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''Isle of Canes'' (ISBN 1-59331-306-3), a novel by Elizabeth Shown Mills, follows an African family from its importation and enslavement in 1735 through four generations of freedom in Creole Louisiana to its re-subjugation by Jim Crow at the close of the nineteenth century. Mills explores the family's "struggle to find a place in () tightly defined world of black and white" 〔''Rolling On,'' July 2004〕 — a world made more complex by the larger struggle of Louisiana's native ''ancien regime'' to preserve its culture amid the Anglo-Protestant "invasion" that followed the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the resulting battle for political and social hegemony. ''Isle's'' central theme is the ambiguous lives of those who escaped colonial slavery only to find they could not survive as free without complicity in the slave regime. The novel's subject-family is one that has been both romanticized and excoriated by journalists, academics, descendants, and current websites over the past half-century.〔For a basic bibliography of the most-used works, see (). Annotations identify those that are peer reviewed or otherwise carry extensive documentation.〕 ''Isle's'' interpretation of their controversial role is based heavily on the author's original research across three decades in the archives of six nations, and actual documents are interspersed throughout the novel. The author's research began in 1972 when she was employed by a preservation society to document the history of one Isle landmark, Melrose Plantation.〔"Foreword," ''Isle of Canes,'' xi-xiii.〕 Critical assessments of ''Isle of Canes'' focus on its upturning of stereotypes. ''Contemporary Lit'' describes the focus as "''Gone with the Wind'' from a vastly different, more important perspective ... not that of the plantation owner or the poor white ... but ''homme de couleur libre'' and slave ... capturing the agonizing decisions which tore families and communities apart." ''Historical Novels Review'' similarly observes, "The Metoyers, a historical family both black and white and yet neither, challenge all perceptions of racial boundaries. You may never look at American History the same way again."〔Sarah Johnson, ''Historical Novels Review,'' 28 (May 2004), 42.〕 The Isle community is also the focus in Lalita Tademy's Oprah Book Club pick, ''Cane River''.〔New York: Warner Books, 2001.〕 Mills's ''Isle'' explores the colonial roots of the community and the experience of slaves who achieved freedom prior to the onset of Louisiana's Creole-Anglo conflict. Tademy's story, whose earliest slave generations are based upon research by Mills and her daughter,〔That research is chronicled in Rachal Mills Lennon and Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Mother, Thy Name is ''Mystery!'' Finding the Slave who Bore Philomene Daurat,” in ''Reassembling Female Lives, a Special Issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly'' 88 (September 2000): 201–28.〕 portrays the mid-nineteenth– and early-twentieth-century experiences of the community's slave families who envied, respected, and resented the free status of the Isle's ''Creoles de couleur libre''—some of whose blood they shared. A third, much older novel, Lyle Saxon's ''Children of Strangers,''〔New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1937.〕 depicts the state of servitude into which the Islanders were subjected by the early twentieth-century. Saxon's era was one in which the chatelaine of the family's last remaining manor house (Melrose Plantation, a National Historic Landmark since 1976) was an Anglo patroness of the arts, who encouraged Saxon to visit and "observe" the community first hand. Saxon's portrayal captures the mindset of that era's white population, who vacillated between economic exploitation of the Islanders, sexual attraction to their women, and a paternalistic view of the multiracial Creoles as "simple people, but our people." Historians struggle to understand the complexities of the Peculiar Institution—particularly the motivation that compelled a significant number of freed American slaves to purchase other humans once free to do so. Edward P. Jones lays out one psychological path in ''The Known World'' 〔New York: Amistad, 2003.〕 creating a fictional anti-hero, the Black Virginian Henry Townsend, who is consumed by his self-centered ambition. ''Isle of Canes'' reconstructs the world of an actual family to define a radically different but equally uncomfortable trajectory by which more than a few ex-slaves survived a status many historians consider "neither slave nor free."〔Pioneers of this theme are David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds.,'' Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World'' (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); and Ira Berlin, ''Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South'' (New York: Pantheon Book, 1974). More recently, H. Sophie Burton has analyzed the struggle for economic viability by freed slaves in colonial Louisiana in "Free People of Color in Spanish Colonial Natchitoches: Manumission and Dependency on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1766–1863," ''Louisiana History'' 45 (Spring 2004): 173-97.〕 ==Major characters== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Isle of Canes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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