Scarlett

Leslie Stainton has served on the board of directors of both the Slave Dwelling Project and Coming to the Table. She is a two-time Fulbright recipient and a former lecturer in creative nonfiction at the University of Michigan Residential College. Stainton is the author of Staging Ground: An American Theater and Its Ghosts and Lorca: A Dream of Life and has published essays in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Scholar, and other publications.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsNote on LanguageBeforePart 1. Myth1. Midnight2. The Family Album3. Fanny KemblePart 2. Excavation4. Letters5. Property6. Daughters’ Work7. Secrets8. LostPart 3. Betrayals9. Trouble10. Revolt11. Let Them Flow12. New OrderPart 4. Inheritance13. Industry14. Matilda15. Songs16. JusticePart 5. A Grandmother’s Nightmare17. State v. Fricie Griffin18. Mr. ScarlettAfterNotes on SourcesBibliographyIndex

“Scarlett is both a deeply intimate family history as well as a candid consideration of the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Perhaps more importantly, Scarlett demonstrates the ways that these two histories are inextricably bound for American families on all sides of the color line. Much in the tradition of Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, Scarlett faces a difficult history head-on, showing how slavery continues to reverberate in the lives of all Americans.”-Jason R. Young, author of Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery  “I’m a witness to immersion into the true history of enslaving ancestors. With history again being weaponized, it makes perfect timing for the release of Leslie Stainton’s vital story.”-Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project and coauthor, with Herb Frazer, of Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery  “Many of us who came of age in the bruising, suffocating silence of an enslaver family are awakening to how this silence cripples us all and deeply endangers our nation. . . . Leslie Stainton’s Scarlett awakens us as it issues its summons, both elegant and heartbreaking. While refusing to look away from her Georgia cotton-empire family’s many racist sins and their effects on the present, Stainton’s exquisite writing and personal transformation shines a sure and steady light for others who would, like her, answer those summonses that our long-stifled grandmothers issued to us in childhood.”-Karen Branan, author of The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth “Leslie Stainton gets it. This modern-day Fanny Kemble didn’t marry into the slavocracy of coastal Georgia; she inherited its wealth, its mythology, and its ‘Scarlett’ letters. Her lyrical and rewarding book, rich in historical detail, recounts with candor a brave journey of self-discovery. Stainton’s deeply personal odyssey links present to past and dares other privileged Americans with troubling family roots to do the hard emotional and archival work of confronting their real ancestral story. This way lies healing, for self and society.”-Peter H. Wood, author of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670–1740 “Beautiful, elegiac, and urgent, Scarlett resonates with tidal force. Leslie Stainton takes us on a search for the truth about her enslaving Georgia ancestors, the Scarletts, and through a reckoning with the myths and distortions of their painful history, from Gone with the Wind to today. In her family as in the American nation, the truth about slavery and segregation lay buried under denial, delusion, and pride. Pulling us all into its depths, this is a memoir that manages to be both bracingly honest and profoundly hopeful.”-William G. Thomas III, author of A Question Of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War “An unflinching look at one Southern family’s ties to slavery, Scarlett is a richly wrought portrait of how the complex legacy of enslavement echoes down to today. Leslie Stainton has given us a remarkable, brave, and beautifully written book.”-Scott Ellsworth, author of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America “This timely and powerful book . . . sheds important new light on the evils of historic slavery and its persistent and profound present-day impacts on all Americans. With searing detail, Leslie Stainton traces her ancestors’ complicity in the barbarous practices of buying, selling, hunting, and violating enslaved men, women, and children. Scarlett exemplifies the kind of candor and courage we so urgently need if we are ever to undo the cruelties and lies of racism and heal as a nation.”-Thomas Norman DeWolf, author of Inheriting the Trade and coauthor of Gather at the Table “This engaging, well-written, and well-researched book about the Scarlett family will draw you in quickly. The author is a talented storyteller, gradually revealing how this white Georgia family’s history is interwoven with stories of enslaving and what the lives of those enslaved persons were like.”-Phoebe Kilby, coauthor with Betty Kilby Baldwin of Cousins: Connected through Slavery, a Black Woman and a White Woman Discover Their Past-and Each Other “Leslie Stainton’s beautifully written and heartfelt personal memoir about her own family’s history, so intertwined with American slavery, should be read by all those interested in the complicated nature of America’s racial past. As William Faulkner wrote, the past is neither dead nor truly past.”-Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War