''Cane River'' is a 2001 family saga by Lalita Tademy. It was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. Beginning with her great-great-great-great grandmother, Elizabeth a slave owned by a Creole family, Lalita Tademy’s historical fiction novel chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women as they battle injustice to unite their family and forge success on their own terms. They are women whose lives begin in slavery, who weather the Civil War, and who grapple with contradictions of emancipation, Jim Crow, and the pre-Civil Rights South. The culture she explores, that of slaves who remained in bondage until after the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...

, bears some core similarities but radical dissimilarities to that of

Cane River Cane River (''Rivière aux Cannes'') is a riverU.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map, accessed June 3, 2011 formed from a portion of the Red River that is located in Natchitoches Pa ...

's Melrose-St. Augustine society, whose families had lived as free from the late Spanish period of

Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is borde ...

history.

Notes

2001 novels Family saga novels Novels about American slavery Novels set in Louisiana {{2000s-family-novel-stub