivers running to the sea.
The big one is the River Nile.
We come from the part with the little rivers called the Nile Delta.
Alexandria is in Egypt, and Egypt is in Africa.
That's where you're from.   Not this place.
We got a real name, a family name.
My father tell me and now I tell you.
Keep it here."
The man tapped at his head with the broad fingers of his right hand.
Sam's senses were swimming.
He saw the scars more frightening up close
than they had been from across the room.
It was as if the man were trying to eat him up, inhale his very essence,
pressing his urgency on him.
Sam's skin tingled, but he lost some of his fear.
It was as if they were tethered together in the moment,
just the two of them connected for better or worse.
"This is all I got to give you," the man said,
"and can't nobody take it away."
He squeezed Sam's shoulders so tight they began to ache.
"We're from far away.
We wasn't brought to this country as no slaves.
We come free, of our own will, from the Nile Delta,
and my daddy paid passage by a sweat work on a ship s'possed to take him
to a land of opportunity, thinkin' he's comin' to a better place
and they make him a slave after he gets here.
He was born free.
My daddy tell me, and now I tell you."
Little Sam still held his hand out, fingers splayed, afraid to move.
The Nile River?   The Nile Delta?
Born Free?   Our real name Tademy.
The man gently pushed Sam out a little farther away
from him studying his face but still holding him tightly
by both shoulders.   "Say it." Sam looked at his mother.
She was busy cutting off a portion of their weekly ration of bacon
and tying it off in a cloth rag.
Sam could tell she was listening to each word but she kept her back
to them, maintaining her distance, refusing to get
between the man and his two boys.
Sam wasn't going to get any help there.
He turned again to the man calling himself his father.
"Tademy," Sam whispered.   Again the man demanded, "Tademy.
One more time, like it fit your mouth."
"Tademy." "Don't never let go of it.
That's your real name," the man said.
"All's you can do now is whisper, but one day you gonna shout it
out so everybody hear and your children gonna shout it
so they remember who they is.
Again." "Tademy," Sam whispered, wondering what they'd do
if they found his father here in the cabin.
Would they beat him?
Kill him? Would they kill all of them just for listening?
"You a good boy.
You got strong, free-fighters blood in you.
Teach that to your brother, and when you make your own sons,
teach them to shout out the name like they know who they is."
The man let go of Sam and stood erect again.
"You still a fine-lookin' woman," he said to Sam's mother.
"Good luck," she said, her face still arguing
with itself, hard and soft.
She handed him the food wrapped in her headscarf.
"I pray you make it out."
The man accepted the small bundle and stuffed it in the pocket
of his ragged, hand-spun trousers.
He peeked warily out the small window.
"Don't forget," he said to Sam.   "What's your real name?"
"Tademy," repeated Sam.   "Hold on to it.
You a Tademy."
As quickly as he had burst into Sam's life,
the man calling himself Sam's father was out the front door,
out into the deepest darkness of the moonless night.
They never knew whether he made it out of Alabama to a free state
or whether he was caught and taken back to his plantation,
but Sam always remembered the last words he heard his father speak,
"You a Tademy."
[applause] So there are microphones on both sides here
and if anyone has a question,
I would be delighted to entertain them.
Female Speaker: It's very nice to have you here.
I am a big fan of historical novels and my question is,
from your own experience, what do you believe is the appeal
of historical novels to readers in general
as opposed to contemporary novels?
Lalita Tademy: You can all hear the question, right?
Yeah, I've asked myself that same question and even of myself.
What is it about...
I am a real sucker for multi-generational novels,
a real sucker for historical novels, and I think part of it is
that in our schools, we just don't teach history very well
and so we're really trying to connect with what came before.
In a historical novel, you have both the personal as well as the sweep
of history to contend with, and it can really make that connection
that so often is lacking in a clear recitation of names and dates
and this is when this happened and then that happened.
I know in my case, for this historical novel,
for both my first one, Cane River, and for Red River,
people have told me that what has appealed
to them was just the strength of families and what parents will do
for their children, what they will do for the next generation.
I think putting that against the backdrop of history,
and learning history in a different way, this is not a Gone
With the Wind kind of history.
This is from a very different perspective.
I think it enriches everybody to be able to look at those facts
or what have been presented as facts and see it in a different way.
Thank you.   Yes. Female Speaker.
Hi. You mentioned that your Aunt didn't even
like to talk about Colfax.   I'm wondering what your reaction
and your family's reaction was when you wrote about it.
Lalita Tademy: Yes, well this is a little bit of a sore point.
I will talk about both my mother and my aunt.
My Aunt Ellen had been trained from a very early age
that this was not something to talk about.
As a matter of fact, going to Colfax, it's not anything
that anyone in the town wanted to talk about, black or white.
It was a very difficult time, they thought it best put behind them.
My Aunt was really thrilled that I was going
to write a book about this.
It wasn't a subject matter that she could tackle herself or was willing
to tackle herself, but it is something, as she said,
"I'm glad somebody is going to tell the truth."
She was thrilled that I would be able to do that.
Now let me tell you about my mother.
My mother worked very, very, very hard to make sure
that I got a good education,
that I had as many opportunities open to me as possible.
My mother was incredibly proud when I graduated from college.
She was incredibly proud when I got my Masters in business.
She was incredibly proud when I entered the corporate world.
She was incredibly proud when I became a Vice President
of a Fortune 500 company.
She was totally disgusted when I walked away from that.
[laughter] -- totally and completely baffled.
She just couldn't understand how I could do that, and I told her
that I really wanted to go to the next chapter of my life,
and I really wanted to find myself.
She said "You really need to be finding a job,
that's what you need to be finding."
[laughter] So she never really understood it.
For her, it was really two-fold.
Again, for me to poke around in the family stories was putting our
family business in the street.
But also, for me to go all the way back to slavery times was something
that she considered unseemly at best
and something she had worked very hard to make sure
that I never had to look toward.
I felt equally strongly that if you don't talk about things,
you are likely to forget that they existed,
and they need to be documented, especially for African-Americans
where so much is oral history
and not necessarily so much that is written.
So I was just determined and, against her best judgment,
continued on, and she never really understood it until a pivotal point.
When my first book came out, on the first day of publication,
I was in New York and Bryant Gumble was interviewing me
on "The Morning Show."
My brother tells me this, having watched because they were
in the same place, she was watching the TV screen and those interviews,
you know, they're like 3-4 minutes and then they're gone,
so she's watching the interview and she's thinking, "Well,
he's sounding like he's interested."
[laughter] "He's talking to her about this.
They're chatting, they're going back and forth.
This is really amazing."
And she was still trying to process that.
By that time, the interview was over, and her telephone rang,
and it was the pastor of her church,
and the pastor said "Sister Willoughby?"
and she said, "Yes?"
And he said, "I just saw your daughter on TV.
Do you think you could get her to come down and talk at the church?"
[laughter] And my mother said, "That's my child.
I can get her to do anything I want."
[laughter] From then on my mother was golden with this career.
Yes. Margaret Morrison: Lalita,
I don't have a question, I have a statement.
Lalita Tademy: All right.
Margaret Morrison: I'm Margaret Morrison.
Louise Morrison, Louise Smith Morrison was my mother-in-law.
We come from the same family.
Lenora, whom you write in the book, was my mother-in-law's sister.
I have appreciated reading both of your novels,
not only because of how very well-written they are,
but because it brought to life many of the tidbits of oral history
that I've heard through my husband's side of the family.
So I wanted to say hello, and it's really wonderful meeting you
like this.
[applause] Lalita Tademy: Hello.   Hello, Cousin.
I always meet at least one cousin on these.
This is great.   [laughter] Lalita Tademy: Yes.
Female Speaker: Hi.
Thank you for both of your books, they're exceptional.
I have a question.
Have you been back to Colfax since you've written your books?
Did you get a key to the city?
[laughter] What kind of reaction have you received
from the folks down there?
Lalita Tademy: Well, let me give you a little contrast.
I wrote two books, one was called Cane River, a real place,
one is called Red River and that's a representation of Colfax.
When I wrote Cane River, I went back, the mayor gave me a key
to the city, I had a big celebration.
Six years later, I released Red River --
Colfax is about 20 miles away from Cane River --
let's just say, I did not get a key to the city.
[laughter] And it actually didn't have a bookstore and so I appeared
in the Cane River bookstore.
I fully expected it would be split, about half the people would come
from Colfax, about half the people would come from Cane River.
It wasn't split at all.
There were four people from Colfax and they were all related to me --
[laughter] -- and I took them out to dinner afterwards and I asked them
"So what do you think the reaction of this book is in Colfax?"
In a very Southern way, this was so beautifully done,
they didn't answer the question directly.
They just said, "You know?
I bet this book gets a wonderful reception
[laughter] I know there are people in Colfax that do appreciate it,
but this was not a flattering time for just about anybody in 1873,
which is when about half of the book takes place.
So, I've been back, but the reception has been mixed.
Yes. Female Speaker: How do you go
about researching the more recent parts of your family history
where you had people who are still alive, such as your parents,
and did you feel free to make up dialogue?
Lalita Tademy: Yeah, I had to make up dialogue because the majority
of the books, both books, takes place in the 1800s.
As I came closer to the current time, I'll just tell you
that it was a major strategy that I stopped books in the 1930s.
I wanted most people to be safely dead -- [laughter] --
because I knew that that would be an issue.
So, for those people that were still alive, you know, they were elderly,
and their representation was them at a young age,
and they were pretty happy with that portion of it.
But you can really get in trouble, especially if you're dealing
with real people who are still alive
and their memories are very different than your memories are
by design, but it's why I call this book a blend of fact and fiction,
I call it "faction," because it very much is based
on real events that really happened.
All the names in the book are real names of real people, but again,
I wanted to make sure that they were not here
to really either contest or litigate.
[laughter] I think I am done.
So thank you very much.   [applause] [end of transcript]