The Hairstons

The white Hairstons were one of the largest plantation owners in America. Many of their holdings have now been lost although a number have been acquired by the black side of the family. Over the years black and white descendents have interacted in many ways, positively as well as negatively and their story (told in The Hairstons: An American Family, by Henry Wiencek) provides a remarkable window into American history.

Waller and Joseph

Joseph: To me the big problem in this country is the fact of separation. People are in camps, they don’t know the other camps, so they distrust the other camp. The more you can bring the camps together so we can see each other as people, [the better]. We may not be likable, we may be very likable, but if we’re in these separate camps we’ll never know that.

Waller: This has been a good experience. I think anytime you get straightforward, honest communication it heals a lot of things. It also helps squelch some rumors that may not be true.

Waller: When I was growing up, we owned the place – we owned it for 200 years. I knew about the black Hairstons; Green Hairston was a descendant of a former slave who lived on the place and was a sharecropper. The gardener was Isaac Hairston and he was a descendant of a former slave. Both of them lived on the place and housing was provided as part of their employment. But a lot of people who lived there moved to areas like Detroit and Washington where they pay a better wage. We were not paying a better wage. When production was going up during Slavery, they were buying more farms than when they were sharecropping; there were a lot of expenses and it was hard to get ahead.

Joseph: To be mad at the unfairness of all this I have to be mad a me, because the enemy is me: I’m a descendant of the master and the slave. If I want to get mad at the master, I have to get mad at that part of me that I got from the master. I deplore the fact that my white ancestors purchased my grandmother and other relatives. But how can I get angry if I am part of them? If there’s any good and bad in me, part of the good and bad came from them; I can’t say all the good came from my black ancestors and all the bad came from the white. It had to come from both.