Henry Wiencek - The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

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A N A MERICAN F AMILY

IN

B LACK AND W HITE

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H ENRY W IENCEK

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For Donna and Henry the Next, with love

This is a moving and timely story of that which separates and binds black and white America. The Hairstons helps us understand our common past and present.

Julian Bond

One would have to be hard-hearted indeed not to be moved by the big story this book tells or by the little stories it tells of individual Hairstons whose lives reveal so much about what it is to be an American. It is scrupulous and honest in all respects, and a powerful testament to what this country, at its best, can be.

Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

The Hairstons is an epic Enthralling Wiencek creates a profound understanding of slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. He uses documents, sometimes centuries old, to bring these Hairstons vividly to life.

Howard Kissel, New York Daily News

Not since Mary Chesnutss Civil War has nonfiction about the South been as compelling as fiction.

Time

Henry Wienceks lovingly detailed history of the complicated relationships among various strains of this huge, tragically divided Old South family has been called a metaphor for the nation, but a more accurate description would lie in the words of Robert Penn Warren, who said, The past is never past.

The Dallas Morning News

Without sentimentality but with great feeling Wiencek steps gracefully through the intricate web that links two family trees, one white and one black.

Publishers Weekly

Since almost everyone described in this book, black or white, bears the name Hairston, it is necessary to refer to persons by their first names. No disrespect is intended, although the author is aware that it has been a sign of contempt to refer to African-Americans by their first names.

This is a story of the legacy of slavery, and how that legacy has been passed into our own time.

At a mansion in North Carolina I met the heir to a family who had once owned a network of plantations stretching from Virginia to Mississippi. They may have held more people in slavery than any other family in the South. On the same day, in the library of the old masters mansion, I met the grandson of one of those enslaved people. Both men shared the name Hairston.

The family saga they began to tell spanned two centuries, from the Revolution to today. After that meeting I spent seven years exploring the past of these two families. I immersed myself in the immense Hairston plantation archivesrunning to nearly 25,000 items; I scoured the records of counties, states, and courts; I studied the documents left by the slave traders, by the Quakers who aided runaway slaves and opened schools after the Civil War, and the reports of Yankee officers who imposed freedom on a bitter South. I spent weeks at a time reading the rosters of the slaves, trying to conjure some meaning from the endless litany of the dead. More important, I went out into the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek the descendants of the enslaved and recover their recollections. I found family elders who, as children, had actually spoken to aged relatives who had been slaves and passed down first-hand accounts of life in enslavement.

These stories tell of the triumphant rise of the enslavedtheir children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildrenwho struggled to overcome a legacy of legal and psychological servitude. A vast panorama of history unfolds in a narrative that touches many facets of American endeavor, from Hollywood to Wall Street, from the coal fields of West Virginia to the battlefields of Europe in World War II, from a cotton plantation in Mississippi to the computer command center that guided Neil Armstrong to the moon.

It was the fate of the Hairstons, both black and white, to endure the violent decline and fall of the Old South. But for the whites, the myth of the Old South grew stronger with each passing generation, adding new layers of deception and denial. Some looked back with unease, while others embraced the fantasy of good masters and mistresses, seeking to recover the lost pride of mastery despite the documents, the letters, the receipts for the sale of people, which told a crueler story. And always, there were whispers of blood ties. Most everyone in the family had heard fragments of the astounding story of a six-year-old girl, enslaved, who was freed by her white father as he lay dying, and given an inheritance of one million dollars. And then the girl vanished. Going from house to house in the Mississippi countryside, I found people who held the keys to a mystery more than one hundred and fifty years old.

As I got to know the Hairstons, both white and black, I found compulsive seekers, unafraid of finding painful truths. This book explores an American tapestry, epic in scale, with no easy answers to the struggles the family, and the country, continue to endure.

Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name: you are mine.

Fear not, for I am with you; from the east I will bring back your descendants, from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north: Give them up! And to the south: Hold not back! Bring back my sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the earth: everyone who is named as mine.