Review by New York Times Review
Twelve presidents were slaveholders, and perhaps another dozen (including the two named George Bush) came from families that once upon a time owned slaves. In common with many of our most venerable institutions, the presidency has ample connection to "slavery time": the White House is like an Internet link that, if you click on it, bounces you to the lawn of a plantation. For 42 million Americans - African-Americans - having slaves in the family tree is almost a given, but this fact wasn't relevant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue until the current first family. Michelle Robinson Obama happens to descend from people once enslaved in South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and Kentucky. She can peer at American history from that far side of the looking glass. Her husband, with no slaves in the family, may not see America in quite the same way. After the president's term began, one expected to hear more in the press and from the Obamas about blackness, whiteness and the nation's never-ending debates about race and class. But Barack and Michelle Obama have not made theirs into a "black" White House. An exception jumped up for two nights last winter, when the commander in chief, on camera, sang the opening lines of a Robert Johnson blues standard, "Sweet Home Chicago," and Al Green's R&B ballad "Let's Stay Together" - the kind of songs that used to be called "race music." "American Tapestry," a fascinating account of the first lady's family, corrects the omission of race from the Obama White House. No political memoir has ever looked or sounded like this one: the book spans several generations of Mrs. Obama's people and reads like a panorama of black life. Rachel L. Swarns, a reporter for The New York Times, has uncovered the story of an ordinary black American family, typical in so many details: generations of forced work on Southern farms; sexual exploitation; children born half white; attempts to flee slavery; emancipation at the end of a rifle barrel; terrorization by the Klan during Reconstruction; futility stirred in with pleasure and church in the 1900s; a stepladder into the working class - and finally, the opportunity that allowed for Michelle Obama's superior education and unlocked 150 years of bolted doors. The book is nonfiction, but with some 30 characters competing for space it's like a saga or perhaps a mini-series, minus the dialogue. It starts wide, intercutting the stories of four families in four Southern states during the early 1900s. Each of them deposits Northern-bound migrants, refugees from the Jim Crow South, into the growing black neighborhood of South Chicago, where, after chance meetings, dates and marriage, they produce all of Mrs. Obama's grandparents. The book then turns around and stitches together the back stories of the first lady's family lines during the 1800s, in slavery and out of it. Some of Mrs. Obama's people lived as human property at Weymouth plantation, near Georgetown, S.C., owned by Ralph Izard, from an old family of rice planters. They became sharecroppers after the Civil War. A couple on her father's side, Mary and Nelson Moten, with a young daughter named Cora, achieved that rarest of feats - they escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad. Living in Kentucky, not far from the town of Lexington, the Motens managed to make their way about 300 miles west during the Civil War and sneak across the Ohio River to Illinois. They settled in Pulaski County, north of the town of Cairo, and waited for the general emancipation. BUT the hero of the book is Melvinia, Mrs. Obama's great-great-greatgrandmother, who in 1852 was an enslaved 8-year-old girl living on a farm in Spartanburg, S.C., along with 20 other slaves. When her owner, David Patterson, died, Melvinia was appraised at $475, taken from her parents and shipped to another Patterson family property, south of Atlanta. And there, seven or eight years later, the child who had been snatched from her family was raped by, or consented to sex with, her owner or one of his relatives, and gave birth to a boy named DoIphus. Swarns digs out from Mrs. Obama's background this cruel vignette, along with many others like it, and pushes them front and center. "'Mulatto' forebears pop up all across Mrs. Obama's family tree," she writes. Melvinia's life goes a long way toward explaining what Mrs. Obama means when she says, regarding her family's tendency to speak softly about the past, "A lot of times these stories get buried, because sometimes the pain of them makes it hard to want to remember." Swarns persuaded a number of Mrs. Obama's relatives to sit for interviews, but the first lady herself did not, and she seems to have given only passive consent to the herculean investigations made on her behalf. Some of the stories here will be news, one suspects, even to members of Michelle Obama's family. There can be little doubt that she, and the president, will savor this book, but political necessity requires that she not publicly "own" her family's slave history, which conceivably could cost her husband votes in the coming election. The book is not about the living family in the White House. It's about the dead: the field hands, housekeepers, single mothers, sharecroppers, brick workers, postmen, shoe repairmen, Pullman porters and maids - Mrs. Obama's relatives all. plain people who owned no property and left no writings. Theirs was mostly a bitter tale, full of abandonments, early death, poverty, orphans and illiteracy. Yet it is also an occasionally sweet story of church, homebuying, business-founding and weddings. Swarns struggles to answer the question of how many of the first lady's female ancestors were compelled to have sex with white men, a common occurrence in the Old South (the most famous instance being Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings), though one that black families still find it hard to talk about - and that's to say nothing of the descendants of slave owners. Swarns is at her best when airing such painful matters and the contradictory emotions they release - pity, shame, curiosity, revulsion. She gives less attention to other signal moments of Mrs. Obama's family history, like how Melvinia was freed, at age 21, after Gen. William T. Sherman's 60,000 troops swept toward Atlanta and burned her master's town in August 1864. The first lady has said that growing up, she talked about "almost everything" with her parents, and spent summer vacations in South Carolina within shouting distance of the plantations where some in her family may once have worked as slaves, but as for slavery, "we didn't talk about that" Swarns wrestles with this phenomenon, which might be compared to the Holocaust effect, "an almost willful, collective forgetting, an intentional loss of memory," and finally accepts it as the necessary censorship of trauma A drawback of the book is that Mrs. Obama's ancestors are presented as having an obsession with uplift. They seem always to be seeking and striving. One "stepped eagerly into her new future," another is "poised to seize the widening opportunities," a third was "nurtured by a family that-strived for success." Personal journeying is not what ordinary folks, swamped with work and kids and grief and laughter - and weighed down by the additional burden of racism - have tended to do. Striving is a sentiment we like to project back onto the dead. Another problem is the heavy use of plot points that "probably" happened. In the absence of letters and written remembrance, Swarns relies too much on the conditional mood. Characters "would have," "could have" and "may have" done things, until speculation becomes a stylistic. But the narrative line of "American Tapestry" is extraordinary because, at least some of the time, we see the first lady as indisputably "black." No decorous White House hostess - from Mamie Eisenhower to Jackie Kennedy to Barbara or Laura Bush - has anything to compare with Mrs. Obama's sturdy timber of a family story. Few important women come from such raw places. The book makes you remember why the Obamas, four years ago, seemed so implausible.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 17, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The threads of Michelle Obama's genealogy are as complex and tangled as those of most African Americans, leading through slavery, Emancipation, and the Great Migration. New York Times reporter Swarns traces the threads, some not previously known to Michelle Obama herself, to ties to black, white, Native American, and multiracial family members. Drawing on two years of research, including interviews with two elderly women one black, the other white Swarns presents the complicated story of race in the U.S. through the prism of one family's history. Some of Obama's forebears pushed against limitations in the South, moving on to chafe against restrictions they found in the North, while others stayed in the South, making peace with a desire to stay with family above all else. A central figure is Melvinia, a young slave girl who gave birth to mixed-race children, raising questions about her relations with her master and his sons. Swarns details the individual choices and challenges that faced the family as they were part of the great sweep of history and the pride or shame that caused some to pass along stories of achievement and keep secrets of their lives as slaves. A completely fascinating look at the complex ancestry of one family, African Americans, and all Americans.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this layered, scrupulously researched, and wrenching chronicle, New York Times reporter Swarns takes readers to South Carolina rice plantations, small Georgia farms, and the industrial magnets of Birmingham and Chicago as she weaves robust portraits of first lady Michelle Obama's ancestors. At the core of this family saga is slave girl Melvinia, mother of Dolphus Shields, the first lady's maternal great-great-grandfather. Melvinia never disclosed the paternity of either of her mixed-race sons, and Swarns's research runs up against the inherently hidden aspect of sex across the color line in the slave-holding South. Generations later, the former Michelle Robinson's family remained unclear on the details of her ancestry-a subject rarely discussed since the past was obscured by a present-day struggle, and "the experience of bondage was so shameful and painful that they rarely spoke of it." Though Swarns makes little of Obama's reaction to these revelations, she shows that the branches of the first lady's family tree are populated by admirable and fallible people propelled by the currents of race and history, reflecting a core aspect of the African-American experience. Agent: Philippa Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
New York Times correspondent Swarns outlines the fascinating journeys taken by various ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama-the people who, across the generations, helped make her who she is today. The author not only presents these accounts but also interleaves them with the story of how she uncovered this information, which began with research for an article she wrote on the subject for the Times. Swarns discovered an ancestor, a slave named Melvinia who had two mixed-race sons. She identifies the descendants, including Michelle Obama and distant relatives who had no idea they were related to the nation's First Lady. Of course, records, no matter the skill in finding them, can tell only so much, and Swarns is very careful to distinguish the known facts from possible explanatory or additional details (e.g., the possible story behind Melvinia's mixed-race pregnancies or likely reasons why a post-Civil War black child might not have been sent to school). VERDICT The result is an engrossing book that demonstrates a lot of research, dedication, and care. Recommended to all readers interested in biographies that employ genealogical research, as well as readers in African American heritage and history. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/11.]-Sonnet Ireland, Univ. of New Orleans Lib. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A New York Times reporter carefully tracks the complex genealogy of Michelle Obama. Originally emerging from Swarns' reporting for the Times, this intensive research work pursues numerous Southern ancestors on both maternal and paternal sides who eventually ended up in Chicago by the 1930s looking for new opportunity. The key forebear here, the "mystery of Michelle Obama's roots," is a slave woman named Melvinia, who worked on a farm in the mid 1800s in Jonesboro, Ga., where she eventually bore several children whose father was white. After the Civil War, Melvinia stayed on in Jonesboro and had several more biracial children, until she moved away in the mid 1870s. Her older son, Dolphus, became a Baptist deacon and a successful citizen, while his grandson Purnell, having relocated with his mother to Chicago in the 1920s, plunged into the integrated South Side's scene of swinging jazz. On the other side, Swarns follows the intriguing life's wanderings of Mrs. Obama's great-grandmother, Phoebe Moten, born in 1879 in Villa Ridge, Ill., the daughter of sharecroppers and freedmen who had joined the general exodus north during or after the Civil War to flee the blighted opportunity and increasing racial violence that characterized the South. Yet the hope of finding a measure of freedom and prosperity in cities like Chicago didn't always occur, as in Phoebe's case: She and her husband, James, an itinerant minister, and their numerous children struggled to reach the middle class only to be dragged down again by racial antagonism and the Depression. Swarns provides numerous tales of heartbreak and achievement, many of which essentially make up the American story. Elegantly woven strands in a not-so-easy-to-follow whole, but tremendously moving.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
