The Stained-Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 - Hardcover

Lewis, David Levering

 
9781984879905: The Stained-Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1984879901 ISBN 13: 9781984879905
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis's own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story

Sitting beneath a stained-glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, it struck Lewis that he knew very little about those ancestors. And so, in his mid-80s, the esteemed historian began to excavate their past and his own.

We know that there is no singular, quintessential American story. Yet, the Lewis family contains many defining ones. His lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a mulatto slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia. In The Stained-Glass Window, Lewis is heir and chronicler of them all.   

His father, John Henry Lewis, Sr. set Lewis on the path he would doggedly pursue, introducing him to W.E.B. Du Bois and living by example as an aid to Thurgood Marshall in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained-Glass Widow, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.

In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are themselves bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum project in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us—in these pages, so too are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John who have shaped this nation and will transform the way we see it.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Levering Lewis is professor emeritus of history at New York University. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Lewis received the Pulitzer Prize for each volume of his W. E. B. Du Bois biography. He is the author of eight books. Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Setting Up Slavery

St. Simons Island to Roswell

The Roswell Historical Society email arrived not quite two weeks after the Schlesinger presentation: "Dr. Lewis, I am cautiously optimistic that I have made a complete line to Alice King with documentation to back up the findings." Not only had reading Malcolm Bell's admirable biography, Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family, reinforced my suspicions about the Butlers' two King overseers, but Bell's candid February 1968 book talk at the Roswell Historical Society corroborated a genealogical fact: "The practice of miscegenation by the two Kings [Roswell and Barrington] is well documented." Reverend Grogan, author of the remarkably detailed inventory of Cobb County black families, found nothing to say about an Alice King, but, as he confided, "the Kings were noted for miscegenation."
DeNiro's much-anticipated packet arrived with the photographed copy of Barrington King's bill of sale, dated January 3, 1822, which recorded the purchase of "all those negro and mulatto slaves named Nancy March Yorick Hester Elsie Candis and William" for the sum of $3,800. I was an old hand with historical documents: the Archives Nationales de France for the Dreyfus affair; Yale's Beinecke for the Harlem Renaissance; FOIA Justice Department files for the Du Bois biography. But reading an actual bill of sale for seven human beings was a nauseating novelty, or, as I expressed much more diplomatically to archivist DeNiro, an experience causing "a fair amount of astonishment." By his ownership rights in the seven human beings sold by Maxwell and Waters, Savannah's leading slave traffickers, Barrington King, Roswell Sr.'s twenty-four-year-old heir, stood to profit as a matter of course "from the future increase of said female slaves."
What relevance this had to this family quest of mine became clear after construing the bill of sale's companion document. It was a long parchment page dated 1849 and photocopied from Barrington King's slave ledgers for the years 1835-1864. Two of the seven purchased in 1822-the enslaved William, age one, and enslaved Elsie, age two-had produced three daughters and two sons by 1849; their oldest was Clarissa, born in 1835; Thomas, the youngest, was born in 1849. A line slicing through Clarissa's name channeled my eyes to the faded penciled notation in her master's hand: "Sold, September 1852." I realized that this young woman Barrington sold away from Roswell must be the mother of Alice.
Barrington King, I remembered, had left Darien to join his father in Roswell in 1838, taking his human property along. Clarissa's mother, Elsie, must have been a tender thirteen when Clarissa was born. Her future husband, William, was just twelve at the time of Clarissa's conception, a procreative feat I thought Reverend Grogan might find interesting. My check of the U.S. Census for 1850 disclosed that of Barrington's seventy-odd slaves, half were under the age of ten and worked as domestics. Many of them must have been females who, like Clarissa, represented future revenue sources. Clarissa should have been seventeen in 1852. She would have lived all but three of her seventeen years in Roswell, and conceivably had enjoyed the dubious advantage of service as a domestic. Moreover, as I learned many years later, Clarissa's mother, Elsie, served as nurse and servant for Barrington King's first daughter. In any case, Clarissa and another enslaved young woman and her infant ("Kitty and child") had fetched $1,420 for Barrington.
My anxious inquiry as to Clarissa's buyer was answered as unknown. Archivist DeNiro added that she thought the sale was unusual for Barrington and that she found his ledger's silence on the matter of Clarissa's new master even more unusual. Nearly a decade of Clarissa's existence had gone missing. Neither her whereabouts nor her situation could be found in Barrington King's ledgers. After a bit more digging, however, DeNiro discovered either Clarissa or a doppelgänger Clarissa ("Claricey") living in Georgia's Houston County as a servant, single, in the household of a James Wiley Belvin and spouse Eliza Judith after 1860. She is still there, free, in the 1870 census: Clarissa King, still single, but now with her siblings, Adela, Charles, and James.
My just-discovered great-grandmother was an altogether mysterious apparition. Still, I felt I knew enough about her world's racial and sexual etiquette to hazard a historically plausible story of Clarissa's Roswell creation and exit. Moreover, reflecting upon what I seemed to glimpse as the larger implications of her genealogy-the metanarrative of Clarissa King-I found myself exhilarated by its explanatory possibilities. Could I not follow this as-yet-to-be-realized maternal great-grandmother's genealogical and circumstantial lineages, and her life lived in slavery and freedom, as emblematic of a national failure?
Slaves had no surnames, but my new great-grandmother appears to have been the rare exception. She would insist on claiming the King patronymic until she could bear it legally after the Civil War. Roswell had been her crucible. Not all the decades elsewhere altered her superior certitude of being a King. No physical description of Clarissa existed. Her name, undoubtedly bestowed by Barrington King, evokes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Georgian England’s sprawling bestseller about unconquered virtue. She was surely not fathered by Elsie’s William, and given the sexual liberties of Roswell King’s male line or, indeed, the plantation South’s general interracial profligacy evidenced by “all the mulatto children in everybody’s household,” as sniffed candid Mary Boykin Chesnut, Elsie’s paternity was evident. Since I began this family history, recent revelations by two writers about racially mixed members among the Washington and Madison families have further complicated the founders’ bloodlines.
That Clarissa was sold when she reached the nubile age of seventeen raises unanswerable questions that her great-grandson needed, nonetheless, to ask. I wondered if she had become a distraction, à la Thomas Jefferson's "dashing Sally," to one of the King scions? James Roswell King, twenty-five, married comely Fanny Hillhouse Prince in Roswell that same year. Thomas Edward King, twenty-three years old, departed bachelorhood two years later. To be sure, I could not draw conclusions from intriguing coincidences. Still, I thought the timing of my great-grandmother's exile by sale from the sole place she had ever known beckoned more research. Whether Clarissa was a King "born," in the parlance of her time, "on the wrong side of the blanket" or merely one by virtue of her culture and psychology, her complicated lineage aroused my deepest professional and personal fascination.
As much as Clarissa's fate was determined by her King slave masters, the Kings' own dynastic ascension after the Federalist Era (1789-1801) had come by way of two generations of subservient labor on behalf of American Founding Father and slave master sans pareille, Pierce Butler (1744-1822), and his grandson Pierce Mease Butler (1810-1867). The Founding Father whom Roswell King Sr. served just shy of twenty years as plantation overseer set foot on colonial American soil as a British officer in 1767. Like thousands of Anglo-Irishmen of his class, primogeniture dictated Major Pierce Butler's chosen career. The third son of Irish baronet Sir Richard and Lady Henrietta Percy of Garryhundon, he had served valiantly in the king's army as a teenager against the French in Canada. Twenty-two years later, a veteran Major Butler and fellow officers of George III's Twenty-ninth Regiment of Foot disembarked in Philadelphia from Nova Scotia. From the outset, as it was plain to see, Pierce Butler was on the hunt for...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984879901
ISBN 13 
9781984879905
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland