An African American folk saying declares, "Our God can make a
way out of no way.... He can do anything but fail." When Dianne
Swann-Wright set out to capture and relate the history of her
ancestors--African Americans in central Virginia after the Civil
War--she had to find that way, just as her people had done in
creating a new life after emancipation. In order to tell their
story, she could not rely solely on documents from the plantation
where her forebears had lived. Unlike the register of babies born,
marriages made, or lives lost that white families' Bibles
contained, ledgers recorded Swann-Wright's ancestors, as
commodities. Thus Swann-Wright took another route, setting out to
gather spoken words--stories, anecdotes, and sayings. What results
is a strikingly rich and textured history of a slave community.
Looking at relations between plantation owners and their slaves
and the succeeding generations of both, "A Way out of No Way"
explores what it meant for the master-slave relation to change to
one of employer and employee and how patronage, work relationships,
and land acquisition evolved as the people of Piedmont Virginia
entered the twentieth century. Swann-Wright illustrates how two
white landowners, one of whom had headed a plantation before the
Civil War, learned to compensate freed persons for their labor. All
the more fascinating is her study of how the emancipated learned to
be free--of how they found their way out of no way.
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