Review by Booklist Review
In the grand tradition of oral history, West African griots and griottes used the power of storytelling to pass down family tales from generation to generation. When Kearse's mother delivered a box of carefully curated familial artifacts, she became her family's newest griotte. Kearse set out not only to be the first griotte to commemorate her family's story in written word but to also find solid evidence to support her family's motto, "Always remember--you're a Madison. You came from African slaves and a president." According to lore, their lineage could be traced back to a slave named Coreen and President James Madison. Kearse's journey to set the record straight was riddled with obstacles and took her around the world, from Lagos to Virginia to Ghana and New York. The result is a compelling saga that gives a voice to those that history tried to erase. Kearse deftly alternates between chapters detailing her experiences and accounts told from the perspective of their family matriarch, a West African slave called Mandy. Poignant and eye-opening, this is a must-read.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Essayist and retired pediatrician Kearse traces her family's history from the antebellum South to present-day California and Boston and investigates long-standing claims that she and her relatives are descended from U.S. president James Madison in this evocative and probing debut. According to family legend, Kearse is the great-great-great-great granddaughter of the founding father and an enslaved woman named Coreen. Writing in the African tradition of the griot (oral historians and storytellers who serve "as human links between past and present"), Kearse begins her inquiry with a box of heirlooms including "a smudged copy of an 1860 slave census" listing her great-great grandparents and their 10 children. She pays a visit to Madison's Montpelier estate in Virginia, where archaeologists are in the midst of excavating the kitchen where Coreen once cooked; travels to slave trading centers in Lagos, Portugal, and Ghana; imagines the wrenching ordeals of her first ancestor to be brought from West Africa to America; and relates her mother's experiences growing up in Jim Crow--era Texas. Though Kearse's attempts to establish a genetic link to the president--who had no "acknowledged offspring"--are met with "roadblocks," she succeeds in portraying her family's tenacious rise in social standing across eight generations. This moving account asks essential questions about how American history gets told. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Retired pediatrician Kearse, her family's eighth griot (storyteller/historian/genealogist), traces her lineage over two centuries: "Always remember--you're a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president," her predecessors instilled. The fourth U.S. president, James Madison, never had biological children with wife Dolley. He did, however, according to Kearse's griot ancestors, father a son with his enslaved half-sister, Coreen. Enhancing the meticulous, often disturbing, history she tenaciously uncovers, Kearse also writes in the imagined first-person voice of Coreen's mother, Mandy, the family's African progenitor, kidnapped, transported, owned, and raped by Madison. Karen Chilton reads Kearse's peripatetic explorations (through Ghana, Portugal, Lagos, and, of course, Madison's own famed Montpelier) with solemnity and gravitas; her convincing presentation never falters. VERDICT Will satisfy listeners seeking historical enlightenment. Libraries should provide easy access to this title in multiple formats.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An African American pediatrician--turned--historical detective investigates her family's history--and, by extension, that of America. "Always remember--you're a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president." So her mother told Kearse, who opens her account with invocations of the West African griot tradition of storytelling and oral history. That tradition found a place in slavery-era America because most slave owners did not allow enslaved people to learn to read and write. James Madison was different: He allowed his mixed-race son, Jim, to linger within hearing of education lessons. Given well-documented events at nearby Monticello, that Madison had such a son is a surprise only because he had no children with his wife, Dolley, which led many scholars to assume that he "was impotent, infertile, or both." Evidently not. Enriching that history not just with stories, but with more tangible historical evidence, Kearse visits the plantation, speaking with archaeologists, historians, and the descendants of slaves, reading widely, discovering the long-unknown burial sites of ancestors. She also traveled to Africa and Portugal--for, as her grandfather had told her mother, "our history goes well beyond America's boundaries." That Jim was educated did not spare him from being sold, always aware that he was the son of a president. So, too, with the descendants, enslaved and then free, who carried the Madison story to new homes, to be incorporated into the narrative of Madison's life, as Sally Hemings is in Thomas Jefferson's. On that note, Kearse writes searchingly of Madison's language in crafting the Constitution, in which the words "slave" and "slavery" did not appear but that spoke of "other persons"--acknowledged as humans, that is, but still left out. "I understood that this omission," writes the author, "was why oral history was essential to African Americans having knowledge of how crucial we have always been to what this nation is." A Roots for a new generation, rich in storytelling and steeped in history. (b/w illustrations) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
