THE GARRETTS OF COLUMBIA

A searching family history, unfolding into a larger social history, by the noted Washington Post Book World writer and editor.

Nicholson’s forebears were descendants of enslaved people who worked the fields of South Carolina, then defied societal expectations by becoming soldiers, Civil Rights workers, lawyers, writers, and scholars. Such expectations extended into the author’s own time. As a student in Washington, D.C., it was “assumed all Black kids played basketball,” while a well-meaning if clueless schoolmate’s mother delivered a Thanksgiving meal out of concern that the Nicholsons could not provide a feast for themselves (they could). The author is a splendid storyteller. Having grown up hearing tales of “the African,” for instance, he relates what he was able to discover of a distant ancestor who “put down [roots] where he was, made the best of where he’d found himself, [and] reinvented himself as an American.” He purchased freedom for himself and that of his wife and two of his children, while his other children were sold, since he couldn’t afford to buy freedom for all. Nicholson gamely admits that because the facts are scarce, “not knowing who he was, I can make him who I need him to be.” That ancestor provided a template for others, including a great-grandfather who was fearless and combative, “perhaps the most respected disliked man in Contemporary Negro life in South Carolina during the early years of the twentieth century.” That ancestor, an “Afro-Victorian” who believed in education, ambition, and hard work, set a template of his own. Working these and other lives into a fluent and swift-moving narrative, Nicholson delivers a vivid portrait of eminent lives carried out in a society that did little to accommodate them: “They were far more faithful than the nation they loved deserved.”

A fascinating excursion into a past that, though relatively recent, has long been hidden from view.