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

A beautiful and very accessable history on the pre and post civil war period. What made it easy was it's grounding in Thulani Davis family. A learning experience for me.

Just as it says, this book is mostly about the author's Confederate kinfolk. As she says, it's easier to find out information about them. A lot of them left diaries and letters. I kept waiting to learn more about her tremendous great-grandmother, but by the end of the book, I realized that it truly was about her white kinfolk. She'll have to write another book to detail the story of her black kinfolk. I was fascinated by this book because I have relatives of that same era that I am trying to find out about, but there is so little documentation. Only one of my great grandparents could read and write. He was a Union soldier, but since his future wife could not read or write, there would have been no point in him writing to her, and so there are no existing letters from him to her from which we could learn about their experiences at the time. This book goes into great detail about the comings and goings of her white ancestors, at least some of whom tried to write "family" histories. Of course, they made little direct acknowledgement, or at least written acknowledgement, of their non-white kin, namely the author's grandmother. I love family pictures. Unfortunately, we don't have pictures of some of the people in our family that I would most like to see. There are pictures of the author's white kin, and of her great grandmother, and oblique references to her by the white kin, but it is difficult to document the story of people who were prevented and penalized from reading and writing. The oral history died with the participants, and some stories that were passed down sometimes went no further than a hearer who declined to pass those stories on. This, for me, is one of the saddest legacies of American slavery. I enjoyed this book because I have been in the same boots as the author trying to find out family history with very little documentary information to go on, and deep regret that I was not interested enough, or old enough, or knowledgeable enough to ask the oldest family members about their memories of those who went before while they were still alive.

When most of us think about Black liberation struggles, the first thing that comes to mind is the American Civil Rights Movement of the `50s and `60s. Numerous women and men used their creativity and ingenuity to challenge nefarious Jim Crow laws and the de facto segregation that permeated every aspect of life in this country. In doing so, they often endangered their lives, and the lives of those who loved them - a risk they deemed ultimately worth the reward of social, political and economic equality they were fighting for. Although this is a period of history which certainly deserves our attention, writer Thulani Davis suggests that the history of American Reconstruction is just as, or even more deserving of study, because of the world that the newly freedmen and freedwoman tried to form, against opposition that was many times more formidable and vicious than that of their descendants a century later. In her new book, My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-first Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots, Davis writes, "The first women and men to walk away from bondage reinvented the race, redefined the terms of American citizenship, and spread the blend of African and EuroAmerican culture created in bondage in the American South. Never has one group of people acted on such a large scale in so many regions of the country at once to push the society to honor its foundational principles. They taught the rest of us how to do it and yet there is no cultural memory of those millions," (pg. 6). It is this cultural amnesia that Davis seeks to cure, through an in-depth exploration of the tangled cords of her own family and ancestors, many of them freedwomen and men, some of them White planters, all of them striving to reach their individual, familial and societal goals through the often contradictory terrain of nineteenth century America. "Researching family history in this country puts you face to face with that seminal American habit of leaving the past behind for a new self, new wealth, new chances, and all their complications - name changing, multiple migrations, and the constant repetition in the naming of towns, churches, graveyards, and slaves," (pg. 9.), Davis writes, in an introductory chapter filled with brilliant insights and revelatory connections. She adds in a later chapter, however, that finding information about her White ancestors was infinitely easier than finding information about the Black ones. "My dogs have more documentation of their existence than most of my forebearers. Considerably more," (pg. 69), says Davis. While this didn't surprise her, it did take its emotional toll. "I have been extremely lucky [in my research], and luck is important, yet sometimes I have had to just cry when five minutes on the internet can turn up over 500 Mississippi lynching victims on one site, and days of research can result in no information whatsoever on the individuals who were lynched," (pg. 71). Although the narrative sometimes gets overburdened

When author Thulani Davis' grandmother died in 1971, she was writing a novel about her Mississippi cotton farmer parents. Her grandmother left a photo and writings, prompting Davis to look for the 'white folk' in her family: a genealogical odyssey which was to uncover many riches. MY CONFEDERATE KINFOLK is at once a memoir and a history: it tells of a journey across the South to uncover truths, connections, and a rich set of roots, and reveals many political insights as well. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch