My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots - Softcover

Thulani Davis is a poet, novelist, journalist, playwright, and librettist. Among her work are two novels, 1959 and Maker of Saints; several plays, including Everybody's Ruby, which premiered at the NY Shakespeare Public Festival, and the librettos for Amistad and Malcolm X. She is also the author of two collections of poetry and two PBS documentaries, and has published in numerous magazines and journals. She lives in New York City.

I have an illustration that I've carried around for years. Published in Harper's Weekly on Jan. 31, 1863, it has for a caption: "Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Emancipation." I count 18 black people of all ages sitting on the ground, standing, looking out from their covered wagon. It looks as if they left somewhere in a hurry. A rifle-bearing Union soldier stands at the rear of the wagon. Who are they? Where have they come from? Where are they going? In her engaging new book, Thulani Davis puts flesh on the bones of that etching and also answers my questions deftly and compassionately. She began with a photograph: a late-19th century picture of an ancestor inspired Davis to explore her sprawling family history. "I have tried to stay close to the ground trod by some of the ancestors," she writes, "clinging to them like a shadow and following their trails through events large and small." Her view pans out, tilts up and down to give us an ever-widening and deepening picture of not only her personal story but also the American story -- who we are and what our history has been. Davis provides a vivid portrait of her African American and white forebears, people who crossed paths in war, in work, in slavery, in freedom and, finally, in love. When Will Campbell, the white owner of a plantation in Silver Creek, Miss., and Davis' great-grandmother, freedwoman Chloe Curry (a married new arrival from Alabama) began a "relationship" in the 1870s, it led to earth-shaking fallout for both families, who until that moment had known each other only as master and slave or "boss" and "boy" or "gal" or worse. It's no news that white men in the south used their power to "own" black women sexually. What is news is that sometimes those men evolved and became more responsible as a result of those "relationships"; they took care of their children, and, yes, took care of the women, too. Will Campbell died and left his entire estate to Chloe Curry. They had one child together, Georgia, Thulani Davis's grandmother. Davis's search for her family's true story comes through, too, in excerpts from the exquisitely written book of memories her grandmother, Georgia Neal, was working on but died before completing: "The colored folks began to look upon [Chloe] as the mistress in the big house; she was well-liked as well as feared because she was very frank and too brutally frank. Nites (sic) when she would go home she was too tired to listen to Jims (sic) complaints although she would always take him a pan of food which he never found any fault with. He read his bible every nite and was forever preparing a sermon which he never got a chance to preach." Jim was Chloe's husband at the time. The poignant last line speaks to generations of African American men whose aspirations remained forever out of reach. Jim eventually went back to Alabama. Georgia's unfinished family memoir contains many treasures -- details of the plantation at Silver Creek, the life lived by Will and Chloe in those troublesome days. Chloe found a way to educate all of her children and did the same for other relatives as well. This woman was a miracle of life. Davis, a playwright and author of the novels Maker of Saints and 1959, weaves passages from Georgia's memoir throughout the book while warning us that Georgia may have idealized some aspects of her past. But we hear Chloe and Will and Georgia, too, and we get a compelling portrait of a time and place long gone . We see them in the old photographs that Davis has included. History begins to live and breathe. Davis uncovered a great deal of information about the Campbell branch of her family, including letters that verify travels and travails, records of properties owned, lost, repurchased. She even found transcribed oral histories and short stories. In one letter to their mother, Will's older brother John described a search for escaped slaves during an uncommon snowstorm in the Mississippi Delta: "(We) hunted till night with hope of finding the tracks & then all night again & the next day & the next day & and could hear nothing of them & I gav (sic) them as lost...." Through Davis's dogged research and fine common-sense wisdom, her personal family history ascends to the epic. We journey with the Campbell branch of the family, these hearty people who would be planters, from Tennessee to Missouri, to Texas and Mississippi in pursuit of the riches to be gained from the plantation system and King Cotton. In loosely alternating chapters, we also travel with the Tarrant/Curry branch of her family, who had been enslaved in Alabama since before the Civil War, and watch them struggle with meager material resources to build a new life in freedom after the war. The book weaves these disparate, intimate histories into one compelling tale and gives us, at the same time, a detailed and lively rendering of Reconstruction. Davis tells us that she is neither a historian nor a genealogist: "But I am a journalist, who is, like many in my trade, very curious, very stubborn ... So this text is not a history nor a genealogy but built from my own great interests: how we define being American, how we deal with race, and human character." Readers will joyfully discover that she really is both a genealogist and a tamer of history. Denise Nicholas is the author of "Freshwater Road," a novel.

Reviewed by Denise Nicholas
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.