100 books like The Invisible Line

This pioneering 1963 classic is the first book I ever read that describes some of the 200 groups of “mestizos” (Berry’s term) living in the eastern United States, with names like the Brass Ankles, the Red Bones, the Melungeons, the Lumbees. It prodded me to start thinking about the whole issue of race and how it is constructed – and what happens to the “marginal” people (another Berry term) who don’t fit into the rigid categories of African, European, Asian, or Native American. 

In this 1994 cri de coeur Brent Kennedy discusses the Melungeon branches of his family tree.  One branch is on my family tree, twice since my paternal grandparents were cousins. This book provided my first hint that my own family tree harbored some mysterious ancestors. It launched me on a ten-year quest to discover who the Melungeons were, where they came from, and whether or not my ancestors had been among them. The book also launched an Appalachian liberation movement of sorts, as many who had been taught to conceal their racially mixed ancestry rushed to claim it – and proclaim it.

This is the most thorough compendium yet of the available information about Melungeons.  Winkler covers the little that is known about Melungeon history, as well as exploring the many origin myths and theories – of descent from shipwrecked Potuguese sailors, from deserters from DeSoto’s exploring expedition, from survivors of Juan Pardo’s torched wilderness forts, etc.  He also describes associated mixed race groups and relates some of the scientific efforts to pin down the genesis of the Melungeons.

Overbay grew up at the epicenter of Melungeon settlement in Hancock County, Tennessee. She attended the Vardy school, built for Melungeon children (who as descendants of “free people of color” weren’t allowed to attend public schools) by Presbyterian missionaries. This state-of-the-art school far surpassed in its facilities and offerings those of the local public schools, and it turned out several generations of accomplished young people. This book includes riveting oral histories about daily life in a Melungeon community and about the educational theories that inspired those who directed the school.

I have bought multiple copies of One Drop as gifts for biracial family members, as well as friends.

Broyard is the daughter of Anatole Broyard, celebrated New York Times book critic in the 1960s and 70s. Only after his death did even his wealthy white wife and mixed children discover his Black heritage. The public—self included—was equally shocked.

Bliss Boyard researches his Louisiana roots, meets her Black cousins, and writes a fascinating, deeply personal story of “race,” showing its often bizarre contours as some family members may be classified as “white,” others “colored” or any number of other categorizations, from “octoroon” on.

A healing narrative, beautifully told.

Though not published until 2002, after Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. purchased and authenticated the manuscript, the autobiographical novel The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts is widely considered the first book known to have been written by a fugitive enslaved woman. Crafts was the author’s pseudonym, and the novel, estimated to have been written in 1858, parallels the life of Hannah Bond, a woman who is documented to have escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and who, like the novel’s protagonist, eventually settled in New Jersey. The preface and introduction of the published book read like a mystery adventure as Professor Gates reveals his multifaceted strategies to identify the real-life author and the real-life characters of her book.

Barack Obama’s father was part of the story of Kenya’s road to freedom, and yet his son, Barrack, hardly knew him. His father met Barack’s mother while on a scholarship to the USA but abandoned her and his son when he returned to Kenya in 1964 and became a senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance.

We researched his life when writing our book. My co-author, Nancy Mudenyo Hunt, is also of Luo ancestry. Her father attended Obama’s funeral. This memoir is a testimony to the struggle of children of mixed heritage to decide on their identity. I find it sad that the young Obama is identified by the father who left him and not by his mother who cherished him.

Oreo (originally published in 1974, then out of print, and finally repopularized by Harriette Mullen and republished in 2000), a satirical novel by Fran Ross, a journalist and, briefly, a comedy writer for Richard Pryor, is widely considered to be “before its time.” This aching and hilarious, experimentally structured story is about a girl, Oreo, with a Jewish father and a Black mother, who ventures to New York City to find her father only to discover there are hundreds of Sam Schwartzes in the phonebook, and then goes on a quest to find him.

Nadia Owusu is the quintessential third culture kid, holder of a US passport, but born in Dar-es-Salaam to a Ghanaian father and an Armenian-American mother. Her UN-employed father moved his two daughters around through Kumasi (Ghana), Kampala (Uganda), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Rome (Italy), and the UK. Her mother left the family when Nadia was three years old and didn’t look back, save for a rare, short visit and some trinket gifts. Aftershocks is Ms. Owusu’s tribute to a loving father, but her upbringing was a shaky foundation that reverberated throughout her life, and provided the earthquake metaphor around which she structures her memoir. She weaves bits of political history and culture from the countries she lived in into her own story, comprised of the foreshocks, main shock, and aftershocks. It’s held together by beautiful prose descriptions, both of place and emotions.

My favorite American novel is at once the most righteously angry and the most beautifully optimistic book I’ve ever read. 

Historical fiction urgently responding to the present, an intimate family saga that creates an entire community—Chesnutt’s masterpiece is a book I’ve taught almost every year of my career, and I find something new in it each time I read it.

No book reminds me more potently of the worst of our history, and no book inspires me to fight for our best more passionately.