February Is Black History Month: "The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White"

"One would have to be hard-hearted indeed not to be moved by the big story this book tells . . . or by the little stories it tells of individual Hairstons whose lives reveal so much about what it is to be an American . . . It is scrupulous and honest in all respects, and a powerful testament to what this country, at its best, can be."— Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World






The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wieneck
Paperback, 400 pages
Published by: St. Martin's/Griffin Trade Paperback
Price: $15.95
Publication Date: 2000

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
— James Baldwin

“At a plantation in North Carolina I met the heir to a family of slaveholders, perhaps the largest slaveholders in the South. On the same day, in the library of the old master’s mansion, I met the grandson of one of those slaves. Both men shared the name Hairston,” author Henry Wieneck writes in the introduction of his extraordinary and award-winning family biography The Hairstons.

Winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and Autobiography and recently released in paperback The Hairstons is epic in scope. It tells of a sweeping family saga that spans two centuries—from Revolutionary days to present day—and looks at the legacy of this Southern slaveholding family and how that history connects one generation to the next, how it unites both the white and black members of this huge Hairston clan.

According to Wieneck, the true Hairston history has been hidden under “layers of lies and myth...for almost a century and a half.” Wieneck undertook a seven-year exploration into the past of these two families to “[set] down the memories that still echo” in their minds and souls.He discovered that their story serves as “a parable of redemption” and is ultimately a story of “love and heroism.”

But before Wieneck reached that sunny conclusion, he compared the romanticized notions of the old South most commonly seen in Gone With the Wind— like portrayals to disturbing accounts of the humiliations and cruelties of slavery. He studied the “immense Hairston plantation archive,” which amounts to some 25,000 items; he visited the Hairston plantation territories in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi; and he deciphered slave rosters and tried to “conjure some meaning from the endless litany of the dead.”

Wieneck’s research reveals startling facts about the Hairstons’ vast wealth and power. For example, in 1851 Samuel Hairston of Virginia, “reputedly the largest slaveholder in the South,” possessed land and slaves worth $5 million. And Wieneck found that the pre-Civil War holdings of the family’s combined branches totaled 45 plantations in four states and 10,000 slaves.

To protect this empire “the Hairstons revived one of the old customs of the European nobility—they married each other.” Combining the riches of one branch of the family to the affluence of another branch assured that Hairston property remained within the family. This practice worked well until 1852, when a devastating threat to the family fortune loomed near. Robert Hairston of Mississippi, who “felt misgivings over slavery,” collaborated with the American Colonization Society to free some of his slaves. He took his slave, Elizabeth, as his wife, and sometime between 1845 and 1847, they had a daughter, Chrillis.

When Robert died in 1852, he left all his slaves, plantations, and land holdings to Chrillis—and she was to be set free. As such Chrillis could free as many as 1,000 slaves, “creating a patchwork of free colonies in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi.”

The white Hairstons would not tolerate Robert’s “dismantling” of their dominion. They sought legal injunctions to halt action on the will and claimed Robert was insane. Wieneck soon reached the end of the documentation on these proceedings, and Chrillis had curiously vanished from the historical record.

Had the Hairstons murdered the unacceptable heir, Wieneck wondered? In a dramatic moment of Wieneck’s genealogical research, Chrillis resurfaces and Wieneck shows that “the fates of the two families, white and black, [converge] in that child.”

Despite their efforts to ensure that their wealth and prosperity remained unshakable, it is an ironic twist in the white Hairston history that they saw their own decline. By the end of the Civil War the family’s fortune had been decimated; and for the first time, the patrician Hairstons were obliged to fend for themselves.

In contrast, the black Hairstons made a “triumphant rise . . . from servitude and poverty to take their rightful place in mainstream America.” As Wieneck writes, this is the history of “a remarkable people,” and their story “touches every facet of American endeavor.”

Wieneck introduces readers to Thomas Hairston, a freed slave who fought in the Civil War with the Third United States Colored Calvary and was the unit’s company bugler. We learn the courageous and provocative story of John L. Hairston, a former principal of an all-black school who “defied the segregationists in 1968 and galvanized the black community to topple the ‘separate but equal’ system that had ruled them for their entire lives.”

We meet Jester Hairston, a 1929 graduate of Tufts University, who arranged music for the films Red River and Duel in the Sun and who played Jethro in the film The Alamo starring John Wayne. And we join Joseph Hairston, one of the highest-ranking black attorneys in the federal government and a World War II veteran with the Ninety-second Infantry, as he goes in search of his Hairston roots.

Whether Wieneck is relating the daily toil of an enslaved people as in his chapter “The Lives of the Hairston Slaves;” exposing the disgusting history of the Ku Klux Klan, their practice of lynching, and their murder of a Hairston family member; or describing the 1949 capital punishment case of the “Martinsville 7” his writing is observant and direct. He’s critical when necessary and dedicated to the pursuit of difficult truths.

The Hairstons prevails as a troublesome and enthralling study of a family who “enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations” and of a people who rose from the “dust” of slavery. It exposes ugly scars of injustice and still-unhealed wounds of racism, and it honors the Hairston attempt to transcend the past by embracing it.


This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2000.