Isle of Canes

by Elizabeth Shown Mills

Overview

Isle of Canes is the epic account of an African-American family in Louisiana that, over four generations and more than 150 years, rose from the chains of slavery to rule the Isle of Canes. Historically accurate and genealogically significant, this first novel by eminent genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills is a gripping tale of racial bias, human conflict, and economic ruin told against the backdrop of colonial Louisiana. This novel is the result of more than thirty years of research. To fuel the story, as well as to maintain historical accuracy, the author found and referenced actual family history documents such as baptism records, manumission papers, probate records, land records, book extracts, and more to reconstruct the lives and times of Francois, Fanny, Coincoin, Augustin, and countless other unforgettable characters. But it takes more than documents on paper and microfilm to bring such an epic story to life. Mills' engaging prose puts flesh on the bones and pulls you into the lives and lifestyle of long-ago Louisiana."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593313067
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	09/01/2006
Pages:	583
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.22(d)

About the Author

Mills is a historical writer who has spent her life studying Southern culture and the relationships between people

Read an Excerpt

“Papa? More gruel? We must keep up your strength.”

François barely heard the words. His mouth moved mechanically as the warm mush was injected, but his mind struggled feverishly to find some meaning to his life.

Coincoin. His little goddess. His and Fanny’s gift to a world that had given them so little. Long ago, or was it yesterday? He had sat out on the edge of a broad hill and watched his little girl grow up. No, she didn’t grow up, either. She had always been grown. What was it he had thought that night? That Destiny surely had greater things in mind when she created this woman-child? Yes! Fanny’s destiny was not dead! She had bequeathed it to this daughter, and Coincoin would fulfill it! Only she didn’t know! Fanny had not told her!

A rash of words then spilled from his swollen lips as he gave his second-born daughter answers to all the questions he and Fanny had never let her ask; as he bared to her his soul, his sins, his failings, as though she were a priest administering to him the last holy rites; as he sang for her the praises of his princess that were not sung at her ignominious burial and then lay before Coincoin the key to her past and the door to her future.

As suddenly as it had come, the tempest from François’s soul subsided and he lay still. For hours, or minutes, it could have been either Coincoin sat in the shadows of the great four-poster that ruled over the little cabin they called home. Death this day had wrenched from her the only meaning her life had known, the very source from which she had sprung. Yet, for what it took, it gave a measure in return. Over and again her mind repeated a single line from the communion prayer that the reverend father chanted at each Sunday’s Mass: Dying, he gave new life. Dying, he gave new life. And in her grief, Coincoin felt no sense of sacrilege at this blurring of the image of her father and her Savior.

She rose, slowly, as tall and graceful as the goddess he thought she was. Bending across the big bed, she kissed her father good-bye. No fear of mortal plague could come between them at this last parting for she, too, shared her father’s knowledge that the hour of her destiny had not yet come. She still lived, because she was meant for something more in life than that which life had given them. The vague ache she had always known deep within her soul had a name now, and she knew its meaning and her mission.

“One day, Papa, Mama!” she cried, thrusting her face toward heaven as she pounded with both hands on the bed post where Fanny had fallen. “One day, Mama’s dream will happen! One day, we shall be free again! Free! And proud! And noble! And men will bow before us, and we will never have to say ‘Yes, Madame’ or ‘No, Madame’ to anyone unless we choose to. We will be free! This, I promise!”

Table of Contents

	The Families	xi
	Prologue: Circa 1900 The Memory-keeper	1
Part 1	1742-1758 The Promise	11
Part 2	1765-1781 The Price	89
Part 3	1788-1816 The Planting	207
Part 4	1816-1856 The Reaping	351
Part 5	1859-1876 The Reaving	471
	Epilogue: Circa 1900 The Rekindling	567
	Afterword	577
	A Note about Sources	581
	About the Author	587

What People are Saying About This

Lalita Tademy

The name Mills has long been synonymous with Cane River history. Elizabeth's books on the river's people were a window into the past for me when I began my own search for enslaved forebears.
—author of the New York Times bestseller Cane River

Interviews

A Conversation with Elizabeth Shown Mills about her new book Isle of Canes:

 

Q: What is this book about?

 

MILLS: Isle of Canes is a story of multiracial America and its historic struggle to make a place for itself in a world that has insisted one must be either black or white. It is a story of personal conflict between a slave’s hunger for freedom and the freedman’s struggle for survival in a slave regime. It’s a story of the cultural clash between the Latin and Anglo South over the issues of race and civil rights for those who were free but not white.  It’s a story of sexual and emotional dynamics that transcend race. Above all, it is the story of family, and how pride in one’s roots can sustain generations of people through all adversities.

 

Q: What role did genealogy play in the creation of this novel?

 

MILLS: Truly, it provided the bones, flesh, heart, mind, and soul for all the Islanders whose story it tells. Genealogy is history up close and personal. When we personalize history, we make it real. Studying the individual lives of people, as I’ve done with the Islanders for the past thirty-five years, gives us a much clearer window through which to see the world. It shows us, starkly, the human costs of decisions made by politicians and generals, and it leaves us with a much truer understanding of why our society is the way it is.

 

Q: What compelled you to write this book?

 

MILLS: Ah, what writer can resist when a story cries to be told! The life that existed for Louisiana’s Creoles of color is a chapter of America’s past that few people have seen or heard. In part, it has been simply neglected amid our country’s traditional emphasis on Anglo-Protestant roots. In part, it has been purposefully ignored because it raises issues we, as a nation, are uncomfortable with. On matters of slavery and race, we favor stereotypes—we grasp for black and white answers—because those are easier to deal with than shades of gray. But the life that once existed on Cane River’s Isle goes way beyond the gray-scale. The Islanders’ story paints the complexities of human life in glorious Technicolor that is both painful and inspiring.

 

Q: How did you discover this story?

 

MILLS: As a young wife and mother, I went to Louisiana’s Cane River in search of my children’s roots. As my study of the region became known, the local preservation society asked me to conduct a historical-site documentation project. It had been given a plantation home and estate grounds that it hoped to place on the National Register. In the end, the story that emerged was so fantastic the site was declared a National Historic Landmark. In peeling away layers of lore and controversy, we discovered that the home, known as Melrose, was only one of a dozen or more mansion houses that once graced the Isle and that the land on which Melrose stood was part of a plantation empire of 18,000 acres founded by a family of freed slaves under the more-tolerant culture of French and Spanish Louisiana.

 

Q: What is the relationship between fact and fiction in your novel?

 

MILLS: Faction is the best word to describe the Isle of Canes.  The story is drawn from thousands of documents unearthed in archives from Canada to Cuba to Mexico to France to Spain—research I personally conducted, individually and together with my late husband, a historian also. What’s more, the sheer size of the family—a cast of over a thousand in its first century and a half—offers a fantastic pool from which to draw the most representative characters in each generation. Yet no amount of records could ever chronicle all the intimate details of an individual life, and a storyteller must color in the blanks left by the written record. Because I’ve spent thirty-five years studying not just the Islanders but all the families with whom they lived, loved, labored, and sometimes feuded, I am confident I have painted my backdrops and clothed my characters as faithfully as a storyteller possibly could.

 

Q. What do you hope your readers will take with them after they finish Isle of Canes?

 

MILLS: That everyone deserves a chance to live up to their potential. That people are individuals and no one deserves to have labels forced upon them. That life’s choices have always been far more complicated than we assume from the stereotyped portrayals of history and that the past cannot fairly be measured by modern ideals. Above all, that family is the bedrock upon which all societies are built and that family should be—and can be—the haven that nurtures each new generation.

Editorial Reviews

Mills is a master story teller, bringing to vivid life untold pieces of our country’s hsitory.
—author of the New York Times bestseller Cane River

Lalita Tademy

A masterpiece. You may never look at American history the same way again.

Historical Novels Review

In language that flows like poetry... issues of race and social standing are portrayed with an honesty that is rare in southern literature.

City Social Magazine