Outside the contemporary cast-stone courthouse in Colfax, La., in a dirt yard cluttered with acorns, stands a historic marker commemorating the “Colfax Riot.” According to the inscription, “three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of the carpetbag misrule in the South.”
Nearby, in the cemetery of this bucolic backwater 100 miles south of Shreveport, a marble obelisk stands marking “the Heros…Who Fell in the Colfax Riot Fighting for White Supremacy.” There is nothing there to remind anyone of the 150 African- Americans who died that same day.
The townspeople who erected the memorial to the three whites concluded that the black men had gotten what they deserved.
To the white men who were in Colfax that Easter Sunday more than 125 years ago, “uppity” former slaves were indeed the cause of the riot. The blacks had elected their own candidate, albeit a white man, as sheriff and had taken over the courthouse to make sure a white mob would not oust the official.
To the black defenders of the courthouse, men who had dared to vote for the first time in the South, protecting the courthouse was a duty of their newly won freedom. The white men who attacked them with guns and cannon were murderers, they said, and the fight was not a riot but a massacre. Indeed, one historian refers to the Easter Sunday bloodletting as “the bloodiest single act of carnage in all of Reconstruction.”
Lalita Tademy, author of the novel “Cane River,” came across references to the Colfax Riot when she was researching family history. Instead of writing a history of the event, she decided to combine her two interests – the massacre and genealogy – in a novel. In “Red River,” four generations of Tademy’s family play roles in the massacre and its aftermath.
The patriarchs are Sam Tademy and Israel Smith, the author’s great-great-grandfathers. Sam leaves the courthouse that fateful day in 1873 to look after the families of other militants and misses the shooting, but Israel is among those who surrender or are captured. Most were subsequently hanged or shot by the white men.
Badly wounded, Israel plays dead and lives the remaining few years of his life as maimed in mind as he is in body. Sam, on the other hand, emerges convinced that the only hope for the children of former slaves is education. His goal is a “colored” school.
The two men pass on their dreams to their children, primarily sons Jackson Tademy and Noby Smith, Lalita Tademy’s great-grandfathers, then to Jackson’s and Noby’s sons, and eventually to Ted Tademy, the author’s father.
Lalita Tademy’s accounts of the massacre and the murder of the black participants are spellbinding. The reader knows from the beginning that the blacks are doomed to lose and that retribution will be awful. You can smell the fear and the gunpowder and the despair of the former slaves as they face death. Yet you can’t help hoping the men will somehow come through all right. But there is no justice for blacks in the Reconstruction South in 1873, nor is there a generation later when Noby stands up to a white man and is forced to flee for his life.
Most of “Red River,” especially the events at the Colfax courthouse, is absorbing reading. But the story falls apart when Tademy reaches her father’s generation. Perhaps that’s because it is easier to make up facts and dialogue about ancestors you never knew.
While that is disappointing, “Red River,” for the most part, is a compelling dramatization of a shameful chapter of Civil War-era history. You can’t help but hope that the book causes someone to rewrite the history on that courthouse sign.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist and freelance writer.
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Red River
By Lalita Tademy
Warner, 432 pages, $24.99
