Homelands and Waterways

June 28, 1999
An emblematic account of the evolution of an African-American clan over three generations, this meticulously researched but stiffly written family history by a history professor at George Washington University reveals the role of black Americans in the evolution and definition of middle-class life in the U.S. Alexander's story begins with her maternal great-grandfather, John Robert Bond, an English-born seaman ("a black Anglo-Saxon Protestant") who, in a vivid contrast to the majority of blacks brought to the U.S. as slaves, arrived in Massachusetts in 1862 and joined the Union navy. Wounded in battle, Bond ended up in a hospital in Norfolk, Va., where he met Emma Thomas, a newly freed slave he married shortly after the Civil War. To set their story in context, Alexander explores the lives and mores of free blacks in 19th-century Virginia and New England (the couple returned to Massachusetts in 1870). In Boston, the Bonds' political beliefs developed amid suffrage and anti-lynching campaigns, the Spanish-American War and the surge of Southern blacks northward in the Great Migration. John Robert's first son, Percy, joined the staff of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, his success supported in part by his marriage to a woman fair-skinned enough to "pass" for white. Alexander's careful examination of the lives of the subsequent generation of literate black women, who were involved in politically active Colored Women's Clubs in Washington, D.C., and who read widely about the artistic innovations of the Harlem Renaissance, illuminates both the family's color-consciousness and its spiritual and cultural advancement. 16 pages of b&w photos.