Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926 [Paperback]

Adele Logan Adele Logan Alexander (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 18, 2000

This monumental history traces the rise of a resolute African American family (the author's own) from privation to the middle class. In doing so, it explodes the stereotypes that have shaped and distorted our thinking about African Americans--both in slavery and in freedom.

Beginning with John Robert Bond, who emigrated from England to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War and married a recently freed slave, Alexander shows three generations of Bonds as they take chances and break new ground.

From Victorian England to antebellum Virginia, from Herman Melville's New England to the Jim Crow South, from urban race riots to the battlefields of World War I, this fascinating chronicle sheds new light on eighty crucial years in our nation's troubled history. The Bond family's rise from slavery, their interaction with prominent figures such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and their eventual, uneasy realization of the American dream shed a great deal of light on our nation's troubled heritage.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

John Robert Bond, son of a white Englishwoman and a black laborer on the Liverpool waterfront, became a sailor in the American Union Navy and married Emma Thomas, a Virginia woman born into slavery, in 1865. Chronicling their lives and those of their children and grandchildren, the author (their great-granddaughter Adele Logan Alexander) presents a dramatic family saga intertwined with a sweeping account of the black experience in America from 1846, the year of John's birth, to 1926, when Emma died at age 80. Most of the Bonds were talented, determined, and successful beyond the norm--John and Emma's progeny included a prosperous businessman and a Radcliffe graduate who was a close friend of W.E.B. Du Bois--but Alexander firmly links their story to the struggles and suffering of all African Americans, delineating with blistering matter-of-factness the galling restrictions they faced every day in every generation. Alexander, a professor of history at George Washington University, provides a bracingly unsentimental perspective on events as big as the Civil War and as seemingly small as the installation of a new sewer system in Dedham, Massachusetts. She writes American history with a refreshing difference, reminding us of the richness that oft-maligned "multiculturalism" brings to our intellectual life. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

An emblematic account of the evolution of an African-American clan over three generations, this meticulously researched but stiffly written family history by a history professor at George Washington University reveals the role of black Americans in the evolution and definition of middle-class life in the U.S. Alexander's story begins with her maternal great-grandfather, John Robert Bond, an English-born seaman ("a black Anglo-Saxon Protestant") who, in a vivid contrast to the majority of blacks brought to the U.S. as slaves, arrived in Massachusetts in 1862 and joined the Union navy. Wounded in battle, Bond ended up in a hospital in Norfolk, Va., where he met Emma Thomas, a newly freed slave he married shortly after the Civil War. To set their story in context, Alexander explores the lives and mores of free blacks in 19th-century Virginia and New England (the couple returned to Massachusetts in 1870). In Boston, the Bonds' political beliefs developed amid suffrage and anti-lynching campaigns, the Spanish-American War and the surge of Southern blacks northward in the Great Migration. John Robert's first son, Percy, joined the staff of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, his success supported in part by his marriage to a woman fair-skinned enough to "pass" for white. Alexander's careful examination of the lives of the subsequent generation of literate black women, who were involved in politically active Colored Women's Clubs in Washington, D.C., and who read widely about the artistic innovations of the Harlem Renaissance, illuminates both the family's color-consciousness and its spiritual and cultural advancement. 16 pages of b&w photos. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (July 18, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679758712
• ISBN-13: 978-0679758716
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #896,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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