There was a period when
genealogists were specialists in pedigree and I guess there are still those who
want to know where they stand in the line of succession to the British throne. Wikipedia only goes up to Number Sixty which completely fails to recognise that a meteorite disaster might require number 6666 to step up. But the popular hobby of family history, enormously boosted by
online resources, has a wider appeal. Even the bureaucratic records of births, marriage
and deaths, now so easily accessed, provide enough information for the reconstruction
of probable stories, for enabling some reasonable sense of how long dead people
lived their lives. And though many will be satisfied with common sense
tellings, others will delve into history books to set lives into fuller contexts.
And for some, books will not suffice and they will visit physical archives and
physical streets and buildings - though often enough the latter prove to be changed
beyond recognition, as Hazel Carby discovers on her own journeys. But, anyway, there
is a spectrum with the bare family tree at one end and, at the other, creative
non-fictions which put people into settings and re-create the happinesses,
successes, failures, and tragedies of ordinary lives - and which approach to
what one might call social histories.
Sometimes such stories
are the supplement or an alternative to autobiography. Hazel Carby
holds back from her own autobiography, allowing the reader glimpses of shocking
incidents which are recorded but not developed. She tries to keep other people
in the foreground, to imaginatively re-create their lives, and to set them in
contexts using the vocabulary available to a Yale Professor of African American
Studies. Sometimes that works, at other times it feels alienating perhaps because
just too anachronistic. I read it as an awkward index of the distance Hazel
Carby has travelled in her own life, a distance which many travelled in the Great Britain of the 1950s and 1960s when the post-war welfare state provided a material underpinning
for upward social mobility through the educational system. One main result was
often to leave the upwardly mobile not belonging where they arrived and no
longer belonging where they left. Carby is not really in that category
since both her parents were talented, valued education, and secured quite a lot of it for
themselves and not just, vicariously, for their children. Her father read those of her academic books published before he died.
As the late 1940s child
of a white Anglo-Welsh mother and a mixed race Jamaican father who was talented enough to
be accepted for aircrew in the war-time RAF, she moves between settings in
Britain and Jamaica. She foregrounds the racism she encountered in school and
her father at work and in dealing with the Home Office and she traces the
history of colonialism, slavery, and more racism as they unfolded in Jamaica
from the eighteenth century onwards. Her detective story coup is to trace her
Jamaican father’s story back to the union of a small time white English slave
plantation-owner and his black “housekeeper” and to find that in that way she
is linked not just to Jamaican Carbys but to the Carbys of an eighteenth
century Lincolnshire village. It is a remarkable story - and also remarkable
that the written records which we keep in public archives are a gift which
keeps on giving.
This book belongs on
the shelf with works like Alison Light’s Common
People which give us a sort of Premier League of family and social histories,
stories which non-academic researchers can read with pleasure and aspire to emulate.