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Summary
Summary
A story of slavery's lasting power traces the Black and white sides of a slaveholding family's history, showing the inspiring rise of the family's Black descendents and the fall of the formerly wealthy whites.
Author Notes
Henry Wiencek was born in Boston and educated at Yale. He has contributed articles to American Heritage, Smithsonian, and other publications, and is the author of a number of books, including Mansions of the Virginia Gentry, Plantations of the Old South, and Old Houses. He was the editor of the twelve-volume Smithsonian Guide to Historic America and wrote two volumes in that series. He lives in Virginia with his wife, the writer Donna Lucey, and their son, Henry.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Covering similar ground as Edward Ball's National Book Award-winning Slaves in the Family, Wiencek steps gracefully through the intricate web that links two family trees, one white and one black. Because it's not his own family history he explores, Wiencek doesn't labor under the burden of personal moral accountability that made Ball's book so powerful. He intends his book as a national "parable of redemption"and he succeeds, admirably, in presenting the Hairstons as a metaphor for the nation while also presenting the specificity of their history, which he learned by traveling through three Southern states in search of interviews and courthouse records. He attempts a balance between the two stories over centuries of ignored heritage and denied kin. At one point, the founding Hairston family owned several plantations and hundreds of slave families over three states. Master Peter Hairston and his former slave Thomas Harston fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, and "the success of one brought the other low." As Wiencek follows the Hairstons from Reconstruction through the civil rights era, he paints a picture of the declining fortunes of the descendants of the slave master and the rise and wisdom of the descendants of the slaves. And yet the name itself is treasured among both family branches, and some of the white descendants can't resist the desire to make contact with the other branch. Commonalities emerge among black and white Hairstons; earnest, if partial, gestures of reconciliation are made. Throughout, Wiencek writes without sentimentality but with great feeling. "I heard history," he writes, "not as a historian would write it but as a novelist would imagine it.... I felt all the moral confusion of a spy." Maps, photographs and extended family trees not seen by PW. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A look at the largest slaveholders in the South and black and white families they spawned. Once they ruled over a pre'Civil War kingdom that spanned 45 plantations spread out over four states and included 10,000 slaves. To keep it all intact, they did what European aristocracy did: they married their own. And as one might imagine, this created a huge and maddeningly complex genealogical configuration, hard to decipher, to say the least. Undaunted, Wiencek, hwo has written for Smithsonian and American Heritage magazines, has spent eight years unraveling the mystery of the Hairstons (pronounced Harston), said to be ``the largest family in America.'' What Wiencek has turned up is nothing if not intriguing, including aspects which are worthy of further exploration. But perhaps not wishing to appear sensational nor to feed prurient interests, he has gone in the opposite direction, taken a subdued approach to his subject that often has the effect of heavy sedation. Wiencek says his research points up that the family touched every aspect of American endeavor from Hollywood to Wall Street and from the coal fields of West Virginia to Europe during WWII. And that may be true. But his approach is so very genteel that it's easy to miss key elements, including some that read like something out of William Faulkner. Amid these huge plantations, for example, are unacknowledged children of their masters who become enslaved butlers, servants, and housekeepers, or children who were forced to keep their mother's maiden name to disguise their heritage. Wiencek does not have a dramatic flair for language, making this a very slow read indeed. But those with an interest in the subject will tough out this eerily fascinating account. (Author tour)
Library Journal Review
This profile of the Hairstons, a large family of planters and slaves spreading from Virginia and North Carolina to Mississippi, examines the intricate situations forged by interracial relationships and reveals the fate of the family in the crucible of war, emancipation, and the struggle for equality. Journalist Wiencek's conversational narrative, based both on archival research and a series of encounters with family members, highlights the contingent construction of historical accounts while revealing the complex and contradictory beliefs and emotions that characterized these tangled relationships, filled with guilt, anger, and ultimately forgiveness without absolution. The result is a voyage of discovery down the stream of history. Wiencek reminds us that no such story, especially one as compelling as this, can be rendered simply in terms of black and white. Recommended for most libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/98.]Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Family Trees | p. viii |
| Map: The Hairston Plantations | p. xiv |
| A Note on Names | p. xvii |
| Introduction | p. xix |
| Part I The Land of the Pharaohs | p. 1 |
| 1. Cooleemee Plantation | p. 3 |
| 2. "Damn Your Souls, Make Tobacco" | p. 22 |
| 3. Beaver Creek | p. 44 |
| 4. The Lives of the Hairston Slaves | p. 57 |
| 5. A Brief Illumination | p. 72 |
| 6. The Education of a Slave Master | p. 75 |
| 7. The Lost Child | p. 91 |
| 8. A Mingling of Roots | p. 100 |
| Part II "I Tremble for My Country" | p. 133 |
| 9. "No Man Can Hinder Me" | p. 135 |
| 10. "Till the Last Man" | p. 146 |
| 11. The Scroll of Names | p. 174 |
| Part III "Our Blood Is in This Soil" | p. 217 |
| 12. A Gathering in Ohio | p. 219 |
| 13. The Liberation of Walnut Cove | p. 226 |
| 14. In Search of the Father | p. 248 |
| 15. A Rite of Reconciliation | p. 283 |
| 16. A Monument by the River | p. 293 |
| Notes | p. 313 |
| Bibliography | p. 335 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 345 |
| Index | p. 349 |
