The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen's Town by Marti Corn (review)

For generations following the Civil War, the vast majority of black southerners were bound within a framework of dependency characterized by tenancy, sharecropping, and, as Douglas Blackmon has reminded us, "neo-slavery." At the same time, however, many freedmen and their descendants, cherishing dreams of economic self-sufficiency, readily embraced opportunities for landownership. Readers familiar with the research of historians Kenneth Hamilton, Thad Sitton, and James H. Conrad know that African Americans often were the agents of their own economic independence as they established all-black towns, colonies, and communities in Mississippi, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and beyond. In The Ground on Which I Stand, a volume in Texas A&M University Press's Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, documentary photographer Marti Corn introduces her readers to the residents of Tamina, a historically black settlement located in Montgomery County, Texas, ten miles south of Conroe and thirty miles north of Houston along the Interstate 45 corridor.

Established in 1871 on acreage owned by a transplanted New Yorker who was willing to sell land to African Americans, Tamina (originally Tammany) was populated largely by freedmen drawn from various southern states to the logging industry and sawmills north of Houston. Here they built their homes, churches, a school, and a general store and developed a strong sense of community that persists among current residents, several of whom are descended from the first settlers. Marti Corn discovered this community when she moved to Montgomery County in 1998 and has observed in recent years that Tamina's residents, embracing a sense of place and pride of heritage, have attempted to resist real estate developers from surrounding upscale communities who have threatened the future of the town.

The Ground on Which I Stand is part ethnography, part oral history, and part photographic essay. Corn's seventy-four color photographs of the people and physical structures that comprise contemporary Tamina are the stars of the volume and help make up for a limited narrative line and long quotations from interviews with residents that in too many instances are less revealing than one would have hoped. While not always captioned, the photographs as a whole are stunning in their composition, simplicity, and, especially, in their ability to capture the dignity of the community's human subjects. Readers may reasonably question whether the story of Tamina belongs in a journal dedicated to the Great Plains, but specialists in African American and Texas history will benefit from this book as it explores from a new vantage point the continuing legacy of emancipation in the Lone Star State.