All Books Reviewed by the Palimpsest Editorial Collective

Jane Beck, a Vermont folklorist, happened upon the story of Daisy Turner, a descendant of captive Africans whose family settled in New England post-emancipation, through providence and a newspaper clipping sent to her by a folk singer and collector. When Beck began to interview her, Turner was one hundred years old. Beck had to contend not only with Turner’s memory as a primary source, which she understood to be faulty—Frederick Douglass rewrote his life and times three times—but with Turner’s own tendency to pepper her kinship ties with embellishments that have some kernels of truth.

In the process, though, Turner was able to lead Beck on a journey traversing more than two hundred years of an American family’s history—from forced migration from Africa to America. As Beck writes, she was fascinated by the Turners’ story because it represented “issues that continue to haunt us . . . it reveals one family’s survival through bondage and its climb to citizenship, land ownership, and respectability” (8). Daisy Turner’s Kin is a readable narrative with surprising twists.

While Beck’s Daisy Turner’s Kin is a large-scale family and cultural history, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering by Rosemarie Freeney Harding with Rachel Elizabeth Harding is a blend of autobiography and biography, as daughter Rachel Harding highlights remnants of her mother Rosemarie’s life and the spiritual community of women she helped to create and nurture. Rachel and Rosemarie prepared notes and interviews for what would eventually become Remnants before her mother passed. It was only after her mother’s death that Rachel returned to the unfinished project. Rosemarie Freeney Harding, a pioneer in her own right, is perhaps better known outside of her community of women activists and spiritualists as the wife of noted historian Vincent Harding, who was also Rachel’s father. Rachel Harding pushes through the dense fog of her father’s noted public intellectualism, allowing her mother to stand on her own terms and in her own voice.