The Hairstons: An American Epic in Black and White

by Henry Wiencek

Book Overview

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312192770
• ISBN13: 9780312192778
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 361 Pages
• Weight: 1.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

The Hairstons is an amazing book

This book shines a light on this specific family and the history that surrounds it the good and the bad. It shows in detail the strength of a family enslaved and how they pushed forward. i would recommend anyone to read this book. I bought it because my coworker is a hairston and he recommended i read it.

Amazing story of shared history, forgiveness and reconciliation...

When Henry Wiencek was doing background work for a book on old houses, he visited a plantation home in North Carolina called Cooleemee. Cooleemee has been owned continuously by the Hairston family, and the present owner is Judge Peter W. Hairston. Wiencek asked Hairston if he knew of any descendents of Cooleemee slaves, and he was introduced to Squire Hairston. This chance encounter lead Wiencek on a seven year odyssey to discover the history of not just the white Hairston family, but the black Hairston's as well. The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White is an incredibly fascinating book that reflects not just the history of one family, but the story of our nation. Fortunately for his readers, Wiencek writes this historical narrative to read like a novel. The Hairston's were once one of the richest plantation families. Together, they owned 45 plantations in three states, and Samuel Hairston was said to own over 10,000 slaves (the most slaves ever owned by one person). The Hairston's tended to marry other Hairston's to keep the plantations in the family. But their way of life changed forever after the Civil War. While the fortunes of the white Hairston's never recovered, the black Hairston's were able to make something of their lives. Due to perseverance and discipline, they became engineers, farmers, musicians, lawyers, teachers, farmers, principals and ministers. Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball covers a similar subject matter, but Wiencek's book gives us much more of a historical perspective. The history of the Hairston's in American begins around 1729 and continues to the present. The author touches on the Revolution, the Abolitionist Movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, blacks in the military and integration. These stories are all told through the eyes of the Hairston clan. Much of the success of The Hairstons: An American Family is due to Judge Peter. He opened his home and his archives (over 25,000 documents) to Wiencek and never put any conditions on where the author's research might lead. Cooleemee is also always open to his black brethren, and he embraced these Hairston "kin" with open arms. When Squire Hairston passed away, Judge Peter sat in the front row of the church and sobbed uncontrollably. What truly drives this book are the themes of love and friendship, forgiveness and redemption, and loyalty and reconciliation. We also see how determination, perseverance and faith can overcome so many obstacles. The Hairston family exhibits great family pride, and over a thousand black Hairston's gather each year for a reunion. Wiencek will also have you running an emotional gamut from incredulity to outrage to finally, hope. You will see that despite the horrible history of slavery and prejudice, both sides of the Hairston clan have come together in a spirit of forgiveness and acceptance (something the relatives of Edward Ball were not able to do). Wiencek al

One family's history through slavery to the present

Subtitled, "An American Family in Black and White", this is a true story of a Southern family that spans the years from 1790 to the present day. The author, Henry Wiencek, is a northern journalist who specializes in old homes. One day, when visiting an historic plantation in Virginia, the owner piqued the author's interest by telling him anecdotes and showing him historical records. The author was fascinated and started doing research and interviewing the surviving members of the family, including the descendents of the slaves who had also taken the last name of Hairston, many of whom were related by blood.This is not only the story of one particular family. It is the story of America itself and the awful institution of slavery. The white family members look back on it with anguish and never make any apology for it. Historically though, there are letters and documents in which they try to justify it. For example, at the beginning of the 19th Century one young white plantation owner visited England and wrote a letter about appalling conditions of the factory workers in London who lived in squalor compared to his well-treated slaves in Virginia. During the 19th Century, most of the whites merely accepted the situation with the exception of one plantation owner in Mississippi. When he died, he left his entire plantation to his daughter who was born to a slave woman. Such a thing was unheard of at the time. The case was delayed in the courts for years while the daughter and her mother were quickly sold. The writer did a lot of research and finally traced the daughter, who wound up with a very interesting life of her own, even though she remained a slave.Some of the stories of the Civil War were fascinating, especially the role of the former slaves who became soldiers in the Union Army. In one particular battle in Mississippi, they fought so bravely that their Illinois white fellow soldiers risked their own lives to save them. In another documented incident with northern soldiers, a white man was disciplined harshly for disrespecting one of the black men. This kind of respect changed however. The Buffalo Soldiers of WW2 were treated badly. It was hard to read about how they were sent into battle by incompetent leaders. The author interviewed one of these Buffalo Soldiers who was still alive and some of his stories are fascinating.Another one of the living black descendents is Jester Hairston, who acted in the movie "The Alamo" with John Wayne. He now is one of the most respected historians of slave music and travels around the country continuing his research and giving lectures. Many of the former slaves settled near the Virginia plantation and opened businesses and sent their children to college. Basically, they've done much better than the white plantation owners who just sold off one parcel of land after another until it was practically all gone.The black Hairstons have a long-standing annual family reunion and the author joine

A Excellent book with history and lessons

I have never read a book like this before in my life. The author took the famillies and made us see who they really were. He showed a common bond through teaching us there history. I recommend this book to everyone it is full of history and faithfulness to family ties.

The Hairstons

This book is, quite frankly, one of the most powerful books I have read in a long time. The author chronicles a southern family's history, unwinding the complex relationships between master and slave and illuminating the enormous contributions of African-Americans to the growth and development of our country--a history long neglected and nearly unknown. As this well researched tale unfolds, the mystery of this family's heritage, their contributions, their curse, and their redemption---both black and white---becomes understood. Their story is our nation's story. I now have a better understanding of why the legacy of slavery continues to haunt our relationships even down to this day. Every American should read this book!

A stark documentation of slavery's legacy in black and white

This book has had a profound impact on me, and I encourage you to read it. Wiencek has done a painstaking job of documenting the legacy of slavery on the white and African American descendants of the Hairston line. Wiencek uses court records, actual letters written by the early white Hairston planters, interviews with present-day descendants, and other texts to trace the rise and fall of the white Hairstons and unconquerable spirit of the black Hairstons. Moreover, the "protests" one sees in these reviews by some of the present-day white descendants of the Hairston planters lends even more credence to the devastating story of greed, sorrow, poverty, and ultimately, triumph painted by Wiencek's seven years of research into the Hairston families' history. Were I a white descendant, I imagine it would not be welcome to have the mythology about one's family as benevolent, caring owners who never sold their slaves exploded. (Indeed, if any African Americans may have a legal claim for reparations, surely the black Hairston family does, for Wiencek "discovers" how the white Hairston family deliberately stole the inheritance--worth millions in present-day dollars--of one of their ancestors, a mulatto child whose father, a wealthy Hairston plantation owner, left her the bulk of his estate. I won't spoil the entire story for you by saying more here. You can learn the details yourself when you buy the book.) And Wiencek does explode the myth, not through rhetoric or anecdotes but through the use of documents that, for example, show the sales of children from their families. Wiencek also provides the reader with an extensive bibliography and chapter endnotes to give authority of each claim made in the book.The only "complaint" I might have with this book--and it's no complaint--is that I often find the story within it painful to read. I'm a fast reader, yet I find I can only read this book a chapter or two at a time, or some days, depending on the passages, only a few pages at a sitting. I then have to stop and move on to some other task to try to shake off the feeling of heaviness that envelopes me. In those moments, I am sometimes struck by how far the owners would go to obtain and retain their property, and that includes their slaves. By how resentful many became after slavery's end and how they saw their former slaves' leaving of the plantation as a betrayal. By the strength and courage of the slaves themselves and their present-day descendants. By how some whites, despite the times in which they lived, had the courage to defend and assist the slaves and their descendants. America is truly a land of complexity and contradiction when it comes to the relationship between blacks and whites, and no story brings the strangeness of that relationship more to light than that of the Hairstons.Please, read this book and judge its merits for yourself. See if you find it as wonderful, as awful, as inspiring as I