Product Description

Beloved novelist and playwright Thulani Davis takes a journey through her ancestral history and finds tartan plaid, unlikely lovers, and Confederate soldiers.

Starting from a photograph and writings left by her grandmother, acclaimed African-American novelist Thulani Davis goes looking for the "white folk" in her family, a Scots-Irish family of cotton planters unknown to her-and uncovers a history far richer and stranger than she had ever imagined. Her journey challenges us to examine the origins of some of our most deeply ingrained notions about what makes a family black or white, and offers an immensely compelling, intellectually challenging alternative.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1399630 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Soon after former slave Chloe Curry began working as a cook in the Mississippi home of Will Campbell, a former slave-owner, she became pregnant with his child. "She stayed with Will Campbell the rest of his life. And he kept her in his home the rest of his life. With this fact in mind, I can only assume a genuine affection of some depth developed between these two people." In this family history, Chloe and Will's great-granddaughter tries to make sense of their relationship in the context of Reconstruction and its failures. Unfortunately, however, Chloe and Will's 19th-century story, with all of its insights into a larger American history, does not fully emerge until the middle of the book. Descriptions of the author's writer's block, her research difficulties and her anger about the neglect of African-American history bog down the early chapters. Yet Davis (Maker of Saints) succeeds in conveying the precarious position of blacks in the South after the Civil War and her final chapter on the great Mississippi flood of 1927, in which "the lives of blacks were harder hit than others," has eerie parallels with the post-hurricane flooding of New Orleans—just one example of how important it is to understand this period in our common past. (Jan)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
I have an illustration that I've carried around for years. Published in Harper's Weekly on Jan. 31, 1863, it has for a caption: "Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Emancipation." I count 18 black people of all ages sitting on the ground, standing, looking out from their covered wagon. It looks as if they left somewhere in a hurry. A rifle-bearing Union soldier stands at the rear of the wagon. Who are they? Where have they come from? Where are they going? In her engaging new book, Thulani Davis puts flesh on the bones of that etching and also answers my questions deftly and compassionately. She began with a photograph: a late-19th century picture of an ancestor inspired Davis to explore her sprawling family history. "I have tried to stay close to the ground trod by some of the ancestors," she writes, "clinging to them like a shadow and following their trails through events large and small." Her view pans out, tilts up and down to give us an ever-widening and deepening picture of not only her personal story but also the American story -- who we are and what our history has been. Davis provides a vivid portrait of her African American and white forebears, people who crossed paths in war, in work, in slavery, in freedom and, finally, in love. When Will Campbell, the white owner of a plantation in Silver Creek, Miss., and Davis' great-grandmother, freedwoman Chloe Curry (a married new arrival from Alabama) began a "relationship" in the 1870s, it led to earth-shaking fallout for both families, who until that moment had known each other only as master and slave or "boss" and "boy" or "gal" or worse. It's no news that white men in the south used their power to "own" black women sexually. What is news is that sometimes those men evolved and became more responsible as a result of those "relationships"; they took care of their children, and, yes, took care of the women, too. Will Campbell died and left his entire estate to Chloe Curry. They had one child together, Georgia, Thulani Davis's grandmother. Davis's search for her family's true story comes through, too, in excerpts from the exquisitely written book of memories her grandmother, Georgia Neal, was working on but died before completing: "The colored folks began to look upon [Chloe] as the mistress in the big house; she was well-liked as well as feared because she was very frank and too brutally frank. Nites (sic) when she would go home she was too tired to listen to Jims (sic) complaints although she would always take him a pan of food which he never found any fault with. He read his bible every nite and was forever preparing a sermon which he never got a chance to preach." Jim was Chloe's husband at the time. The poignant last line speaks to generations of African American men whose aspirations remained forever out of reach. Jim eventually went back to Alabama. Georgia's unfinished family memoir contains many treasures -- details of the plantation at Silver Creek, the life lived by Will and Chloe in those troublesome days. Chloe found a way to educate all of her children and did the same for other relatives as well. This woman was a miracle of life. Davis, a playwright and author of the novels Maker of Saints and 1959, weaves passages from Georgia's memoir throughout the book while warning us that Georgia may have idealized some aspects of her past. But we hear Chloe and Will and Georgia, too, and we get a compelling portrait of a time and place long gone . We see them in the old photographs that Davis has included. History begins to live and breathe. Davis uncovered a great deal of information about the Campbell branch of her family, including letters that verify travels and travails, records of properties owned, lost, repurchased. She even found transcribed oral histories and short stories. In one letter to their mother, Will's older brother John described a search for escaped slaves during an uncommon snowstorm in the Mississippi Delta: "(We) hunted till night with hope of finding the tracks & then all night again & the next day & the next day & and could hear nothing of them & I gav (sic) them as lost...." Through Davis's dogged research and fine common-sense wisdom, her personal family history ascends to the epic. We journey with the Campbell branch of the family, these hearty people who would be planters, from Tennessee to Missouri, to Texas and Mississippi in pursuit of the riches to be gained from the plantation system and King Cotton. In loosely alternating chapters, we also travel with the Tarrant/Curry branch of her family, who had been enslaved in Alabama since before the Civil War, and watch them struggle with meager material resources to build a new life in freedom after the war. The book weaves these disparate, intimate histories into one compelling tale and gives us, at the same time, a detailed and lively rendering of Reconstruction. Davis tells us that she is neither a historian nor a genealogist: "But I am a journalist, who is, like many in my trade, very curious, very stubborn ... So this text is not a history nor a genealogy but built from my own great interests: how we define being American, how we deal with race, and human character." Readers will joyfully discover that she really is both a genealogist and a tamer of history. Denise Nicholas is the author of "Freshwater Road," a novel.

Reviewed by Denise Nicholas
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Starting with photographs and writings left by her grandmother, novelist and playwright Davis traces the "white folks" in her ancestry, finding Scots-Irish cotton planters and Confederate soldiers. Davis' grandmother had been working on a novel about her parents--Chloe Curry, a former slave from Alabama, and Will Campbell, a white planter from Missouri. Davis was able to trace her family through the South to Sierra Leone, uncovering influences of Scots-Irish, African Temne, and American Choctaw. Guided by her own idiosyncratic notions of culture and family, she learned of a long lineage of writers and people longing for self-expression. Davis takes the reader on a genealogical search that is particular for her family but common for African Americans, exploring the myths of kindness and beneficence on the part of slave masters and the tangle of incomplete records that cloud the ability to research slave genealogy. This book will intrigue readers interested in genealogy and a personal view of slavery. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Black Liberation Struggle is More Than Just the Civil Rights Movement

When most of us think about Black liberation struggles, the first thing that comes to mind is the American Civil Rights Movement of the `50s and `60s. Numerous women and men used their creativity and ingenuity to challenge nefarious Jim Crow laws and the de facto segregation that permeated every aspect of life in this country. In doing so, they often endangered their lives, and the lives of those who loved them - a risk they deemed ultimately worth the reward of social, political and economic equality they were fighting for.

Although this is a period of history which certainly deserves our attention, writer Thulani Davis suggests that the history of American Reconstruction is just as, or even more deserving of study, because of the world that the newly freedmen and freedwoman tried to form, against opposition that was many times more formidable and vicious than that of their descendants a century later.

In her new book, My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-first Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots, Davis writes, "The first women and men to walk away from bondage reinvented the race, redefined the terms of American citizenship, and spread the blend of African and EuroAmerican culture created in bondage in the American South. Never has one group of people acted on such a large scale in so many regions of the country at once to push the society to honor its foundational principles. They taught the rest of us how to do it and yet there is no cultural memory of those millions," (pg. 6).

It is this cultural amnesia that Davis seeks to cure, through an in-depth exploration of the tangled cords of her own family and ancestors, many of them freedwomen and men, some of them White planters, all of them striving to reach their individual, familial and societal goals through the often contradictory terrain of nineteenth century America.

"Researching family history in this country puts you face to face with that seminal American habit of leaving the past behind for a new self, new wealth, new chances, and all their complications - name changing, multiple migrations, and the constant repetition in the naming of towns, churches, graveyards, and slaves," (pg. 9.), Davis writes, in an introductory chapter filled with brilliant insights and revelatory connections.
She adds in a later chapter, however, that finding information about her White ancestors was infinitely easier than finding information about the Black ones. "My dogs have more documentation of their existence than most of my forebearers. Considerably more," (pg. 69), says Davis. While this didn't surprise her, it did take its emotional toll. "I have been extremely lucky [in my research], and luck is important, yet sometimes I have had to just cry when five minutes on the internet can turn up over 500 Mississippi lynching victims on one site, and days of research can result in no information whatsoever on the individuals who were lynched," (pg. 71).

Although the narrative sometimes gets overburdened by the weight of too many names, third cousins, small Mississippi towns, and incidental Civil War skirmishes, Davis succeeds in her task to lay out the daily struggles that both her White and Black ancestors faced during the Reconstruction period. In doing so, she simultaneously reveals how the options these people faced were absolutely over-determined by their race, and how the category of race in America is largely false.

"One cannot be completely explained by anything, thank God, but it would be easier to build selves less fictional and community less mythical if the truth of American heritage was accepted. This country has been crazy to make people black or white ever since Thomas Jefferson thought a system should be devised and made law," (pg. 12), writes Davis, whose grandmother was the product of a rich White Mississippi planter and his Black house "servant."

True to her stated intent, the bulk of My Confederate Kinfolk centers on the African Americans who strived to make a life for themselves in the wake of Emancipation - specifically those freed people in Mississippi gained political power in the "reformed" state legislature, only to be killed for it in what the White elite of the day termed "the Redemption." Indeed, Davis narrates a shocking and gruesome story of the state elections of 1875, in which "all the black office holders were hunted down or run out of town," (pg. 38). Local organizers, teachers, church leaders, and even state representatives were lynched, shot, stabbed and/or beaten. Some narrowly escaped this fate. One man, James G. Patterson, a Republican member of the Mississippi House of Representatives (one of its first Black members) is suspected of being lynched at the home of one of Davis' ancestors.

Davis argues that the history of Mississippi, and many other Southern states that faced a similar backlash from white racists after emancipation would have been quite different if Blacks had been able to keep office there, and build up some political and economic power. She also says that not knowing our history is what keeps African Americans, and other marginalized groups, continually at a disadvantage.
"If I told someone tomorrow that white supremacists ran black people on their tickets in 1875 to get black people to sign on for the worst possible agenda of their lives, most people wouldn't believe it. Do we even know black people in Mississippi could vote then? If I said it happened in Chicago this year, they would. These scenarios continue to be utilized because we continue to ignore our past," (pg. 14), she writes.

Davis' book, although digging in deeply to just one moment of American history, could go a long way towards making that past real to this generation. I certainly have not encountered a story as mutifaceted and vital on Reconstruction as the one Davis puts forth in My Confederate Kinfolk. The lives and determination of the freedwomen and men she documents are as inspiring as they are tragic. Still, the only hope for their ultimate redemption would seem to lie in the here and now.

It's Mostly About the Confederate Kinfolk
Just as it says, this book is mostly about the author's Confederate kinfolk. As she says, it's easier to find out information about them. A lot of them left diaries and letters. I kept waiting to learn more about her tremendous great-grandmother, but by the end of the book, I realized that it truly was about her white kinfolk. She'll have to write another book to detail the story of her black kinfolk. I was fascinated by this book because I have relatives of that same era that I am trying to find out about, but there is so little documentation. Only one of my great grandparents could read and write. He was a Union soldier, but since his future wife could not read or write, there would have been no point in him writing to her, and so there are no existing letters from him to her from which we could learn about their experiences at the time.

This book goes into great detail about the comings and goings of her white ancestors, at least some of whom tried to write "family" histories. Of course, they made little direct acknowledgement, or at least written acknowledgement, of their non-white kin, namely the author's grandmother.

I love family pictures. Unfortunately, we don't have pictures of some of the people in our family that I would most like to see. There are pictures of the author's white kin, and of her great grandmother, and oblique references to her by the white kin, but it is difficult to document the story of people who were prevented and penalized from reading and writing. The oral history died with the participants, and some stories that were passed down sometimes went no further than a hearer who declined to pass those stories on. This, for me, is one of the saddest legacies of American slavery.

I enjoyed this book because I have been in the same boots as the author trying to find out family history with very little documentary information to go on, and deep regret that I was not interested enough, or old enough, or knowledgeable enough to ask the oldest family members about their memories of those who went before while they were still alive.

A memoir and a history
When author Thulani Davis' grandmother died in 1971, she was writing a novel about her Mississippi cotton farmer parents. Her grandmother left a photo and writings, prompting Davis to look for the 'white folk' in her family: a genealogical odyssey which was to uncover many riches. MY CONFEDERATE KINFOLK is at once a memoir and a history: it tells of a journey across the South to uncover truths, connections, and a rich set of roots, and reveals many political insights as well.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch