Black, White, and Indian Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

by Saunt, Claudio

• ISBN13: 9780195313109
• ISBN10: 0195313100
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-07-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices--to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship--wereoften necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country's racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons. Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William--both Creek Indians--had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their nativeland soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America's racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused toleave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them. Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other's existence. In 1907,when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W.Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America's past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of "blood" in the construction of identity. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its ownright but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Author Biography

Claudio Saunt is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia.

Table of Contents

Introduction	3	(191)
Profile: A Symposium at Dartmouth College	6	(4)
1 The Griersons	10	(20)
Profile: Native Art, June 2000	27	(3)
2 "My negro Woman Judah": William's Decision	30	(19)
Profile: Rudy Hutton, September 1999 and June 2000	46	(3)
3 Race and Removal: Katy's Compromise	49	(17)
Profile: Marilyn Vann, June 2003 and April 2004	64	(2)
4 Separate Paths: Katy and William in the Antebellum Creek Nation	66	(22)
Profile: Napoleon Davis, June 2000	84	(4)
5 "It is negroes that we are killing now": The Graysons' Civil War	88	(23)
Profile: Chester Adams, June 2000	108	(3)
6 Northern Indians and Negro Slaves: Wash and the Politics of Reconstruction	111	(21)
Profile: Buddy Cox, July 1999 and June 2000	128	(4)
7 Hardship and Opportunity: The Fortunes of Emma, Vicey, and Wash	132	(19)
Profile: Buddy Cox, June 2000	149	(2)
8 Divided by Blood: The Graysons and the End of the Creek Nation	151	(22)
Profile: Bob Littlejohn, July 1999 and June 2000	169	(4)
9 Wash in the Age of Progress	173	(21)
Profile: Bob Littlejohn, June 2002	192	(2)
10 The Graysons in a Black and White World	194	(19)
Afterword	213	(4)
A Note on Sources and Historiography	217	(6)
Notes	223	(68)
Index	291