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The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, by Henry Wiencek
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The Hairstons are extraordinary families, both black and white, who share a complex and compelling history that embodies the legacy of slavery and shows how that legacy has passed into our own time.
Opening at the remote North Carolina plantation of Cooleemee, The Hairstons reads like a gothic tale filled with vexing mysteries. In an attempt to resolve those mysteries, Henry Wiencek crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi, seeking out Hairston descendants and immersing himself in the musty archives of plantations and courthouses. The result is a richly textured portrait of seven generations that examines the ambiguities of slavery and its painful aftermath.
The black family's story traces the triumphant rise of a remarkable people--the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves--who took their rightful place in mainstream America. They are people who tilled the land, built schools and churches, fought for civil rights, and shed their blood in war.
In contrast, it was the fate of the white family, once one of the wealthiest in America, to endure the decline and fall of the Old South. At the heart of their experience lies the story of a lost child. Wiencek's search for the true account of her life peels away layers of lies and myth to reveal a tale the slaveholders and their descendants had kept hidden for almost a century and a half. Surprisingly, it was a tale not of horror, but rather of love and heroism powerful enough to shake the foundation myth of the Old South.
The Hairstons ultimately addresses the universal human struggle to come to terms with the past, and offers a parable of redemption, one that may in the end serve as a vital contribution to our nation's attempt to undo the twisted historical legacy of the past.
- Sales Rank: #395957 in Books
- Published on: 1999-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.75" h x 6.50" w x 1.50" l, 1.65 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 361 pages
- history of mixed-race families in America
Amazon.com Review
The Hairstons traces the complex lineage and fascinating legacy of one of America's largest families. Henry Wiencek explores the lives of black and white members of the Hairston clan, as they have accepted each other as one family, easing the historical divide between the races, and reveals how Southern families have been affected by slavery's legacy and by the burden it continues to carry. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons' stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching. For example, from a black Hairston, Wiencek learns of a slave who burned rail fences to cook a hog for his starving comrades; white Hairstons record the incident as an act of slave indolence, a way to hinder the next day's work.
As Wiencek tells the stories of individual Hairstons, he uncovers the layers of a shared history at times painful, shameful, extraordinary, and joyful. Beautifully describing the land of the South and faithfully recounting what he has been told, Wiencek testifies that he "heard history not as a historian would write it but as a novelist would imagine it." The dynamic stories in The Hairstons are not solely one family's legacy but a record that reflects America's complicated process of healing and understanding the mark of slavery. --Amy Wan
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
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.
-?Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent book and truly explains the history of The Hairstons ...
By Maria Marson
An excellent book and truly explains the history of The Hairstons which is part of America's history. What began in the deplorable conditions of slavery, Jim Crow, and beyond ends on a note of triumph and hope not only for the Hairstons but for all of America in our quest for a free, just, and color blind nation.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Just as good, if not better, than Ball's book
By Dave Schwinghammer
Readers reluctant to read THE HAIRSTONS because of its similarity to Edward Ball's SLAVES IN THE FAMILY should not be dissuaded. In some ways, this is a better book.
The author Henry Wiencek provides a sometimes confusing family tree of both white and black Hairstons. Once you get used to it, you will find yourself paging back and forth trying to find the Hairston Wiencek is talking about. What I found most fascinating was how the Hairstons kept the plantations in the family. For instance, "Saura Town Peter" Hairston arranged for his daughter Ruth to marry his nephew Robert after her first husband, Peter Wilson, died young. This usually worked, but in this instance, Robert, who wanted to free his slaves against Peter's daughter's wishes, left his family. He established another Hairston dynasty in Mississippi.
When Wiencek tells us about Robert and his heirs, the book becomes fascinating. Robert fell in love with one of his slaves, having a daughter with her. When he died, he left his plantations to the daughter, Chrillis. The other Hairstons, some of whom had followed Robert to Mississippi, fought the will, and when that didn't work they transferred Chrillis to another plantation, telling the judge she had died. Wiencek tracks down Chrillis, and she's not the only former slave he's able to ferret out. Once again "Saura Town Peter" enters the picture. Wiencek contends that "Saura Town Peter" had another family with one of his slaves, Sally Blag. At a reunion of the black Hairstons, Wiencek meets Joseph Henry Hairston. Joseph knows he had a white ancestor but is unable to trace any further back than a slave named Elias. Wiencek is able to find strong circumstantial evidence that "Saura Town Peter" may have been the Joseph's white ancestor.
Joseph Henry Hairston is a remarkable man. He works his way up from sharecropper to army officer to lawyer for the federal government. Joseph and Judge Peter Wilson Hairston, the present owner of Cooleemee Plantation on the Yadkin River in North Carolina, are the central protagonists in the book. Judge Peter opens his archives to Wiencek and helps him all he can to write this book, although he's worried what Wiencek may say. The white Hairstons insist that their family was kind to their slaves. Judge Peter's worst fears come true when Wiencek shows the Judge's grandfather selling Robert Hairston's slaves down the river.
There is reconciliation at the end, however, as Judge Peter opens Cooleemee to the black Hairstons and the black Hairstons embrace their heritage no matter how cruel some of the Hairston ancestors and overseers were to their people.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Better than Ed Ball's "Slaves in the Family"
By D. C. Carrad
All right, let's sum up:
1. Yes, the author is biased against the white people in this fascinating story. But he is candid enough to admit it and those instances when this prejudice appear are easy to identify and thus deal with on the part of an alert reader. Why the author thinks you cannot love your grandfather and respect his accomplishments even though he was flawed (as all human beings are) is a great mystery. Why he thinks sins are inherited is even more mystifying.
2. Yes, the family trees are confusing but the anecdotes are great
3. Well-written.
4. Written by a Yankee, yes, but one with a fascination for the South.
Summation: This book has flaws but it is still well worth reading and much better than Slaves in the Family or Confederates in the Attic
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