Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (review)

evocative portraits of people struggling with inner and outer demons, albeit in a simpler, seemingly more innocent place and time. Most of all, though, Wilkinson has mastered the short narrative in much the same way that her fellow Kentuckian bell hooks has mastered the short provocative essay. There is a searing penetration that characterizes Wilkinson's stories, and these stories seldom fail to instruct or delight. However, regardless of how excellent the short narratives are, simply arranging them together, even cleverly, does not a sustained narrative make. Readers need and demand more than that for a work to have a unified, cohesive impact such as seems to be intended in Water Street. Besides, when the individual stories work so well and achieve such mastery, is such a linking strategy really necessary? — Warren J. Carson John C. Inscoe, ed. Appalachians and Race: The Mountain Southfrom Slavery to Segregation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 330 pages. $34.95 Hardcover. Any book which pulls together material dealing with African Americans in Appalachia is welcome. This is especially true when the new collection is of uniformly high quality. John Inscoe's introduction does an excellent job of spelling out the problems and issues involved in the study of the lives of African 81 Americans in 19th century Appalachia. One of the major challenges is the scholar's being limited largely to official or institutional documents. Richard Drake's essay gets the ball rolling with his discussion of the extensiveness of slavery throughout the mountains and the growth of abolitionist ideas. Prior to the Civil War, African Americans in the mountains played a variety of roles other than field hands or servants. David Williams tells of their participation in the Georgia gold fields in the 1830s and 1840s. Some were able to buy their freedom through their mining. Charles Dew reconstructs the life of a western Virginia ironworker. John Stealey's essay deals with the large number of leased slaves who worked in the salt industry in the Kanawha Valley from 1812 to 1860. Marie Tedesco writes of an ambitious free black man whose numerous business dealings in Tennessee included the buying and selling of slaves. Cecilia Conway tells of the African American musicians who shaped Appalachian banjo playing. The economic, political and ideological issues involved in slavery and segregation are presented in several essays. Although the mountain regions contained relatively few slaves, slavery had an impact. Wilma Dunaway spells out the effect of the interstate slave trade; Kenneth Noe the effect of the building of railroads in southwestern Virginia. Inscoe deals with the frequently overlooked picture of slavery in the mountains found in the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted. Following emancipation, African Americans became active in politics in a number of areas. Gordon McKinney tells of their experience in Tennessee in the face of the coming age of Jim Crow. Emancipation also meant that African Americans were able to migrate on their own for the first time. This had the unforeseen effect of increasing poverty in several areas. The data in the essay by Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings indicate that out-migration reduced poverty among whites while increasing poverty among African Americans in a Kentucky county. At the same time, the literary emphasis on the "white, Anglo-Saxon" character of mountain people removed nonwhites from the picture as pointed out by Nina Silber. Emancipation meant the end of a long-lived system of white social control of African Americans. New systems were needed. John Cirnprich reports the problems of racial, class and personal conflict in Tennessee at the end of the war. Ronald Lewis details the development of the convict lease system as a means of control in the mountains. Fitzhugh Brundage points out that the mountain areas took on the broader southern practices of mob violence and lynching as means of controlling the African American population. 82 AfricanAmericans in the mountains were not passive; many strove to establish communal institutions. Jennifer Smith covers the efforts of freed persons to establish an independent church and separate schools in Lumpkin County, Georgia. Joe William Trotter's essay portrays the results of the migration of African Americans into the West Virginia coalfields and the...