Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown (review)

The Great Migration, when approximately 6 million black Southerners left the agrarian South for the industrial North and Midwest between 1910 and 1970, was complicated, and is not always a morally satisfying narrative. Karida L. Brown's oral history of the black community in Harlan County, Kentucky, complicates the familiar narrative of South-to-North movement with an unusual visit to the history of black Appalachia. "The historic catastrophe of slavery made us [African Americans] homeless," Brown writes, illustrating "what an elusive concept 'home' is to black people" (5). Even after Emancipation, "black people's relationship to home has been one of continual dislocation and displacement" (5–6). Using one hundred forty or so interview subjects, Brown sketches an image of what poet Frank X. Walker has called AFFRILACHIA that will be a revelation to readers unaware of the region's history.

In the old debate over whether the migration from the Deep South was motivated by push or pull factors, Brown falls definitively on the side of the former; "the act of leaving," she asserts, "was not a migration but an escape" (25). The coal towns of eastern Kentucky were not a complete escape from racism, because Kentucky was still a Jim Crow state. However, even a paternalistic company town was a relief after the "racial landscape of overt domination and terror" farther south (73). After later generations had moved further north to complete the Great Migration in Ohio and Michigan, the memory of an Appalachian childhood augmented the double consciousness (this, and many other DuBoisian concepts, define Gone Home) of black life in America.

Black Southerners who came to the New River and Flat Top districts of southern West Virginia were largely Virginians like Booker T. Washington, with some North and South Carolinians thrown in. But the later black migration to Harlan County came predominately from Alabama, particularly the area in Alabama where black men had been mining coal since the days of enslavement. Alabama served as a point of departure and contrast in the memories of citizens of Harlan and the nearby towns of Benham and Lynch. The constant physical threats of Deep South racism were replaced by the paternalism and social control of the company town. Black miners and white miners shared similar conditions: dangerous work and low pay in the form of scrip, their wives forced into a permanent condition of gendered labor. If there was a race-based difference in pay in mines owned by US Steel and International Harvester, it did not register for the mining families' children. But the knowledge of racial difference was just as real in a part of Kentucky with a large white majority as it had been farther south.

This was especially true for children raised in Harlan County with no memory of Alabama to act as contrast. Segregation, and the other devices of Jim Crow, were particularized by the minute differences between communities. "For example, I don't remember separate water fountains, except when I went to Harlan [from Lynch] and you could see the signs," one interviewee remembered (82). Black consciousness in the mountains was defined by racial "flash points," moments of violence or verbal communication that reminded black children of their race even in an environment where racial difference was informal and only vaguely institutionalized. But racial Otherness was also internalized as well. Black children in Harlan County recalled being subject to hierarchies of pigmentation. "In the eyes of the blacks [it was] 'if you're black stay back, if you're brown stick around, if you are white you're all right,'" recalled one man born in Lynch during World War II (89). With Italians and eastern Europeans also in the mining population, black mountain children learned about hierarchies of whiteness. Immigrants from countries like Hungary and Yugoslavia "were considered to be white folks of a different class" and, anecdotally, were more likely to fraternize with black mining...