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

One of the most difficult tasks for historians is to uncover the voices of peoples who have faced erasure or left little evidence that has survived in the historical record. In A Mind to Stay: White Plantations, Black Homeland, Sydney Nathans unearthed the lives of Paul Hargis, a family patriarch who experienced the transition from slavery to freedom, and the peoples of Cassimore, the all Black community that he and other formerly enslaved people helped to establish in Hale County, Alabama, after the Civil War. Hargis left few clues about his life: a Freedmen's Bureau contract signed with an 'X' in 1865, his place of residence in census records, and a deed documenting that he purchased land in the 1880s. In order to elucidate Hargis's story, the author oftentimes had to investigate him indirectly and comb the thousands of papers left by his former owner, Paul Cameron, for greater insight. Nathans has completed an immense undertaking in reconstructing Cassimore by collecting oral histories, reconstructing family trees, and perusing the masses of public records referencing the community's longtime residents.

The backdrop to these experiences is the land itself. Culminating with the modern civil rights movement, the story of the land spans the one hundred seventy-year history of the residents' enslavement in the antebellum period, their attempts to become economically self-sufficient in the postwar era, community development during the age of Jim Crow, and the challenges of commercialized farming and outward migration in the twentieth century. Nathan contends that Black residents, who chose to stay, connected landownership to true freedom. His work is "an account of the meaning of land to those who lived on it, and how the land's role and meaning changed over time" (p. 14).

A Mind to Stay covers the economic, political, and social history of Cassimore, including people such as Tom Ruffin, a formerly enslaved person, who by 1900 was the largest Black landowner in the county, and Ned Forrest Hargress, a landowner, church elder, and rumored son of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Also included are residents who challenged racial and economic injustices such as James Lyles, a preacher and civil rights leader, who along with his wife, Mildred, began a local Black credit union and the Alabama Farmer's Cooperative in the 1960s, and Alice Sledge Hargress, who in 1964 at the age of fifty mobilized during the civil rights movement and, like thousands of other Blacks in Hale County, registered to vote for the first time.

Some contention might be made at the author's attempts at emotional conjecture, applied at times to Cameron and to Hargis. Nathans portrays Paul Cameron as a paternalistic slaveowner, one who cares for his enslaved workers more than profits. The author contends, "Indeed, within bondage, as Paul Hargis and his siblings could testify, the fair measure of 'humanity' was comparative, and by comparison, the Camerons and Bennehans of the early nineteenth century stood high among their peers" (p. 98). Yet, there are also accounts in which Cameron exhibits the demoralizing characteristics of southern slave owners. In 1865 one of his former bondsman called him a "hard Master—yielding short supplies of all sort & granting no indulgences" (p. 98). An absentee owner to many of his slaves, it can also be said that he was driven by profit, condoned contemporary tortures, and always displayed bias toward the word of his white employees. Although possibly contrived, most of the assertions about Cameron's motivations, Hargis's concerns, and the rationale of both enslaved people and owners, are reasonably surmised.

Within this microhistory of one Black community in Alabama, readers will gain insight into and recognize themes of westward migration, Black resistance to economic and political subjugation, and southern genealogy. A Mind to Stay will also begin to allow readers to understand how for Black Americans living on family land provided a sense of pride, self-determination, and sanctuary from Jim Crow that cannot...