A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans (review)

Historian Sydney Nathans arrived in western Alabama in 1978 hoping to research 114 enslaved persons who slave owner Paul Cameron moved from North Carolina to Alabama in 1844; he planned to interview "descendants who possessed an oral tradition" (x). He started his work with Alice Hargress, one of the descendants, and at their first meeting he introduced his project, telling her, "I'm doing research on black people brought out from North Carolina to Alabama in 1844… [Paul Cameron] went back to North Carolina, but left the people, and after freedom came, it looks like many of them stayed." Hargress simply replied, "That's right" (7). As early as this first conversation, the project became not only a history based on oral tradition but also the story of the development of that oral tradition itself, as many generations of African Americans thereafter forged a community and interpreted their own past.

In A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland, Nathans argues that the Hargress family exemplifies a form of resistance in which descendants push back against the lingering effects of bondage. Despite white supremacists' repeated attempts to evict and terrorize them, these descendants have banded together to support each other by working the land and establishing businesses, such as the Greenala Citizens Federal Credit Union. Nathans's aim in his work is to illuminate "the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans" (ix). Not only does A Mind to Stay diverge from the "dominant narrative of black life in the twentieth century, Great Migration," but it also demonstrates the potential of nontraditional oral history to challenge more traditional narratives (ix).

Nathans divides A Mind to Stay into four sections comprised of fourteen chapters, plus a preface, a prologue, and an epilogue. The book is organized mostly chronologically, but like many oral history monographs, Nathans uses reflections of narrators in recent interviews to offer a different understanding of past events; that is, he uses contemporary primary sources to reconstruct past events rather than the sources of that time period.

Though much oral history research focuses on recent events, A Mind to Stay uses the oral tradition of one family to craft a narrative that begins in the 1840s. As a result, Nathans delves into the ways nineteenth-century chattel slavery shaped American lives then and through its legacies in the 1980s and beyond. This is an approach that might surprise some oral historians. Nathans's work epitomizes the potential of using oral tradition from living descendants and written sources from historical archives in tandem to explore both the present and a time far removed (temporally, though clearly not culturally) from those he interviewed. He made repeated trips to western Alabama to interview the Hargress descendants and other members of their community over the course of forty years and combined those results with extensive archival research in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina to construct this narrative. Interestingly, Nathans published two additional books while researching A Mind to Stay: The Quest for Progress: The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1870-1920 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1983) and To Free A Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Harvard University Press, 2012), both of which drew from multigenerational oral traditions to present the lived experiences of enslaved African Americans.

Ned Forrest Hargress, a prominent member of the Hargress family and of the African American community in western Alabama, died just a few months before what would have been his one hundredth birthday in June 1965. His father was Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and his mother was an enslaved member of the Hargress family. As per usual, the identity of Ned's father was well-known only among local African Americans. Alice Hargress's telling of this fact to Nathans in her interview exemplifies all that oral traditions of marginalized communities can offer: a record of...