My Confederate kinfolk

by Thulani Davis

Starting from a photograph and writings left by her grandmother, beloved African-American novelist Thulani Davis goes looking for the "white folk" in her family, a Scots-Irish clan of cotton planters unknown to her -- and uncovers a history for richer and stranger than she had ever imagined. Along the way she finds tartan plaid, unlikely lovers, a lynching close to home, and Confederate soldiers. When Davis's grandmother died in 1971, she was writing a novel about her parents, Mississippi cotton farmers who met when in their twenties sometime after the Civil War: Chloe Curry, a former slave from Alabama, married with several children, and Will Campbell, a white planter from Missouri who had never married. In this compelling intersection of genealogy, memoir, and history, Davis picks up where her grandmother left off. Inspired by an 1890s photograph of a black teenager dressed in Campbell family tartan, Davis finds herself on a journey to places from Missouri to Mississippi to Alabama,