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

Journal of Southern History, Nov, 2008 by Murray Wickett

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. By Claudio Saunt. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 300. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-19-517631-5.)

Claudio Saunt's Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family, like Tiya Miles's Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley, 2005), makes a significant contribution to the growing historiography on black-Indian relations. Like Miles, Saunt examines the ambiguities of American race through the lens of the troubled history of one family, in this case five generations of the Grayson clan. Tracing the family's origins to a marriage between an adopted member of the Creek Nation (Sinnugee) and a Scottish trader (Robert Grierson) in colonial Alabama, Saunt details the fluidity of race in the colonial South. Racial intermixing was common in the Creek Nation, and two of Sinnugee and Robert's children (Katy and William) formed relationships with partners of African descent. As more whites moved to the southeastern frontier, they established plantations worked by black slaves that displaced Indians from their ancestral lands. The relative flexibility in race relations that had prevailed during the colonial era gave way to a virulent prejudice against black skin, which became a social stigma and mark of degradation.

During this period, Katy's relationship with her black mate ended. In 1817 Robert gave her sixteen slaves, prompting a dilemma: she could "be a mother to black Creeks or a master of black slaves" (p. 25). She chose the latter and distanced herself from any connection with blacks except as chattel. Her brother William, in contrast, chose to remain with his black slave partner, a woman named Judah. When removal was forced on the Creeks in the 1830s, the separation of the Graysons along racial lines became permanent. William and Judah took their seven children to Indian Territory, where they established a small homestead in the Creek Nation near Oktaha. Katy settled farther south in the Choctaw Nation, possibly because the Choctaws were more accommodating to the needs of slaveholders. In Indian Territory, Saunt notes, there was a steady deterioration in the economic status and political power of African Creeks. As statehood drew near, segregation became the principal political debate. Creek leaders proved just as anxious to pass Jim Crow laws as their white counterparts, since the Creeks saw these laws as a means to enjoy all the benefits that "white" status brought in the bipolar world of race in early-twentieth-century America.

One of the many strengths of Saunt's book is his ability to contextualize the lives of the Graysons within the tumultuous times in which they lived. While this fascinating family history would have been a worthwhile read on its own, Saunt has written an account that speaks volumes about the complexities and complications that arise out of the American obsession with race. Saunt's emphasis on the growing racism within Creek society is contradicted by some new research. Gary Zellar's African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation (Norman, Okla., 2007) depicts a much more racially tolerant Creek Nation in which African Creeks were able to exercise a good deal of agency in controlling their own lives and in shaping the Creek economy and Creek politics as a whole. Whereas Saunt notes the increasingly racist legislation that was passed by the Creek National Council throughout the nineteenth century, Zellar argues that few of those laws were ever rigidly enforced. Such debates are a good indication that the study of black-Indian relations is finally receiving the attention it so richly deserves.

MURRAY WICKETT

Brock University