The Hairstons

February 1, 1999
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.

Starred review from February 15, 1999
Last year Edward Ball won a National Book Award for "Slaves in the Family", a book that recorded Ball's family's slave-owning history. Wiencek brings readers another incredible story, one that transcends the history of another American family, the Hairstons, to illuminate the lives of many American families. It reverberates with timeliness and timelessness as white Americans continue to deny the black descendants of Thomas Jefferson. The Hairstons were the largest slaveholders in the South and one of the wealthiest families in the U.S. With varying degrees of acceptance of the race mixing that occurred between master and slave, the Hairston family history remains remarkably intact through documents held on the white side of the family and stories passed down on the black side. Wiencek details the family's efforts to keep its dark-skinned members enslaved and to maintain the wealth only for its white members. He draws parallels with Faulkner's tales of the evils and blood kinship of slavery, tales of miscegenation and denial. This is a fascinating, well-documented book that explores the complexity of family and racial relationships in the U.S. ((Reviewed February 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)