The Hairstons Quotes

“Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“A peculiar gravity kept the white and black Hairstons at Cooleemee. Judge Hairston's grandfather had abandoned the house after the Civil War, but misfortune brought his family back to it. They had no other place to go. When the white Hairstons returned, so did the blacks. Thrown back together by necessity, the Hairstons acted out, in microcosm, the long aftermath of slavery.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“His family, it seemed evident, had enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations. It had happened so far back in the past that the whites had been able to forget it, and even among the blacks it was only a dim memory—so dim that it had only the frail substance of a phantom, a voice that whispered only faintly in the roll of begats carried in the memories of the elders.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“They [i.e., freed slaves] lived in an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion, with the status of “outlaws,” in the oldest meaning of that term—which did not originally mean “criminals,” but people outside the protection of the law. They could not get justice; they and their relatives were murdered while the killers went free; their right to marry whom they chose was abrogated; by force and violence they lost the right to vote; and when they sought to improve their lot through education, their teachers were threatened and a schoolhouse was destroyed.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“The terrible suffering among the freed slaves during Reconstruction has been overshadowed, in popular literature and film, by the fall of the white planters, exemplified by the figure of Scarlett O'Hara.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“We know how much corn they [i.e., the enslaved people on Hairston plantations] ate, but do not know how they felt to see the sun rise.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White