Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky by Jack Glazier (review)

Jack Glazier revels in the particularity of place in the newly published paperback edition of his book, Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky (2015). Noting that each place is “constrained by the burden of its own history” (5), Glazier merges history and ethnography to present an insightful study of contemporary race relations in Hopkinsville, Christian County, Kentucky—a town once described by current residents as “unmarred by race relations” (190). Glazier weaves together local archival documents, secondary sources, and ethnographic observation to dismantle this myth of racial harmony. He provides an account of community formation and personal achievement as he recounts blacks’ efforts to secure autonomy amid systemic racial inequality. Yet, his study does more than present a counter-narrative to biased representations of the past. The book examines the battle between history and memory in an effort to demonstrate how both have been used to bolster as well as to contest racial inequalities in the region.

Glazier’s book is inspired by the life of Idella Bass, a black woman who worked as a domestic in his house when he was a child. Bass was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1891 and came from a distinguished background. The daughter of former slaves, her father briefly attended Oberlin College and later established a successful laundry service in Indiana. While an accident dashed Bass’s dreams of becoming a nurse, her resolute character left an indelible mark on Glazier. Bass’s stories about Hopkinsville and her family’s efforts to overcome racism sparked his protracted interest in the western Kentucky region. Although he aimed to write a biography of the Bass family, limited historical information precluded him from doing so. Glazier, instead, chose to detail a more comprehensive history of Hopkinsville and the greater christian county region to better illuminate the lives of the Basses and other black families.

Despite the prevailing claims of racial harmony in western Kentucky, Glazier’s analysis reveals an area deeply divided by race. His book traces roughly 150 to 200 years of history in the region linking current racial inequalities to the area’s enslaved past. Chapter 1 immediately counters the myth that slavery was a modest and benevolent institution in Christian county. Glazier highlights christian county’s ascendancy as one of the US’s leading producers of tobacco and discusses the significance of enslaved labor to the area’s agricultural economy. He also lays out the book’s central premise, which is that the past has been modified and manipulated to both maintain and resist racial hierarchies. To characterize this process, Glazier uses the term “usable past,” which is described as an account of one’s history that contributes to “confident cultural self-awareness, making possible communal engagement and self-representation” (9).

Glazier explains how the relationship between history and memory are important in this process as the development of a usable past involves the selective remembrance of certain people, places, and events. chapter 2 elucidates how history—often considered an authoritative and unquestionable account of the past—in Christian County has ignored the lives, experiences, and contributions of blacks in the area. Glazier surveys the unpublished diary of a white female slaveholder to show how whites perceived blacks through stereotypical tropes like the faithful slave. He elucidates how these images became the ideological foundation to rationalizations of slavery in western Kentucky. The portrayals in the state’s historiography of blacks as servile, childlike, and ignorant codified blacks’ exclusion and alienation by rendering them without a history and identity beyond white political and economic subjugation.

Chapters 3 and 4 recoup black history from the margins by outlining blacks’ transition from slavery to freedom. These chapters highlight freed blacks’ agency and resilience despite the continuous uptick in racial violence following the conclusion of the Civil War. While Glazier highlights the failures of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the rise of Jim Crow...