Red River by Lalita Tademy

At some point in our lives, we all took a history class and learned about the Slave Trades, the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. Whether it was in elementary school, high school, or even in college, we all got a sense of that history and happened during that time frame. From what I learned, the impression that I got from what these history books were explaining was that, first, white people went to Africa and gathered hundreds and thousands of people, took them on boats to and turned them into slaves. Then after years have passed, good ol’ President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and blacks and whites lived equally ever after. Although these events did happen, textbooks still managed to “sugarcoat” the situation and keep out some of the major key factors, like how Africans were still mistreated and dehumanized by the white man, out. The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendment were created so that slavery would stay abolished, defined a citizen, and allowed African American men to vote, white people still had a way to go around these amendments and make the black man feel inferior to them. Violence struck everywhere (especially in the south), and colts, such as the KKK, were created so that they will be feared by colored people. A lot of public buildings and schools were made off limits to African Americans and only educated those who were white. So why is it that we were taught in our textbooks that white and black men were equal when they clearly were not? In Lalita Tademy’s novel, Red River, she tells the story of the struggle the Tademy and the Smith family had to go through for many generations. The year was 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana; it was the time after the Civil War had ended between the Union and the Confederate states in the United States, and the beginning of the Reconstruction Era. The book began by