At the core of the origin story of African-American history—in fact, of all people of African descent in the Western hemisphere—is migration.
The greatest, most dangerous, most destructive, and most formative of these treks was their original transplantation into enforced slavery out of Africa to the New World. But that was only the start. If they survived the dreaded middle passage across the ocean, the newly enslaved people faced additional uprootings once they arrived at their new locations. And because their situation in the United States was comparatively better than that of slaves in the Caribbean—who were worked to death in the more dangerous disease environment there, and thus never suffered additional transportation to other lands—many American slaves made repeated moves during their longer lives.
The first of these was likely to be their forced sale before the Civil War from the soil-depleted upper South into the newly opened cotton lands of the old southwest—into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and adjacent territories. The second was more recent: the voluntary migration of free African Americans from South to North in the 20th century. The stories of the losses sustained in such moves are the basis of countless works of American history and literature. But it is not the story of this startling new work.
Instead, Duke historian Sydney Nathans has exhumed the history of a single black family in Hale County, Alabama, that managed to remain where it was—a history that, in the author’s word, is a kind of “counterpoint” to the ancient story of exodus and return. They stayed put by good fortune, pluck, shrewdness, and steely determination. And they did so during slave times and after emancipation, always facing efforts to get them off their land, when cotton crops failed and their acres could fetch little during the Depression; when they encountered local prejudice and the racism of federal programs; when the Ku Klux Klan roamed Hale County and violence faced them in the 1960s; and into our own time. A story of 200 years of American history, it’s a down-to-earth epic told in simple terms.
It begins in the 1820s on the North Carolina piedmont plantation of Duncan Cameron, where the Hargress family members (named Hargis until they changed their surname) first served as slaves. By 1840, their plantation’s soils depleted by overfarming, Cameron and his son Paul decided to purchase land in the Alabama Black Belt and have a go at cotton farming. Without a say in the matter, in 1844, some of the Hargresses were forcibly taken to the new holding and put to work developing it. When the new plantation proved a failure, the Cameron family held onto it but distributed some Hargress family members to another holding on Mississippi bottomlands and sent others back to North Carolina. But a few were left in Alabama. In 1867, finally free, Paul Hargress, something of the family’s leader and a treasured worker to the Camerons, moved back to Alabama to rejoin his brother. That’s when the Hargresses got a mind to stay put. This is the story about how and why they’re still there.
Part of it concerns how the Hargresses came to own their former master’s land, as unpropitious for yielding good crops as it was. Not finding other willing purchasers, Paul Cameron sold his plantation in parcels to his former slaves by advancing them credit. Some of them now being owners of farms of as much as 240 acres, they managed to meet the terms of their five-year loans by marketing their meager crops, working at trades, laboring for others and sometimes in the mines, pooling funds with other families to buy more land or secure their own, and saving what they could. By 1875, they had what Nathans calls “their foothold in freedom.”
The author makes clear that unlike Paul Cameron, Paul Hargress and his kin and friends didn’t intend to make a fortune; they simply wanted to fulfill their independence as small farmers. Fearing the loss of their land, rarely did they borrow directly against it; instead, they got caught up in the entangling lien system—pledging parts of their crops in return for the seeds and other stuffs they needed—but somehow never having to surrender their acreage. Sometimes they rented parts of their land to others; women as well as men worked the soil. Some of the families succeeded in creating full-fledged plantations, with mills, workshops, and hired labor.
Of course, when they tried to go beyond mere ownership and sustenance to exert political influence, until the 1960s they were thwarted at every turn. Ballot boxes disappeared, and the KKK rode out. Deference was expected and, sometimes, required of them. And nothing was made easier by the Depression. Federal programs rarely made it through the segregated culture of the Jim Crow South to help people like the Hargresses, nor could the patronage of some whites be counted on.
If Nathans goes a bit too far in attributing their holding-on simply to grit—luck has to come into the picture somewhere—he is surely correct in linking their success in doing so to their understanding that ownership undergirded their independence and to their fierce, enduring, family bonds. Farming was their way of life, and they were determined to keep it so. As Depression gave way to war and then postwar prosperity, and family members scattered about the country—even then, that commitment endured. Alice Hargress wanted to make sure that her kin “will always have somewhere to stay.”
One hangs onto the story to see whether the Hargresses hang on. And they almost don’t—not even when they take a hand in the civil rights movement and gain some new protections for themselves. Family members and friends did succeed in reaping some anti-poverty funds to set up a rural cooperative. Some others almost slipped off the edge into landless poverty, as so many who had gone North did, and lost their land. But not Alice Hargress: When she died in 2014, just shy of her hundredth birthday, her family remained where some of them had landed in slavery almost two centuries before.
Nathans conveys this tale in a fashion much at odds with the usual sweeping telling of much African-American history, especially when (as in this case) he relates in the first person his efforts to track down his characters’ pasts. His own part in recovering this history, a quest he inaugurated almost 40 years ago, helps bring it alive. While aware of the now-vast literature of American history, he doesn’t wade into it, invoke esoteric interpretive theory, pick arguments with other historians, or barnacle his account with weighty references to others’ works. His account is built almost entirely on documentary records—some buried deeply, never before used, in out-of-the-way places, as well as on interviews with family members whose trust, then friendship, he won. Almost in defiance of much academic writing, his sentences are short and denatured, his style spare. Rarely do adornments interrupt the flow of declarative, factual sentences.
It’s as if the author is trying, by every means possible, to say: There’s another oft-missed story here, one that has to be told in a fresh way. At times, one wishes for more grace, more variety. But Nathans’s manner is entirely fitting for the history of a family whose members, one modest step after another—sometimes intentional, sometimes not—worked day by day to hold onto the land on which they had ended up.
What are we to make of this story, save for the tale of people with a mind to stay in place? We know that millions of African Americans have remained in the South—in the land of their original enslavement, their emancipation, and now their slow acceptance. Some never left after emancipation; others have recently returned from their days up north. But historians haven’t captured much of this history. Nathans’s is only part of it. Yet it unrolls a wide canvas yet to be painted: on the history of landowning and agriculture, of Alabama Black Belt culture, of the bonds of blood, of the tangled loyalties among some whites and blacks, of honor as well as racism and deceit.
It’s as much a family saga as Downton Abbey. It’s a Southern tale much richer than Gone With the Wind. It’s a particular American story that forms the weave of the nation’s larger history, one that could easily be the basis of a long novel. It’s a revealing, sobering, yet inspiring glimpse into a part of American history little known and little seen—light-touch scholarship of the best sort.
James M. Banner Jr., a historian in Washington, is writing a study of revisionist history.
