MY CONFEDERATE KINFOLK

An African-American turns to genealogy to plumb the lives and times of her white Southern forebears during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

In presenting the results of exhaustive personal research into a racially mixed branch of her family tree, playwright and novelist Davis (Maker of Saints, 1996, etc.) emphasizes that her findings are hardly unique. Any African-American with kin “from the South or West way back when,” she asserts, “is likely to have family ties—black and white—to the founders of the country [as well as] the American system of bondage.” In telling the story of her search for ancestors that began with old letters, the writings of her grandmother and a strange photograph of a black child of the 19th century completely decked out in authentic tartan plaid, Davis also documents the condition of blacks making the transition from bondage to Emancipation as “freedmen and freedwomen.” (Her use of the term and its application to herself intimate that the transition is ongoing.) The story centers on the encounter in the 1870s between her African-American great-grandmother, Chloe Curry, and Will Campbell, scion of an influential white cotton-planting clan with proud Scottish roots (refugees, in fact, from the horrors of guerilla-style terrorism in Civil War Missouri). The evolution of that relationship from household employment to lifelong companionship (they never married) takes place against the cataclysmic background of failed Reconstruction in Mississippi’s Yazoo County. Burnings, shootings, lynchings and rapes were exacted against blacks who voted against the “redeeming” white supremacist ticket. The author reacts variously with shock, sarcasm and occasional vituperation as injustices surface in her research, forcing her to embrace her African heritage with vigor.

Polemics overlaid on personal history—reader affinity required.