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Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaz074

1945-2314

Robert Cassanello,

Race, History, and American Society

Kendra Taira Field has written a personal book about emancipation, migration, and the quest for black political and social autonomy from white supremacy. Field is interested in the social history of African American families and kinship groups who migrated or passed through Indian Territory in Oklahoma in the decades following emancipation. The key figures in the book are all distant relatives or connected to her through some kinship network, in ways organizationally similar to Thulani Davis's My Confederate Kinfolk (2007). Although genealogical methods are part of this work, the author seats the history in a broad context that addresses scholarly debates and trends in Jim Crow–era American history. Field employs microhistory to put a kinship network that passed through Brownville, Oklahoma, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the lens of what Rayford W. Logan described as the nadir so she can interrogate past and present interpretations of the period. The book also touches on the role of agency in social history, the “exodusters,” the Great Migration, the back-to-Africa movement, and the intersection of African American history and native peoples within the shifting foundation of race and citizenship. Field points to the work of Nell Irvin Painter, Darlene Clark Hine, and, most importantly, to Steven Hahn's A Nation under Our Feet (2005). The book also draws on the history of native peoples and relies on Theda Perdue's work on the Cherokee and Claudio Saunt's Black, White, and Indian (2006). Although many of the ideas and the interpretive scope of this book have been fodder for African American history for at least the past thirty years, Field brings fresh ideas and uncovers new approaches to a history and narratives that scholars may have, by now, taken for granted. In many ways this work reminds me of Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor's Colored Travelers (2016). Pryor forces readers to confront the transnational history of Jim Crow segregation but effectively argues that this history is the history of movement; thus, movement is central to understanding the history of people of African descent on racially segregated transportation and the lives of African Americans after emancipation who decided to leave the rural South for economic opportunity, autonomy, and a desire for distance from white supremacy. Movement is central to Growing Up with the Country and is a theme that helps us understand the complex and multifaceted lives that African Americans tried to construct for themselves as a racialized citizenship was imposed on them from above after Reconstruction—a story familiar to many but perhaps not in this way.