My first Book is now available on Amazon. If you’re interested in supporting this project, you can find it at the link below. Once the resource material costs ($450) are reimbursed, 100% of the profits will support the Seay Chapel Restoration in Alexandria, TN, where many of these men hailed from.
Writing—and especially editing with publication in mind—has never been my strong point. It can feel awkward and overly formal to me, so I tried to preserve a conversational voice in this Book. I think I learned a great deal in the process, and I hope to do even better with the next one. I could do a full-day debrief on it, as I am my own worst critic; we will see if that stays true now that it’s released.
I tackled a great deal in this Book: Civil War records, which are not my forte, as well as racism and slavery. Now I wonder how readers will receive it. Was I too harsh? Should I have chosen gentler words? I am bracing myself for criticism, but I will carry what I learn into the next Book. If someone shows me that I have seriously misunderstood or mishandled something, I will need to reconsider my approach.
Writing for a wider world requires vulnerability, especially when the subject matter can be political. I am not sure whether I fear offending someone as much as I fear harming the cause I am trying to support, because perspectives on these subjects are so fluid and deeply personal. That is the central challenge: perspective is subjective. In this Book, I had to address an incident involving the KKK and include racial slurs in their historical context, while still preserving the authenticity of my own voice. Finding that balance was incredibly difficult in a first book.
I learned a great deal while tracing the lives of these ten men and their families. The journey began with Malachi, and I often felt that Kalib was beside me. Amzi Bass seemed to insert himself, with humour, into my online research that had nothing to do with him. Then, on the day I posted about the Book on Facebook, the next item in my feed was a photograph containing the name Malachi. I could not help feeling that he had sent it as a sign of approval—glad that he was no longer represented only by a single line on a roll call marked “missing deserted,” but that his story had been reunited with his wife Julia’s pension application, which revealed a fuller picture of what happened.
The truth is rarely pretty, but that is also the foundation of good journalism. If history appears entirely comfortable or beautiful, we are probably not seeing it honestly.
I should mention that Kalib isn’t mentioned in the book, but he was once enslaved in the home I own in Alexandria, and I often feel he is helping me on this journey and leading me to find the balance needed in these difficult conversations.
Malachi may have started this journey, but Dary (Richard) Williams proved to be the longest and most complicated file to unravel. Through these stories of humanity, I came to admire all of the individuals, especially the strength, beauty, and intelligence of the widow, Lucinda, and the resilience of Jefferson in his life marked by Scrofula. Together, their lives changed me and altered my perspective on the world. They helped me understand the privilege of telling these stories and taking part in remembering lives that might otherwise be overlooked. Unexpectedly, the DeKalb community has reignited my creative flame and given me a muse—something I can approach with openness and vulnerability. Without vulnerability and intimacy, there can be no true connection, passion, or sense of belonging.
I welcome thoughtful criticism offered in a spirit of mutual respect, especially because I can make corrections to the Book fairly quickly. I am also looking forward to beginning the journey of Book Two, which will recount lives connected to the cemetery. It will start with the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, his time there, and the lives that intersected with his. At times, I truly feel that he is watching over the work.
What the Record Leaves Behind
Lives and Service of Ten African American DeKalb County, Tennessee Soldiers, most in the U.S. Colored Troops
Ten men tied to DeKalb County, Tennessee, left to fight for the Union, most of them in the United States Colored Troops. All ten had been born enslaved. What became of them, and of the wives, children, and communities they left behind, survives today in an unlikely place: the federal pension files the government kept on each of them, sometimes for sixty years after the war ended.
This Book follows those files as far as they go, and says so plainly when they contradict each other, run cold, or simply stop.
A soldier calls another man “my brother” under oath, and the file never says whether it was true by blood. A widow spends decades fighting a Bureau of Pensions that cannot find any record her husband ever served, though he did. A man in Illinois is identified by his own wife and neighbours as her long-lost husband. In contrast,e the government’s own investigator insists it is a case of mistaken identity, and the file never settles which of them is right. Another man buries four wives and marries a fifth under a name that was never his own, hiding a war record his neighbours would not have forgiven.
Built from pension depositions, census, marriage, and death records, and years of family-history research, What the Record Leaves Behind reconstructs ten lives exactly as the record preserves them: incomplete, contradictory in places, and more human for it. It is the first volume in the DeKalb County Untold series, following the African American families of DeKalb County, Tennessee, from slavery through emancipation and beyond.
For descendants searching for their own people, for readers of Civil War and African American history, and for anyone who has ever tried to piece together a life from what the paperwork left behind.
