The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White [Hardcover]

Henry Wiencek (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1999

The Hairstons is the story of how the legacy of slavery has passed into our own time. Opening at the faded North Carolina plantation of Coolemee, this Faulkner-like true saga examines the ambiguities of the master-slave relationship.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Hairstons traces the complex lineage and fascinating legacy of one of America's largest families. Henry Wiencek explores the lives of black and white members of the Hairston clan, as they have accepted each other as one family, easing the historical divide between the races, and reveals how Southern families have been affected by slavery's legacy and by the burden it continues to carry. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons' stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching. For example, from a black Hairston, Wiencek learns of a slave who burned rail fences to cook a hog for his starving comrades; white Hairstons record the incident as an act of slave indolence, a way to hinder the next day's work.

As Wiencek tells the stories of individual Hairstons, he uncovers the layers of a shared history at times painful, shameful, extraordinary, and joyful. Beautifully describing the land of the South and faithfully recounting what he has been told, Wiencek testifies that he "heard history not as a historian would write it but as a novelist would imagine it." The dynamic stories in The Hairstons are not solely one family's legacy but a record that reflects America's complicated process of healing and understanding the mark of slavery. --Amy Wan

From Publishers Weekly

Covering similar ground as Edward Ball's National Book Award-winning Slaves in the Family, Wiencek steps gracefully through the intricate web that links two family trees, one white and one black. Because it's not his own family history he explores, Wiencek doesn't labor under the burden of personal moral accountability that made Ball's book so powerful. He intends his book as a national "parable of redemption"?and he succeeds, admirably, in presenting the Hairstons as a metaphor for the nation while also presenting the specificity of their history, which he learned by traveling through three Southern states in search of interviews and courthouse records. He attempts a balance between the two stories over centuries of ignored heritage and denied kin. At one point, the founding Hairston family owned several plantations and hundreds of slave families over three states. Master Peter Hairston and his former slave Thomas Harston fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, and "the success of one brought the other low." As Wiencek follows the Hairstons from Reconstruction through the civil rights era, he paints a picture of the declining fortunes of the descendants of the slave master and the rise and wisdom of the descendants of the slaves. And yet the name itself is treasured among both family branches, and some of the white descendants can't resist the desire to make contact with the other branch. Commonalities emerge among black and white Hairstons; earnest, if partial, gestures of reconciliation are made. Throughout, Wiencek writes without sentimentality but with great feeling. "I heard history," he writes, "not as a historian would write it but as a novelist would imagine it.... I felt all the moral confusion of a spy." Maps, photographs and extended family trees not seen by PW.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 361 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr; 1st edition (February 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312192770
• ISBN-13: 978-0312192778
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #674,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hairstons, November 29, 1999

By 

Renee Tietjen (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (Hardcover)

This book is, quite frankly, one of the most powerful books I have read in a long time. The author chronicles a southern family's history, unwinding the complex relationships between master and slave and illuminating the enormous contributions of African-Americans to the growth and development of our country--a history long neglected and nearly unknown. As this well researched tale unfolds, the mystery of this family's heritage, their contributions, their curse, and their redemption---both black and white---becomes understood. Their story is our nation's story. I now have a better understanding of why the legacy of slavery continues to haunt our relationships even down to this day. Every American should read this book!

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stark documentation of slavery's legacy in black and white, May 12, 1999

By 

Debra Green - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (Hardcover)

This book has had a profound impact on me, and I encourage you to read it. Wiencek has done a painstaking job of documenting the legacy of slavery on the white and African American descendants of the Hairston line. Wiencek uses court records, actual letters written by the early white Hairston planters, interviews with present-day descendants, and other texts to trace the rise and fall of the white Hairstons and unconquerable spirit of the black Hairstons.

Moreover, the "protests" one sees in these reviews by some of the present-day white descendants of the Hairston planters lends even more credence to the devastating story of greed, sorrow, poverty, and ultimately, triumph painted by Wiencek's seven years of research into the Hairston families' history. Were I a white descendant, I imagine it would not be welcome to have the mythology about one's family as benevolent, caring owners who never sold their slaves exploded. (Indeed, if any African Americans may have a legal claim for reparations, surely the black Hairston family does, for Wiencek "discovers" how the white Hairston family deliberately stole the inheritance--worth millions in present-day dollars--of one of their ancestors, a mulatto child whose father, a wealthy Hairston plantation owner, left her the bulk of his estate. I won't spoil the entire story for you by saying more here. You can learn the details yourself when you buy the book.) And Wiencek does explode the myth, not through rhetoric or anecdotes but through the use of documents that, for example, show the sales of children from their families. Wiencek also provides the reader with an extensive bibliography and chapter endnotes to give authority of each claim made in the book.

The only "complaint" I might have with this book--and it's no complaint--is that I often find the story within it painful to read. I'm a fast reader, yet I find I can only read this book a chapter or two at a time, or some days, depending on the passages, only a few pages at a sitting. I then have to stop and move on to some other task to try to shake off the feeling of heaviness that envelopes me. In those moments, I am sometimes struck by how far the owners would go to obtain and retain their property, and that includes their slaves. By how resentful many became after slavery's end and how they saw their former slaves' leaving of the plantation as a betrayal. By the strength and courage of the slaves themselves and their present-day descendants. By how some whites, despite the times in which they lived, had the courage to defend and assist the slaves and their descendants.

America is truly a land of complexity and contradiction when it comes to the relationship between blacks and whites, and no story brings the strangeness of that relationship more to light than that of the Hairstons.

Please, read this book and judge its merits for yourself. See if you find it as wonderful, as awful, as inspiring as I do.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THE HAIRSTON'S, January 24, 2000

By 

R. Hairston (Walkertown. North Carolina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (Hardcover)

I consider myself to be an avid reader, but there were times as I read that I had to put the book down due to emotions that boiled up in me as I read. Not so much of anger,(there was some), but of sorrow and despair. Mostly because of what these people went through, but also because so many southerners are even today ignorant of their history, glorifying, what at the time was as bad if not worse than Nazi Germany of the 30's and 40's. To quote a famous man "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". This book will be required reading for my entire family. Both immediate and extended.