From the Author
Cane River stole my heart in 1970. As a young wife and mother, I went there to find my children’s roots, never suspecting that a bout of curiosity would turn into a lifelong love affair.

I found its people to be a puzzle. Cloutiers, Derbannes, Duprés, La Cours and Le Courts, Lecomtes, Prudhommes, and Rachals. They came in many shades. They gave their children the same names. They worshipped in the same churches but, curiously, in different wings—one for whites, one for blacks, and one for those considered to be neither. They shared not only the same river but the same records, challenging modern researchers to sort them out. Among them, like the glue that held them all together, lived the Metoyers, a family that intrigued me although I could find no place for them on our family charts.

Cane River fever spread within our household. My husband, a young historian, was duly cautioned by his department head “not to get involved with genealogy or his career would be ruined”—a warning common to the era but one he proceeded to ignore. My mother-in-law took me back to Cloutierville and taught me the way her people thought—they and the neighbors who shared their lives and some of the same ancestral lines. As I gathered their stories and struggled to chart out their connections on mammoth rolls of newsprint, my three-year-old joined me on the floor to “write Rachals,” as she put it. Her affinity for that family name was not surprising. It was the one we had, perhaps with premonition, given her at birth.

In 1972, my hobby became a profession. The Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches had been gifted with the estate grounds of a plantation steeped in lore and wracked with controversy. If legend could be believed, it dated to the colonial era, during which it had been founded by a freed slave woman variously known as Marie Thérèse or Coincoin. My charge was to document its history. The hope was to earn a slot on the National Register of Historic Places. As often was the case, the legend strayed here and there from the facts of history, like partners in a waltz who touch and twirl together then swing away to tease and flirt with others before coming back into each other’s arms. Yet the story that emerged from thousands of records scattered across six nations, was even more incredible. By the time the project ended, the fabled plantation actually founded by Coincoin’s son Louis—and known now as Melrose on the Cane—was proclaimed a National Historic Landmark.

Even then, Cane River and its Isle still held the Millses in their grip. Bridging the traditional divide between academic and family history, my husband adopted the Isle for his doctoral dissertation. The parish of Natchitoches continued to be our “other home,” and the Metoyers who carved a civilization out of the canebrakes became our “adopted family.” Inevitably, Gary’s career would take him elsewhere, but mine would stay rooted along that mystic river.

Gary’s dissertation, which Louisiana State University Press published in 1977 as The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color, reconstructs the socio-economic history of the Isle from the naked bones of the documentary record. Beyond those bones, however, there was a heart throbbing with family stories left untold, a soul formed by the society that spawned rich traditions, and the flesh of historical context that was colored by all the families with whom the Metoyers lived, worked, loved, and feuded. In Isle of Canes, the heart, soul, flesh, and bones are made one.