Download Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree AudioBook Free
In 2005, Margaret Jones Bolsterli learned that her great-great-grandfather was a free of charge mulatto called Jordan Chavis, who managed an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The news was a great shock; Bolsterli had found out about the plantation in family stories told during her Arkansas Delta child years, but Chavis' name and contest experienced never been mentioned. With further exploration, Bolsterli found that when Chavis' children crossed the Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they passed into the white world, giving the family's racial history completely behind. Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and it is the story, too, of the surge and fall season of the Chavis fortunes in Mississippi, from the family's first appearance on the frontier plantation in 1829 to ownership of over one thousand acres and the slaves to work them by 1860. Bolsterli discovers that in the 1850s, when all free colored people were purchased to leave Mississippi or be enslaved, Jordan Chavis' white neighbours effectively petitioned the legislature to permit him to stay, unmolested, even as three of his sons and a princess changed to Arkansas and Illinois. In Kaleidoscope, long-silenced truths are exposed, inviting questions about how exactly attitudes toward contest may have been different in the family and in America if the truth about this situation and a large number of others enjoy it might have been told before. Published because of the School of Arkansas Press. "Kaleidoscope's value as a memoir about the South can hardly be overstated." (Arkansas Historical Quarterly) "This well-written and insightful narrative is a timely addition to the American crisis." (Jeannie Whayne, author of Delta Empire and co-author of Arkansas: A Narrative Record) "A riveting read." (Elizabeth Payne, editor of Mississippi Women)
