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Kaleidoscope - Redrawing an American Family Tree (Paperback)
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Kaleidoscope - Redrawing an American Family Tree (Paperback)
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In 2005 Margaret Jones Bolsterli learned that her
great-great-grandfather was a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis, who
owned an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The
news was a shock; Bolsterli had heard about the plantation in
family stories told during her Arkansas Delta childhood, but
Chavis's name and race had never been mentioned. With further
exploration Bolsterli found that when Chavis's children crossed the
Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they
passed into the white world, leaving the family's racial history
completely behind. Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and
it is the story, too, of the rise and fall of the Chavis fortunes
in Mississippi, from the family's first appearance on a frontier
farm in 1829 to ownership of over a thousand acres and the slaves
to work them by 1860. Bolsterli learns that in the 1850s, when all
free coloured people were ordered to leave Mississippi or be
enslaved, Jordan Chavis's white neighbours successfully petitioned
the legislature to allow him to remain, unmolested, even as three
of his sons and a daughter moved to Arkansas and Illinois. She
learns about the agility with which the old man balanced on a
tightrope over chaos to survive the war and then take advantage of
the opportunities of newly awarded citizenship during
Reconstruction. The story ends with the family's loss of everything
in the 1870s, after one of the exiled sons returns to Mississippi
to serve in the Reconstruction legislature and a grandson attempts
unsuccessfully to retain possession of the land. In Kaleidoscope,
long-silenced truths are revealed, inviting questions about how
attitudes toward race might have been different in the family and
in America if the truth about this situation and thousands of
others like it could have been told before.
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