I love reading your blog and have found your postings illuminating on a number of levels. Like many people who have posted comments here, I have been digging into my family’s past and found that the racial history of the South, and more specifically interpersonal relationships across the color line, were far more complicated than what you see presented text books or in popular myth/culture. Luckily I was one of those kids who listened when my grandparents talked, and I’ve been able to follow-up and confirm old family stories through my own research. One of the first things that immediately surprised me was the fluidity of early Southern race relations, the ease with which people slipped across the color line, and how those factors shaped my own family’s history. I had once thought that interracial relationships between white women and black men were rare, but on my dad’s side this apparently happened a number of times, although mostly during the Colonial era in Virginia.

I had however grown up hearing about post-Civil War mixed-race relationships on my mom’s side of the family. My grandfather vividly remembered visits from Susannah Miles, his mother’s Scots-Irish grandmother, who had lived with and had children with Issac Baker, a former slave, in Darlington County, South Carolina after emancipation. The couple wasn’t allowed to marry due to the state’s anti-miscegenation laws, but they did seem to have a degree of acceptance from Susannah’s father (the couple lived next door and worked on the family’s land) and some neighbors. I found this especially interesting given that Susannah’s brothers, and possibly her father, fought for the Confederacy.

I would love to get some recommendations from you regarding books or other sources I can go to understand what life may have been like for poor, Southern, and rural white women like Susannah. I have heard that Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention is a good place to start. Any other suggestions? Again, thanks for sharing all this great information!

Yvonne Bivins’s history of Vernon Dahmer’s early roots also has similar elements. In fact, several of the essays contained in the “Multiracial Families” category of this blog offer similar stories.

Would love to hear from other readers in regard to Virginia’s story.

Vikki