Daisy Turner's Kin
An African American Family Saga
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved”--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life.
In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner’s storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner’s African ancestors; Daisy’s father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy’s childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father’s life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist’s perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory.
Publication of this book is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Folklorist Beck's story of the Turner family's transition from freedom to slavery to freedom again is a marvel of scholarly storytelling, the culmination of 30 years of research. It is fascinating at two levels: for the compelling narrative of patriarch Alec Turner, seen first as a slave and then as a free man taking his place in a Vermont community, and for the glimpse into the process of pulling apart an oral history to tease out its broader meaning. Particularly gripping is the account of Turner's father's kidnapping in Africa and subsequent enslavement on the Gouldin plantation in Virginia, where Turner was born in 1845. The teenager took advantage of the proximity of Union troops in 1862 to escape, afterward changing his last name from "Berkeley" to "Turner" and serving in the First New Jersey Cavalry (though he was not allowed to formally enlist). Alec Turner went on to pass down his life story to his children, leading to his daughter Daisy, in the last years of her life (she died in 1988), sharing it with Beck. As a scholar, Beck aims to function as a cultural interpreter, taking what Daisy Turner told her and putting it up against the historical record while assessing how fact and story all fit together. The result is an engrossing American tale. 46 b&w photos.
