Family Ties, Color Lines, and Fault Lines: Oral Histories of Land Ownership and Dispossession

Abstract

Family Ties, Color Lines, and Fault Lines:Oral Histories of Land Ownership and Dispossession Adrienne Monteith Petty (bio) Sydney Nathans. A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2017. x + 313 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Kendra Taira Field. Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. xxv + 224 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $38.00. A few pages into A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland, Sydney Nathans expresses the sense of doubt and trepidation many interviewers feel before approaching a potential narrator. He recalled the time in 1978 when he steeled himself before calling Alice Hargress and others who lived on the same Alabama plantation where their ancestors had been enslaved. Yet he singles out his Euro-American ancestry as the potential sticking point: "[W]ould they share what they knew with me, a white professor, an utter stranger?" (p. 6). To gain the trust of Hargress, the first descendant he telephoned, Nathans revealed the parts of the story he had been able to reconstruct. He mentioned her ancestors' forced migration from North Carolina to Alabama in 1844. He named their owner, Paul Cameron. "That's right. That's right," Hargress responded. "Come on." (p. 7). With this invitation and vote of confidence, Hargress shepherded Nathans through a journey of discovery that would take him forty years to complete. Nathans's book stands as a testament that, whether his interviewees harbored any lingering mistrust about him, it did not interfere with his ability to evoke eloquent and revealing statements from them about the changing meaning of land across multiple generations. Few people would argue that Nathans and other white historians should interview only white narrators, that Native American interviewers dare not interview anyone except another Native American and so on. But the idea that there is something singularly tricky, sensitive, or even risky about interviews across the color line endures despite untold recorded hours of spectacularly revealing interviews across various lines of color, ancestry, and nationality. So [End Page 436] many variables can make or break an interview that it is nearly impossible to single out any one factor—even one as reprehensible as the narrator's racism.1 In doing research for Growing Up With the Country, Kendra Field experienced a different but related dilemma. Despite her shared ancestral and kinship ties with the men and women she interviewed, she describes the challenges she faced in reconstructing the fascinating and heartbreaking story of land acquisition and land loss among her Indian and African American forebears. It is a paradox that Field's kinship ties with many of her narrators did not spare her the uncertainty that Nathans and countless oral historians face, nor did it guarantee her access to insightful, garrulous narrators full of indelible memories that they were ready and willing to share. The works of Field and Nathans remind us that the single most important factor in oral histories has nothing to do with ancestry at all. Curiosity about and respect for other human beings remain the only variable oral historians can control in the interview. Moreover, if oral historians approach interviewing with the tenacity and sense of wonder about other human beings that the task demands, they recognize that they do not have the luxury of interviewing only those people who "look like them," those whom they admire, or those with whom they share an affinity. It requires reaching across color lines and "fault lines," interviewing both victims of and perpetrators of inequality. Nor can oral historians assume that those who share seemingly salient attributes with them will automatically be more forthcoming than those from different backgrounds. At its best, oral history is the idea of pluralistic democracy in action. Although fleeting, oral history interviews represent crucial moments when the interests of interviewers and narrators intersect, when both unite in telling about the past or exploring the present. Now, perhaps more than ever, the oral history interview offers a useful model for treating all people with humility, curiosity, and respect, and actively seeking out a variety of narrators even when...