Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community by Douglas A. Boyd (review)

This composite book review consists of an initial review by John B. Wolford, followed by four responses and commentaries by Sarah Milligan, Tracy E. K’Meyer, Katherine A. Scott, and Joanna Hay. Taken together, they explore the significance of Crawfish Bottom, both the book and the community it documents, from a kaleidoscope of perspectives: the role of the oral historian in community-based oral history projects; the public reaction to the book; the relevance of national trends, such as urban renewal, for community history; and the complex interplay of race, class, and place.

• John B. Wolford
• John B. Wolford

Crawfish Bottom details the public and personal memories about a socioeconomically depressed community in a small Kentucky town. The town is Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, and the small section of town that is documented was a predominantly African American one that the city had isolated through law and social sanction for about a hundred years. Obliterated by urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s, Crawfish Bottom lingers only in the memories of individuals, archival records, and some photographs. The place is lost, as the book’s subtitle suggests, but only as a physical space.

Perhaps most importantly, the subtitle also suggests that the “place” still exists and that the sense of this place is recoverable. Prominent oral historians, such as Kim Lady Smith, Terry Birdwhistell, Sarah Milligan, Doug Boyd, Tracy K’Meyer, and many others have studied Frankfort or worked with (or within) its Kentucky Oral History Commission over the decades. Boyd, however, may be the perfect person to have written this book. With deep and varied backgrounds in folklore, archives, oral history, library management, and community research, in addition to having lived in Frankfort for several years, he has brought to bear all of his skills to craft this deep study of “Craw,” as residents most commonly called the area. Relying heavily on government records, newspapers, manuscripts, police reports, and other documentary research, as well as twenty-three archival oral histories (many of which James Wallace conducted in 1991), Boyd likewise incorporates four interviews of his own, one a reinterview of one of Wallace’s narrators, R. T. Brooks. To Wallace’s extensive oral history, Boyd adds much deeper historical, geographical, and cultural context through his research, as well as adding a more considered objectivity. As might be expected, he fully documents all references.

Boyd’s construction of this work is masterful. After beginning with an overall introduction, he presents the early history of the area, bolstered by relevant theory and approaches from public history, memory studies, folklore, and history. In chapter 2, he focuses on how residents came to define the place. Calling this chapter “Defining Craw,” Boyd invests that title with layers of meaning, including the various understandings of the diverse names of the area (“Craw,” “Bottom,” “The Craw,” “The Bottom,” “Crawfish Bottom,” “the lower part of the city,” and more) by both residents and outsiders; the actual variations on the geographic boundaries of the areas mapped out (in words) by the interviewees (and supplemented with excellent maps as illustrations); and how both residents and outsiders have characterized the area over time. All of these definitions of the place provide a comprehension of historical and personal understanding that any one alone would not accomplish. In the third chapter, Boyd focuses on James Wallace’s amazing series of interviews from 1991 (eighteen interviews involving twenty-two interviewees), in which his intent apparently was to have the narrators contest the prevailing notion of Craw as one-dimensionally lawless, filthy, and amoral. While highlighting and critiquing the leading questions that Wallace incorporated into the interviews, Boyd emphasizes the significance of Wallace’s effort to provide a counter-narrative, in the residents’ own words, to the prevailing notion that Craw was solely a blight. Boyd reveals the tension within the narrators’ testimonies, acknowledging how tough life was in Craw, while also preserving...