Title: Shake Your Tree: Memoirs of Marie Claire, Always Creole and Always a Proud Colored Former Slave Owner
Author: Paulette Fenderson Hebert
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1663219001
Pages: 112
Genre: Historical Fiction
Reviewed by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
Miss Marie Claire, a 105-year-old Creole woman in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, has seen multiple wars, upheavals, good times and lean years. She reflects on these with “Mr. Census taker”, a young man from the federal government who knocks on her door, seeking demographic information.
Miss Marie Claire tells him, “You see, young man, before the Civil War, Louisiana had three classes of people: White, Colored, and slave. The White and the Colored classes shared the same rights and privileges. After Louisiana became a state in 1812, the Americans tried to change our way of life. They did not understand the Colored people owning plantations and slaves. Of course, they did not understand our blood kinship with our White relatives and their respect of us. The Americans tried in the 1820s and the 1840s to pass laws to limit our rights. For example, one of their laws forbade us to own slaves. But we did!”
These notions inform all of Marie Claire’s rambling, delightful, grievously detailed story. At times her account – making the most of an extremely clever narrative device – reads like the Book of Genesis: this one begat that one who married who begat that one...But the history is told with homily, authenticity and spice, and even disbelievers among the audience are in for a real treat.
The author explains at the outset that this is book is part historical fiction – lots of history, with a soupçon of fancy and fiction thrown in. Turns out the main premises of the story are borne out: “free men and women of color” (fwc and fmc, for short) married into white families; owned plantations; dressed fancy; had arranged marriages; and even fought for the Confederacy. True geographic and historic references in this book abound, including Pointe Coupee Parish (of course), False River, and Bienville. Shake Your Tree meanders into Historic Controversy Land, siding with those who maintain that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states’ rights – and big money. Throughout Miss Marie Claire’s tale, concepts that may rankle for some flourish, including Blacks with ‘pedigree’, Black slaveowners, and diminished well-being after the Civil War for the black minority who were land-and-slave owners.
The book has much to delight. There are extended and graphic descriptions of wedding preparations, and a murder to boot. Marie Claire explains to the wide-eyed census taker the meaning of words like ‘quadroon’, ‘octoroon’, ‘mulatto’, and ‘Creole.’ The excursions into little known areas of American history are nothing short of remarkable. Marie Claire (who says her father was a veteran of the Revolutionary War) digresses but keeps us on the edge of our seats describing how territorial conflict between the British and French played out in 18th century America. The pervasive influence of French culture – the names of towns, the names of people, the lasting influence in Louisiana of the Napoleonic Code – is evident throughout. The centenarian raconteuse further describes, in somewhat veiled terms, the machinations of ‘The Organization’, which often took the law of the parishes and bayou country into its own hands. Marie Claire pulls no punches, and discloses the incursions of corruption among the landed gentry of that time and place.
Miss Marie Claire’s advice to the government man may well ring true: “Just shake your tree, son – you never know who or what will fall out.”
