My Confederate Kinfolk

My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-first Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots, Thulani Davis. Basic Civitas Books, 2006. Hardcover; 288 pages. $15.75.

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 by the weight of too many names, third cousins, small Mississippi towns, and incidental Civil War skirmishes, Davis succeeds in her task to lay out the daily struggles that both her White and Black ancestors faced during the Reconstruction period. In doing so, she simultaneously reveals how the options these people faced were absolutely over-determined by their race, and how the category of race in America is largely false.

“One cannot be completely explained by anything, thank God, but it would be easier to build selves less fictional and community less mythical if the truth of American heritage was accepted. This country has been crazy to make people black or white ever since Thomas Jefferson thought a system should be devised and made law,” (pg. 12), writes Davis, whose grandmother was the product of a rich White Mississippi planter and his Black house “servant.”

True to her stated intent, the bulk of My Confederate Kinfolk centers on the African Americans who strived to make a life for themselves in the wake of Emancipation – specifically those freed people in Mississippi gained political power in the “reformed” state legislature, only to be killed for it in what the White elite of the day termed “the Redemption.” Indeed, Davis narrates a shocking and gruesome story of the state elections of 1875, in which “all the black office holders were hunted down or run out of town,” (pg. 38). Local organizers, teachers, church leaders, and even state representatives were lynched, shot, stabbed and/or beaten. Some narrowly escaped this fate. One man, James G. Patterson, a Republican member of the Mississippi House of Representatives (one of its first Black members) is suspected of being lynched at the home of one of Davis’ ancestors.

Davis argues that the history of Mississippi, and many other Southern states that faced a similar backlash from white racists after emancipation would have been quite different if Blacks had been able to keep office there, and build up some political and economic power. She also says that not knowing our history is what keeps African Americans, and other marginalized groups, continually at a disadvantage.

“If I told someone tomorrow that white supremacists ran black people on their tickets in 1875 to get black people to sign on for the worst possible agenda of their lives, most people wouldn’t believe it. Do we even know black people in Mississippi could vote then? If I said it happened in Chicago this year, they would. These scenarios continue to be utilized because we continue to ignore our past,” (pg. 14), she writes.

Davis’ book, although digging in deeply to just one moment of American history, could go a long way towards making that past real to this generation. I certainly have not encountered a story as mutifaceted and vital on Reconstruction as the one Davis puts forth in My Confederate Kinfolk. The lives and determination of the freedwomen and men she documents are as inspiring as they are tragic. Still, the only hope for their ultimate redemption would seem to lie in the here and now.