Customer Reviews

Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)

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I'm not a history buff per se but I found the James family collection of letters fascinating because it tells the story of an African-American family that was solidly middle class in the late 1800s at a time in America's history when most people were poor or struggling. Though historically rich, the book is told through the original voices of family members through their letters to one another so the reading is engaging and fast-paced. I wish I had read more like it when I was in school.

Meet the Jameses and the Lanes, the Chisholms and the Hudsons - all members of an extraordinary family of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who come alive in the pages of Elisabeth Petry's Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family's Letters (University Press of Mississippi). Despite the Southern publisher, most of the African Americans portrayed in this epic tale are Yankees. They are descendants of a Civil War hero who served as coachman for an 1870s governor of Connecticut; they are also the ancestors of the author and her mother, Ann Petry, a prominent writer who grew up as the daughter of pharmacists in coastal Old Saybrook. (In The Street, she later vividly chronicled the Harlem experience.)
The letters in this book were preserved by a member of the family in a tin can used to store the drugstore ice cream cones. They were written during what Elisabeth Petry calls the "nadir" of the American black experience, the period 1890-1910, the years of lynchings and the Supreme Court's Jim Crow decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson. But these were also the years of black progress, of the dueling worldviews of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. The ordinary lives of this handful of African Americans is set against this backdrop - a friend writes frighteningly of the murderous 1906 Atlanta race riots - but there is so much more.
There is the attempt of members of the family to do well in business, in educating themselves, in the military. There are the stumbling of any individuals in close relation - the father who neglects the daughter's graduation, requiring her to seek charity for her white dress for the occasion; the son who shoots a white man in the South, then appeals for money to bribe the sheriff; and the sense of shame that led the keeper of these letters quite clearly to destroy some of them. But there are heroes in here, the beautiful Bertha, who took care of her brothers and sisters, the main characters of this drama; her sister Harriet, full of spirit, who died an untimely death; and the brilliant Helen, who studied at some of the few venues available for African American women, Hampton Institute and Atlanta University, taught at an orphanage in Hawaii and later in a rural school in South Carolina. Her writing is the most memorable, as when she described a Hawaiian church service in which an old man "spat on the floor until he was tired of it, then from a little distance sent it through a broken pane of glass in a sash behind the minister."
Elisabeth Petry has wisely turned her collection of letters into a narrative, weaving together the threads of her family's tale while quoting copiously from them, so that the themes of striving and family troubles and hope shine through. She hints at each character's tale, then devotes entire chapters to each one, so that we end up feeling as though we'd lived though important years of their varied and intriguing lives.
Petry has now (2008) published another family-related work with Mississippi: At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry. Judging from the first, it should be another compelling read.

Liz Petry does a masterful job of combining history as we learned it with history in the words of those who were actually there. Finding and sharing letters from her ancestors and presenting them in the context of the world as they knew it is an incredible gift to our generation. This gem of a book gives a clear look at the everyday lives, the education and ambition of people who overcame the rigors and abuses of slavery and took their rightful places in post Civil War society. I found it enlightening and fascinating that it took only one generation to progress from slavery to college degrees. These wonderful people then passed their legacy of education and achievement to their progeny. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in every American History class in every high school and every college.

I was so taken by this brilliant composition, that I recommended it to a cousin working on a thesis concerning northern desegregation between 1954-1980 in the hope that such wonderful, first-hand, historical information would be helpful. He was thrilled.

Congratulations, Liz. Your work is superb, and I look forward to your next book, "At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry."

M. E. McMillan
Author of "Rebirth of the Oracle - Tarot for the Modern World," and as Elizabeth Blackstone, author of "Virtual Strangers, A Woman's Guide to Love and Sex on the Internet" and "The Commoner's Guide to Dog Breeding."