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notoriousagk's review against another edition
3.0
The concept was interesting; an author goes public with the "truths" behind the novels she's written, now that she's outlived all the family and other members of the community who might object to her revealing the stories she's picked up from them. Unfortunately, her focus on strict truth-telling limits her story-telling, since most of the "truths" she's telling are fragmentary by their very nature--for instance, her grandfather's suicide, a rarely-discussed family secret about which she never did learn the details, which tends to be the case with rarely-discussed family secrets. With so little to go on, it's difficult to find this "truth" compelling.
Perhaps the only place her absolute refusal to fudge the details did work was her final story, "On Second Creek," where her attempts to uncover the history behind the punishment of 30 slaves murdered for plotting an insurrection by a group of men which included her own ancestors is largely fruitless. In that story only, the silence of the historical record, and her inability to uncover the voices of those involved--and particularly the voices of the slaughtered men--resonates. Her framing of her mother's visceral horror at the lynching of a free black man in the 20s against her family's unquestioning admiration of their forebears, some of whom were likely complicit in something even worse, is probably the most pointed and poignant moment in the whole memoir.
Perhaps the only place her absolute refusal to fudge the details did work was her final story, "On Second Creek," where her attempts to uncover the history behind the punishment of 30 slaves murdered for plotting an insurrection by a group of men which included her own ancestors is largely fruitless. In that story only, the silence of the historical record, and her inability to uncover the voices of those involved--and particularly the voices of the slaughtered men--resonates. Her framing of her mother's visceral horror at the lynching of a free black man in the 20s against her family's unquestioning admiration of their forebears, some of whom were likely complicit in something even worse, is probably the most pointed and poignant moment in the whole memoir.
vasha's review against another edition
4.0
"Julia and Nellie", about the author's attempt to imagine the lives of her grandmother and other women of her generation, is diffuse and rambling in structure; the author chose to tell it rather as she pieced her knowledge together, in snatches. Both it and the preceding essay, "Grant", give a sharp sense of the people and the society, in spite of Douglas constantly foregrounding her own uncertainty about these stories -- or maybe because of it? Douglas is concerned to say no more than she knows, and to give small details when she doesn't know larger things; she's trying not to use convention or assumptions to fill in the blanks. That helps her stories not to disappear into generalities.
But this sense of seeing clearly isn't present in "Hampton", because Douglas didn't know the man she's writing about very well, and because his experiences were so distant from hers; she knows the white people in his life, but otherwise, she can only report what he told her, and a few other fragments; it's necessarily distanced.
"On Second Creek" may be the best of the essays. Its main theme is not family stories, but not telling family stories; many things are deliberately shrouded in silence. It's a thought provoking subject. The author talks about her fiction-writer's instinct to fill in details; but memoirs based on history often try to present themselves as without gaps.
But this sense of seeing clearly isn't present in "Hampton", because Douglas didn't know the man she's writing about very well, and because his experiences were so distant from hers; she knows the white people in his life, but otherwise, she can only report what he told her, and a few other fragments; it's necessarily distanced.
"On Second Creek" may be the best of the essays. Its main theme is not family stories, but not telling family stories; many things are deliberately shrouded in silence. It's a thought provoking subject. The author talks about her fiction-writer's instinct to fill in details; but memoirs based on history often try to present themselves as without gaps.
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