Henry Wiencek, "The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White"

Henry Wiencek (born 1952) is an architectural historian and preservationist who has written books with titles like Mansions of the Virginia Gentry. As he told the story, one day in 1992 he was visiting a historic house – Cooleemee, in North Carolina (above) – and interviewing its owner. That owner, Judge Peter Hairston, was a font of knowledge about his family's past:

History poured from him in torrents, as he talked of the family's exploits in the Revolution and the Civil War. The judge's grandfather had fought by the side of Jeb Stuart, his cousin and brother-in-law. He served later with another cousin, General Jubal Early, whose mother was a Hairston. He lost friends and relatives in the battle at Manassas, at Williamsburg, at Shiloh. . . . The judge showed me his most precious heirloom, which dates back to the family's origins in this country. It was a crude wooden trunk, hewn from a single log and fitted with hinges and a lock made of iron. The trunk was covered in deerskin, and the inside was lined with faded, worm-eaten newspapers. The first Hairston to come to America, known as Peter the Immigrant, had brought it with him on the journey from Scotland to America. (6)

But Wiencek is a northerner and a liberal, and whenever he visited such houses he always wondered about the people who had lived and worked there as slaves. When he had asked about the former black residents at other southern mansions he had received only blank stares or polite demurrals. Oh, they moved away, we don't know where they are. But when he put that question to Peter Hairston he got a very different answer: why, sure, lots of them still live around here. Many are named Hairston. If you want to know more, "I'll call my old friend Squire Hairston and ask him to come over." (10)

This was Wiencek's introduction to a fascinating American family with two branches, the Black Hairstons and the White Hairstons. Both are the kind of southern clans that hold regular family reunions for which they rent out whole hotels, and they are very much aware that they are related to each other. Wiencek spent much of the next seven years meeting the Hairstons, visiting their homes, and researching their history, and the result is this impressive book.

Before the Civil War the white Hairstons were one of the richest families in the South. They controlled a chain of plantations that stretched from Danville, Virginia, fifty miles southwest to Cooleemee, and branches of the family had set up satellite kingdoms in Mississippi and Tennessee. For four generations they were dominated by hard-hearted, voraciously acquisitive men and women who eschewed luxury in favor of saving their money to buy up more land and slaves, of which they eventually controlled more than 2,000. To keep all that property in the family they regularly married their cousins, leading to anomalies like the woman known as Anne Hairston Hairston. They also had a habit of keeping their family property tied up in obscure legal arrangements – for example, by never probating wills, leaving estates in legal limbo for decades – so that even a family member who wanted to sell land or slaves might find that he lacked the authority to do so. When Wiencek asked Judge Hairston if his grandfather had freed any slaves, he got an irritated answer to the effect that even if he had wanted to, he could not have, because so many other people were involved. At the time that sounded to Wiencek like an evasion, but he later discovered that it was likely true. Meanwhile, of course, various Hairston men were fathering broods of mulattoes with their slave mistresses, so the future Black Hairston clan was growing.

Of the many fascinating stories Wiencek tells about those years, I have to pass on one. In the 1820s a certain Robert Hairston migrated west to Mississippi to set up a new plantation; according to family lore, he took with him 1,000 slaves in a great train of coaches and wagons. That is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it conveys the scale at which the Hairstons operated, and how they were seen and remembered. But Robert Hairston was also remembered for other things. First, he treated his favored slaves as if they were free, giving them farms to manage and letting them make their own marriages and so on. (John Hope Franklin, one of the first major black historians of the U.S., wrote about this class of people, whom he called "slaves virtually free.") Second, he pretty much avoided white society in favor of his slaves. This was a phenomenon noted across the South, called "going black," except with a different word. So, of course, he took a black wife, named Elizabeth – not legally, not even the Hairstons could manage that, but in every other way, even giving her a gold wedding band – and had a daughter with her. 

When Robert Hairston was dying he called to him the one other white man he trusted, his nephew Major Hairston, to record his will. That will liberated his daughter, then called Chrillis, and left her his entire estate. That act would have made a black girl one of the five richest people in Mississippi, so of course it did not happen. But Major Hairston was determined to fight for his cousin's rights, and the case went up the the Mississippi Supreme Court and around and around for years. As Wiencek followed the case he wondered what had happened to Chrillis. At one stage in the proceedings the court ordered that Robert Hairston's slaves be divided up among his white kin, and Robert's common law wife Elizabeth was assigned to his estranged white wife, Ruth. She, of course, wanted nothing to do with her rival, so Major Hairston stepped in and bought her. But there was no mention of the daughter until Wiencek hit upon a note saying that Chrillis had died. He was deeply saddened and wondered if she had been murdered. But when he mentioned this to one of his Hairston acquaintances he was told, "no, she didn't die, they just spirited her away to another plantation. Come on, I'll introduce you to her descendants." Wiencek is even shown a photograph of Chrillis. And also one of the man who fathered her children: Major Hairston. In the genealogies kept by White Hairstons he was listed as "unmarried," but while that was legally the case it was factually inadequate.  He had kept the family tradition by marrying a cousin, except that this cousin happened to be a black former slave.

The Ruins of Oak Hill Plantation, a Hairston Property in Virginia

There are many other stories: about the horrors of slavery and the even more shocking depradations of Reconstruction, the indignities of Jim Crow, the rampages of the Klan, the miserable treatment of black soldiers during World War II, and on and on. It would be a grim tale except for what happened later. Because since 1900 or so the trajectory of the White Hairstons has been steadily downward, while that of the Black Hairstons has been steadily rising. Wiencek has some great material on the Faulknerian descent of the White Hairstons, who lost their mansions and their land through mismanagement, profligacy, and a foolhardy belief that they would always remain rich and respected because they deserved it. Judge Peter, the only Hairston who did hold onto one of their plantations, used to be heard muttering about his kin, "They're gonna lose it, they're gonna lose it." (109) And they did. 

Among other characters we meet a certain Watt Hairston, born 1876. Watt owned the second motor car licensed in the state of Virginia, plate number 2. 

The town of Martinsville passed speed laws specifically against him. The story is told that the constable waved him down one day as he was zipping into town flagrantly above the speed limit. The constable fined him $5 on the spot. Watt handed him a ten, "so I won't have to stop on the way out." (49)

He later died in an accident, becoming one of Virginia's first drunk driving fatalities.

Meanwhile the Black Hairstons were taking advantage of every opportunity that opened up as Reconstruction faded and the Civil Rights movement got under way. Some of the Black Hairstons acquired land and held on to it, becoming successful farmers; one even purchased the farm of some White Hairstons after they went bankrupt. One was the first black to register to vote in the county where Cooleemee stands. Attending Black Hairston reunions Wiencek meets many members of the upper middle class, from ministers and school superintendants to a NASA mathematician. One of the main characters of the book is Jester Hairston, a gospel singer and choir director who also had an acting career, appearing in TV shows from the 1950s to the 1990s and at least 29 movies. In the 1960s the US State Department made him a "Goodwill Ambassador" and sent him to West Africa with various American choirs, performing with African choirs in churches and concert halls. The movies he appeared in stretched from The Green Pastures (1936), in which Hairston played a chorister, to Being John Malkovich (1999). Most of the parts were the sort of things a minor black actor got in those days: a witch doctor in Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955), the butler in In the Heat of the Night (1967), Jim Bowie's faithful slave in John Wayne's production of The Alamo (1960). But the acting money allowed him to do the work he loved, training choirs and preserving the music of the plantations.

What makes The Hairstons such an impressive book is the way Wiencek interweaves the horror and strangeness of the past with the uplifting camaraderie of the present. Today many of the White and Black Hairstons know and respect each other, and the genealogists among them share stories and documents of their shared family history. Their story makes it seem possible for black and white Americans to move forward together without forgetting the past.