When We
Were Apart
Two children sent downriver in 1867 — and a family divided across a century by silence, by the river, and by the institutions that decided who they were permitted to be.
In 1867, two children are sent downriver from a Freedmen’s Bureau home farm in Vidalia, Louisiana, beyond the reach of a danger their parents can no longer protect them from. It is the last time their family will be whole.
In New Orleans, Artimese and Dewitt pass through the classrooms of the newly founded Straight University and into a world remaking itself after slavery. But freedom does not mean safety, and the institutions that promise refuge also possess the power to rename, classify, separate, and erase.
One grows up and marries a prominent white Louisiana man who never learns who she really is, resisting him in private through acts whose meaning stays hidden even from her own sister. More than a century later, their descendant Carly receives a DNA result she did not expect — and follows the thread back to the home farm, and to a family story no one person was ever allowed to know in full.
The DNA test solves nothing. It is only the door back into a house the family never truly left.
Lara Catledge Reedick
Lara writes about inheritance: the stories families tell, the histories they conceal, the habits we carry, and the obligations that survive forgetting. She moves between personal essay, spiritual reflection, humor, and historically grounded fiction — drawn to the places where ordinary lives meet larger systems of family, faith, race, and history.
Her work is plainspoken but morally serious, attentive to context, and interested in the possibility that remembrance itself can be a form of repair. When We Were Apart is her first novel.
A Working Shelf
The histories, archives, and scholarship the novel is built upon.
Notes from the Work
Updates on the novel’s progress, research discoveries, and excerpts.
John Roy Lynch (1847–1939) Historical research keeps changing the map on me. When I first began writing When We Were Apart, I thought about Vidalia and Natchez the way most of us probably
Read the noteSo far these field notes have been about the scaffolding of writing a novel — the archives, the registers, the long chase after a name. Today I want to share something from inside the walls
Read the noteCharles H. L. Pierre (1814 – after 1886) Historical research is full of people who refuse to remain in the margins. You begin by looking for one person, one school, one church register, one family
Read the note