Growing Up with the Country

The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants

Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field’s epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements.
 
When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration. Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico. Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field’s beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.

“This is a wonderful, capacious narrative about a country that remains always a dodgy work in progress. Field's seamless interweaving of family, race, and nation---of the particular, the subordinate, and the superordinate—recaptures exceptionalist possibilities that will upend and enrich her readers’ understanding of the American past.”—David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography