`Homelands' chronicles history of black Hub family
Kay Bourne
Who has walked these streets before you? Adele Logan Alexander retraces the steps of three generations of her family. She has written a finely tuned historical narrative enriched by a mother lode of research. There are period city maps, songs from the plantation, and references to other historical materials by the yard.
Admirably scholarly, yet literary, her writing interweaves the myriad strands of information rather the way a world class symphony integrates the voices of the strings with the beats of the percussion. You'll be engaged by the coursing saga of the Bonds and the lives they touch as their epic tale flows through the years.
"Homelands and Waterways" (Pantheon Books) is Alexander's story but yours too.
At one juncture, her family were early settlers of the Readville section of Hyde Park, Boston, coming in 1874, only six years after the tract of land was incorporated into a town.
When John and Emma Bond arrived with their son Percy into a frame house on River St. in the working class neighborhood, they were fitting into a small but vibrant community of African Americans.
A decade earlier, Readville's Camp Meigs had been the training ground for the fabled 54th regiment that fought so heroically in the Civil War. Among their neighbors is James M. Trotter, a writer, musician, author, realtor, and one time lieutenant of the 54th who works as a post office supervisor in Boston (his son William Monroe Trotter founded the fabled black newspaper, "The Boston Guardian.")
The lines of ancestry for most people are complicated, no less so for African Americans.
When the author's great-grandfather, John Robert Bond, the son of an Irish woman and a black Englishman, came to this country as an immigrant, the U.S, was embroiled in the Civil War.
Bond, a skilled sailor, patriotically and with a love for his people chose to fight against slavery. Wounded in battle, he met Emma Thomas, who was fleeing bondage. As fate would have it, she had claimed her freedom in Norfolk nearby the naval hospital where Bond was recuperating. This is where Alexander begins her tale of the Bond dynasty in which a family prospers against the odds.
Percy's daughter Wenonah Bond, the author's mother, would go to Boston University, as would Alexander's daughter much later to get a master's degree. Alexander herself, a professor of history at George Washington University, was raised in New York City, and educated at Radcliffe Colleges and Howard University. Other children of John and Emma would live in Hyde Park and Roxbury but the family also spread out to Southeast Texas, Alabama, and Washington, D.C.
Recently Alexander spoke at the Boston Public Library, where much of her research for this gracefully told genealogical adventure was done.
Asked about the songs she includes when writing about Emma Thomas's early years laboring on a Virginia Tidewater plantation, she sang a few lines to the delight of the large gathering:
Keemo, Kimo, dar you are,
Hey, ho, rum to pum-a-diddle
Set back pennywink,
Come Tom Nippie Cat,
Sing song Kitty
Can't you carry me home?
"In so many ways, music and songs and poetry reflect our lives," she mused.
"My mother always sang this song to me. I knew my mother got the song from her father, Percy Bond," she reminisced.
When Alexander was researching the songs she was considering for her book, she perused the slave narratives collected during the 1930s WPA program. These thousands of interviews were put in a 40 volume set. They reflect the experience of workers from plantations though out the South, "but the only place where this particular ditty was sung was in Southeast Virginia," she notes.
"I was quite amazed," she commented, "on how your oral history can mesh with archives."
Black history as fiction
Inland from tidewater country in the Piedmont area with a spectacular view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, sits the elegant mansion Montpelier, home to the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, Jr., a slave holder.
Novelist Connie Briscoe, a descendant of the enslaved Africans who labored here, has also turned to her family history for a story of three generations, the absorbing fiction "A Long Way From Home" (HarperCollins).
The reader comes to know them as if they were family. The courageous, matter-of-fact Susie, her mischievous, dreamy daughter Clara and her loving granddaughter Susan ever loyal to her mom are by fate of birth, house servants.
They are at the beck and call and whim of those whose capricious might will, as the reader witnesses, falter and fall. The gifted author's involving writing style enables the reader to walk with these remarkable women thrust into circumstances that would have crushed a lesser people.
Some few months ago, Briscoe herself traveled to Montpelier as its historical society's honored guest. The author gave a talk at the Montpelier Education Center.
Photo (Clifford Alexander Jr. and Adele Logan Alexander)
