A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
Starred review from December 9, 2024
In this intricate, sumptuously written account, Pulitzer winner Lewis (W.E.B. Du Bois) offers a unique version of the American rags-to-riches story that shows how Black strivers had to navigate the nearly insurmountable obstacles and moral quandaries of slavery and Jim Crow in order to prosper. Delving into his own family history, Lewis uncovers a great-grandmother who bore children to her enslaver and inherited real estate from him, and, on another branch of his family tree, a great-great-grandmother who, as a free Black woman, worked as a plantation overseer and bore children to the plantation’s owner. As he follows these women’s descendants—a line of businesspeople, ministers, and educators—from Reconstruction through the civil rights era, Lewis intertwines their story with Atlanta’s history of resistance to white supremacy, often exerted through the power of the city’s Black bourgeoisie. An exquisite stylist and wide-ranging intellect, Lewis ties in many other threads, including an illuminating study of the Black bourgeoisie’s evolving relationship to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who posited that separate but equal prosperity was possible through economic uplift (Lewis bears a sharp and amusing disdain for the thinker, repeatedly insinuating, in arch and ironic prose, that he was somewhat annoying: “Some of the... students probably found Booker Washington’s antebellum similes cringeworthy”). The result is a scintillating and piercing study of how the Black upper class emerged from a fraught system in which violence, family, and inheritance were intertwined.