Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War by Kendra Taira Field

Abstract

Reviewed by: Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War by Kendra Taira Field Quincy D. Newell Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. By Kendra Taira Field. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. ix + 216 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $38.00, cloth. Drawing on her own family history, contextualized among countless other primary sources, including (but not limited to) oral histories, photographs, archived letters, and newspaper stories, Kendra Taira Field offers a fascinating story of migration by "freedom's first generation" (2) in Growing Up with the Country. Focusing on the multigenerational stories of three families after the Civil War, Field persuasively argues that the dominant understanding of the Great Migration as an event that took African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the early twentieth century is incomplete. Instead, Field contends, we should understand the Great Migration as part of a larger movement by newly free African Americans in search of what Nell Irvin Painter called "real freedom" (1). In Field's analysis, this movement was transnational and multiracial, and it took black people west to Indian Territory and across the Atlantic to Africa—as well as north to the urban centers traditionally associated with the Great Migration. Crucially, Field demonstrates that we must see all these movements in relation to one another, rather than as unrelated movements in response to distinct impulses. Field's analysis begins with an examination of black movement to Indian Territory and early Oklahoma. Illustrating a range of connections between black, Indian, and black Indian people, Field helpfully undermines the racial categories on which the United States relied, even as she chronicles the construction and imposition of those categories on people in Indian Territory and early Oklahoma as well as more broadly in the US. The book's final chapter examines the Chief Sam movement, an effort to transport African Americans from the US to Africa's Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), where Sam was from. In many ways, this chapter demonstrates the payoff of Field's method: her focus on specific individuals allows her [End Page 112] to trace the connections between movement west and migration to Africa, showing that the same people kept moving in search of a home beyond the reach of American racism. Simultaneously, Field's sources reveal the ways this movement—and the transnational, multiracial character of the larger search for "real freedom" of which it was a part—have been obscured, forgotten, and erased. This book will be of great interest to scholars of African American history and the history of the North American West. Like other excellent books, Field's Growing Up with the Country will leave readers wanting more, and I expect that graduate students will find fertile ground here for innumerable projects elaborating on the ideas that Field advances so elegantly here. Quincy D. Newell Religious Studies Department Hamilton College Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln