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The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, by Henry Wiencek
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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.
The black family's story is most exceptional. It is the account of the rise of a remarkable people―the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves―who took their rightful place in mainstream America.
In contrast, it has been the fate of the white family―once one of the wealthiest in America―to endure the decline and fall of the Old South, and to become an apparent metaphor for that demise. But the family's fall from grace is only part of the tale. Beneath the surface lay a hidden history―the history of slavery's curse and how that curse plagued slaveholders for generations.
For the past seven years, journalist Wiencek has listened raptly to the tales of hundreds of Hairston relatives, including the aging scions of both the white and black clans. He has crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek out the descendants of slaves. 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.
Paradoxically, Wiencek demonstrates that these families found that the way to come to terms with the past was to embrace it, and this lyrical work, a parable of redemption, 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: #591148 in Books
- Published on: 2000-02-19
- Released on: 2000-02-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .85" w x 6.00" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 361 pages
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
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
The Hairstons
By Renee Tietjen
This book is, quite frankly, one of the most powerful books I have read in a long time. The author chronicles a southern family's history, unwinding the complex relationships between master and slave and illuminating the enormous contributions of African-Americans to the growth and development of our country--a history long neglected and nearly unknown. As this well researched tale unfolds, the mystery of this family's heritage, their contributions, their curse, and their redemption---both black and white---becomes understood. Their story is our nation's story. I now have a better understanding of why the legacy of slavery continues to haunt our relationships even down to this day. Every American should read this book!
29 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
A stark documentation of slavery's legacy in black and white
By Debra Green
This book has had a profound impact on me, and I encourage you to read it. Wiencek has done a painstaking job of documenting the legacy of slavery on the white and African American descendants of the Hairston line. Wiencek uses court records, actual letters written by the early white Hairston planters, interviews with present-day descendants, and other texts to trace the rise and fall of the white Hairstons and unconquerable spirit of the black Hairstons.
Moreover, the "protests" one sees in these reviews by some of the present-day white descendants of the Hairston planters lends even more credence to the devastating story of greed, sorrow, poverty, and ultimately, triumph painted by Wiencek's seven years of research into the Hairston families' history. Were I a white descendant, I imagine it would not be welcome to have the mythology about one's family as benevolent, caring owners who never sold their slaves exploded. (Indeed, if any African Americans may have a legal claim for reparations, surely the black Hairston family does, for Wiencek "discovers" how the white Hairston family deliberately stole the inheritance--worth millions in present-day dollars--of one of their ancestors, a mulatto child whose father, a wealthy Hairston plantation owner, left her the bulk of his estate. I won't spoil the entire story for you by saying more here. You can learn the details yourself when you buy the book.) And Wiencek does explode the myth, not through rhetoric or anecdotes but through the use of documents that, for example, show the sales of children from their families. Wiencek also provides the reader with an extensive bibliography and chapter endnotes to give authority of each claim made in the book.
The only "complaint" I might have with this book--and it's no complaint--is that I often find the story within it painful to read. I'm a fast reader, yet I find I can only read this book a chapter or two at a time, or some days, depending on the passages, only a few pages at a sitting. I then have to stop and move on to some other task to try to shake off the feeling of heaviness that envelopes me. In those moments, I am sometimes struck by how far the owners would go to obtain and retain their property, and that includes their slaves. By how resentful many became after slavery's end and how they saw their former slaves' leaving of the plantation as a betrayal. By the strength and courage of the slaves themselves and their present-day descendants. By how some whites, despite the times in which they lived, had the courage to defend and assist the slaves and their descendants.
America is truly a land of complexity and contradiction when it comes to the relationship between blacks and whites, and no story brings the strangeness of that relationship more to light than that of the Hairstons.
Please, read this book and judge its merits for yourself. See if you find it as wonderful, as awful, as inspiring as I do.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Amazing story of shared history, forgiveness and reconciliation...
By Cynthia K. Robertson
When Henry Wiencek was doing background work for a book on old houses, he visited a plantation home in North Carolina called Cooleemee. Cooleemee has been owned continuously by the Hairston family, and the present owner is Judge Peter W. Hairston. Wiencek asked Hairston if he knew of any descendents of Cooleemee slaves, and he was introduced to Squire Hairston. This chance encounter lead Wiencek on a seven year odyssey to discover the history of not just the white Hairston family, but the black Hairston's as well. The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White is an incredibly fascinating book that reflects not just the history of one family, but the story of our nation. Fortunately for his readers, Wiencek writes this historical narrative to read like a novel.
The Hairston's were once one of the richest plantation families. Together, they owned 45 plantations in three states, and Samuel Hairston was said to own over 10,000 slaves (the most slaves ever owned by one person). The Hairston's tended to marry other Hairston's to keep the plantations in the family. But their way of life changed forever after the Civil War. While the fortunes of the white Hairston's never recovered, the black Hairston's were able to make something of their lives. Due to perseverance and discipline, they became engineers, farmers, musicians, lawyers, teachers, farmers, principals and ministers.
Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball covers a similar subject matter, but Wiencek's book gives us much more of a historical perspective. The history of the Hairston's in American begins around 1729 and continues to the present. The author touches on the Revolution, the Abolitionist Movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, blacks in the military and integration. These stories are all told through the eyes of the Hairston clan. Much of the success of The Hairstons: An American Family is due to Judge Peter. He opened his home and his archives (over 25,000 documents) to Wiencek and never put any conditions on where the author's research might lead. Cooleemee is also always open to his black brethren, and he embraced these Hairston "kin" with open arms. When Squire Hairston passed away, Judge Peter sat in the front row of the church and sobbed uncontrollably.
What truly drives this book are the themes of love and friendship, forgiveness and redemption, and loyalty and reconciliation. We also see how determination, perseverance and faith can overcome so many obstacles. The Hairston family exhibits great family pride, and over a thousand black Hairston's gather each year for a reunion. Wiencek will also have you running an emotional gamut from incredulity to outrage to finally, hope. You will see that despite the horrible history of slavery and prejudice, both sides of the Hairston clan have come together in a spirit of forgiveness and acceptance (something the relatives of Edward Ball were not able to do). Wiencek also did extensive research to discover the truth behind many family mysteries. In some respects, it reads more like a mystery, although he wasn't able to solve all the unanswered questions.
My only complaints about The Hairstons are minor ones: the family tree was a bit confusing in spots. Also, I thought the picture selections could have been better, and there could have been more of them. A map of the Mississippi plantations would have also been helpful. But please don't let these small problems detract from an otherwise excellent book. Although I have borrowed this book from the library, I will definitely purchase a copy for my collection.
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