Elizabeth Shown Mills is a highly acclaimed genealogist who has just completed her first novel. During her 32-year career, she served as president of the American Society of Genealogists and recently retired as editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. The focus of her research was the people who lived on the "island" between the Cane and Red Rivers near Natchitoches, Louisiana. In the South, an "island" may just be an area between two rivers or the area encompassed by a large bend in one river. Her late husband Gary was also closely involved in this research. In fact, his dissertation, The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1977. Mills clearly brings a sense of passion and respect for the families to this "faction," fact told through fiction, as she says.
Her passion does not always translate into good novelistic techniques. Although Mills matured as a novelist as she wrote and brought focus to the story, some of the earlier passages in the book are juvenile in their overblown verbiage. The narrator is providing an account in character- and era-appropriate language when, suddenly, flights of fancy break out. Witness this account of a hurricane which blows up during a wartime trip on the Gulf of Mexico. "Now, amid clear skies, their fleet seemed to rule the Gulf. But the jealous God of the Seas resented the intrusion upon his domain and so, on the third day, Poseidon reared his head, shot his scepter, and roared….Beneath the fleet, the sea began to bulge and boil, as the sky blackened." This description is so out of place that it grates on the ear. Fortunately, these instance are largely confined to the earlier chapters of the novel.
Isle of Canes, especially in its first quarter, is too episodic, a picaresque novel gone awry. This soap opera in words remains unfocused until Pierre Motoyer enters the story, and the story line becomes clearer. In many ways this is Gone With the Wind from a vastly different, but equally, perhaps more important perspective. The issues surrounding slavery and the forces which tore this country apart are nearly always explored from the view of the plantation owner or the poor white farmer, seldom from the perspectives of un home de couleur libre or a slave. Roots is an example which springs immediately to mind. Isle of Canes does not always a positive portrayal of its central characters [The Metoyers are human, after all, complete with warts.], but it surely rings accurate and honest. In sum, the depiction of the Metoyers is a sympathetic and lovingly realized portrait of a real family.
Although the cast of characters is immense [There are eight pages of genealogical charts at the beginning!], the story is remarkably straightforward and clear. The omniscient narrator moves things along as four generations are revealed from 1735 to 1900. Certain characters (Coincoin, Pierre Motoyer, Augustin and Perine Metoyer) are vivid and fully realized in all their strengths and weaknesses. The reader comes to know them and their extensive families. We appreciate their hard work and improbable success; we decry their willingness, especially as people of color and descended from slaves, to own slaves themselves. Yet, when the Civil War comes, we understand their sense of loss as their world turns upside down as surely as did the world of white plantation owners. From enlightened property owners who brought education, religion, and peace to the Isle, they became nearly destitute, but persevered, honor intact. Most tellingly, the central characters break the stereotypic mold too many have come to expect of the South. They are a family. And, "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," according to the author.
