Last night, Ellen Sussman hosted a reading and party in her home for Lalita Tademy, author, most recently, of the novel Red River, a multi-generational story inspired by the men in her family. The first half of the novel centers on the Colfax Massacre, an actual event which took place on Easter Sunday, 1873, in the town of Colfax, Louisiana, and resulted in the deaths of 280 black men.

Tademy read a moving piece about how one of her ancestors refused his slave name and instead handed down to his sons the name he brought to America from Africa–noting that he had actually worked for passage on a ship to America, in search of a better life, but upon his arrival here had been forced into slavery. During an informative Q&A, she talked candidly about the experience of writing Cane River and Red River–emotionally exhausting–and the reception by her mother–who was reluctant to embrace Tademy’s writing career until she saw her daughter being interviewed on television one morning by Bryant Gumble, and minutes later received a call from her pastor saying, “Isn’t that your daughter? Could you come get her to speak at our church?” Tademy also talked about the difficulty she had getting Red River published, despite the astounding Oprah-driven success of her first book, Cane River, in large part because Red River was a book about men, and her publishers wanted her to write another “woman’s book.” When I asked Tademy about the reception to the book in Colfax, she said it had been mixed; a lot of people in Colfax felt she had portrayed their town unfairly, and many wanted to sweep the whole massacre under the rug of history. Tademy, who grew up in California, used to make summer visits to Colfax, her mother’s hometown, as a child. I also got a chance to talk to her brother Lee, who spent a couple of summers in Tuskegee as a child 50 years ago.

All in all a lovely event, very well-attended by writers and readers alike.