A Mind to Stay

In 1844, Paul Cameron forcibly moved 114 enslaved people from his wheat plantations in North Carolina to a newly purchased cotton plantation in western Alabama. In 1978, Sydney Nathans, a young historian at Duke University, traveled there with a question: “Could I find a black oral tradition—despite the lapse of 134 years—to shed light on the black perception of separation from home?” (6). To his surprise, Nathans found one origin story about the migration among descendants who still lived on the land, and heard other stories of Civil War generals, Reconstruction political meetings, the coming of the railroad, Jim Crow restrictions, activism in the modern civil rights movement, and halting efforts at cooperative agriculture and mutual improvement, all woven into the local lore. Connecting with Alice Sledge Hargress, the community matriarch, and Louie Rainey, its oral historian, Nathans began a decades-long effort to match local tales and documented records. As if this project was not ambitious enough, for twenty of those years, Nathans also engaged a side project about a personal servant to the Cameron daughters – the result was his award-winning To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Harvard, 2013).

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