When the urge hit her, Lalita Tademy was corporate vice president of Sun Microsystems: "I had the feeling there was something else I was supposed to do." While she was deciding what that something else was, Tademy spent two years researching "the slave branch" of her family, "my mother's side." Returning to her ancestors' Cane River roots, she scouted old sharecroppers' farms; ransacked old courthouse archives; plotted a paper trail from grueling bondage to better days. Then, discovering what "I was supposed to do," she sat down to write this novel about the lives of slaves who were never allowed to write it themselves. Genealogy with wings.

Ophrah's Book Club