Customer Reviews

Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative (Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia)

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From the first paragraph, I wanted to get to know this narrator. Family history and the secrets that have such a strong influence on future generations were masterfully woven into this memoir/story of an extended family over time. I wanted it to keep going.

It's hard to tell your own, or your family's, story in a compelling way. The writer is interested, but how does she draw others in? No problem here. I could sense the emotional urgency from page one. The book opens back in Tate's graduate student days, when she first began to be consumed by the desire to find out about her grandmother and her past. Like many of us, she was coming from an imperfect childhood into adulthood. She had fond memories of her grandmother, who died when she was only four, but her father got grouchy any time she asked about her. That mixture, of both painful and pleasant memories, launches Linda on this amazing trek through the past, through books, library birth records, deeds, old newspapers. Graveyards. Everything. Throughout, that mixture of fond and difficult memories creates a compelling ambivalence that fuels this narrative as Tate tries to reconcile the two.

After her exhaustive research had uncovered everything that could be discovered about her Cherokee-Appalachian great-grandmother Lousiana and her grandmother Fannie in the conventional way, she recreated them in her imagination, giving them their own voices and letting them tell their own stories. It's a great literary accomplishment, inhabiting and recreating those individuals, bringing them to life.

Tate also brings to life this exotic lost world: "land between the rivers." This area between the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers had since been dammed by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It is now a national recreation area known as Land Between the Lakes.

Probably the best thing a memoir or any book can do for us is cause us to reflect on our own lives. Reading about Tate's ancestors, steeped as they were in both nature's harshness and nature's gifts, opened my imagination as I thought about what it must have been like for my own grandmothers and great grandmothers to come west and settle the Kansas prairies. It was really the luck of the draw. Some got kind husbands, some did not. Whatever happened, they were stuck out there, like Tate's ancestors, in the wilderness together.

Linda Tate searches back into her family heritage to understand how her forebears' struggle with poverty and isolation colored her own life. Having grown up in the mountain south, much of this resonates with me as I think of my childhood friends. So many now are proud of their Cherokee ancestors (though this may be an arbitrary ethnic identity, since it may be the only Native American group which which they are familiar). It was a harsh reminder of the discrimination and greed which resulted in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and a tribute to Linda's courage in facing difficult memories and moving on.

Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative is the true-life memoir of author Linda Tate's journey to learn more about her Cherokee-Appalachian heritage. Refusing to sugar-coat the domestic violence, poverty, and discrimination that have left their effects on the lives of Tate's Cherokee-Appalachian relatives, Power in the Blood also tells stories of individual and communal strength in the face of adversity. Tate embarked on exhaustive research through archives, libraries, and courthouses to track down distant relatives (all descended from her great-great-grandmother Louisiana), and in the process helped orchestrate family reunions with swapped stories that unearthed her family's forgotten past. An extraordinary family journey, highly recommended especially for Native American memoir shelves.

I was stunned by Linda Tate's deft interweaving of memoir, family research, and psychological mystery. She gracefully balances personal with Appalachian history. Her memoir reads like a novel, right down to an unexpected twist of the plot that takes the reader by surprise just before the end of the book.

Brutal honesty... Paragon of persistence... Blazing versatility... Role model for all family historians... These are a few of the cryptic notes I jotted as I read Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative, by Linda Tate. I was struck by the impact of the basic story, and my appreciation deepened as I considered the craft and research involved in writing this gripping six generation tale.

Linda's brutal honesty was fascinating. She tip-toed into it, occasionally letting silence speak louder than words. Early in the story she alluded to things that happened with her father in secret places. She never specifically filled in those details, but later disclosures gave more substance to assumptions. Two accounts, written as heavily researched interpretations of the lives of the grandmother she dimly remembered with the greatest affection and that grandmother's grandmother, were even more explicit, based on collective family memories and legends. Linda was brutally honest about her own thoughts and reactions as understanding of her family history unfolded in unexpected ways.

A recurring dream of searching for her grandmother and never quite finding her sparked the beginning of her research in 1988. Her book was published in 2009, twenty-one years later. She spent most of those years doing research, both academic and on-site, fitting it piece-meal into a busy academic career. The research paid off in a literary masterpiece rich with layers and facets.

Which leads to versatility of both voice and content. When she wrote of her early childhood, she wrote with the voice of a young child. That voice matured as the story progressed. When she wrote in the voices of her grandmothers, their personalities were distinctly evident through the choice of words as well as the dialect she used to good effect as she wrote. I had the sense of sitting on the front stoop listening to these women muse about the past. The fictionalized parts were every bit as vivid and compelling as accounts of her own experience. She has done an amazing job of blending fact and fiction, always making it clear where the boundaries lie without letting those boundaries intrude.

In addition to the story content, Linda includes extensive backstory, explaining how she did her research, lending additional credibility and authenticity to inherently powerful stories. The research also served as the framework for weaving in rich detail about the history of relations between white settlers and the native population of Appalachian Tennessee and Kentucky, and the inbred culture of "The Land Between the Rivers" where her forebears settled after being driven out of the family homeland up the Cumberland River farther east in Tennessee.

As the book recounts stories of brutal abuse, it gives testimony to the generation-spanning damage this behavior causes as well as the strength of the human spirit and its ability to endure and transcend. It's also a testimony to the shackle-shattering power of shedding light on the past to replace fear and shame with healing, hope and reconciliation for new generations.

The story is worth a read for its own sake. Family historians and memoirists will derive added value from the fine example of craft.

This was such a great book. The way it was written, with stories of the past and present juxtaposed, really kept it moving along and held my interest. And I really appreciated how much effort (and emotional resilience) it must have taken the author to pull this book together - how many difficult conversations with family members, plus all the research about the area (including the interesting Applachian speech patterns she captures so well).

I read it several months ago, but the stories of life in the region keep coming back to me - the tiny cabins, the hard labor, the conservation, the reliance on family. There are a lot of different takeaways one could carry away from this book, but for me the timing of reading it during such difficult economic times is a helpful reminder that there is much I can do without.

I liked this book because it reminds me of the incredible power of imagination, especially when applied with care, compassion and courage, to illuminate and heal.

Linda Tate weaves a compelling family story richly textured with historical, location, and lifestyle detail flecked with psychological insights into mixed heritage ancestry. The descriptive scenarios are well researched and written in a manner that is not word dense. They flash across the mind in striking succession, much like well chosen scenes in a great motion picture, imprinting upon the readers mind in a way that immerses one in the discovery and adventure of the time and place. There are well placed subtle allusions that compel the reader on to the real life discoveries. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and appreciate the difficulty of researching Native American history when whole tribes were endangered human species. Well done!