'A story of people who remained on the land': Duke professor discusses book on Alabama property

Duke professor emeritus Sydney Nathans’s book, “A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland” chronicles the story of the Hargress family’s unlikely centuries-long ownership of a property in cotton-country Alabama.

Nathans gave a talk on Wednesday that touched on black settlement in the South and the legacy of slavery.

Nathans said the Hargress family came to own the property under an unusual set of circumstances. Sent westward in 1844 by slave-owner Paul Cameron, of the Cameron family after which Cameron Avenue is named, the Hargress family was able to buy the property from Cameron after emancipation.

“As one descendant put it, ‘The Camerons stole your labor, but they kept you together,’” Nathans said.

The family has held onto the property in the century and a half since, which is different from the predominant narrative of black settlement after the Civil War.

“‘A Mind to Stay,’ is, instead, a story of people who remained on the land, and in fact the very plantation in western Alabama in which their forebears were enslaved,” Nathans said. “It’s an account of what it took for them to acquire land, and how and why they held onto it.”

The story held personal significance for some of the audience members.

“I was inspired by some of the parallels within my own family history back in Georgia, because the landowners who my great-grandfather worked for, he worked to gain that land back as a sharecropper,” sophomore and sociology and African, African American and diaspora studies major Miriam Madison said. “And to this day we still have that land in our family.”

Nathans worked on the project for 40 years, taking trips to the property near Greensboro, Alabama and commuting to UNC’s libraries while teaching as a professor at Duke.

“Between Duke and the University of North Carolina, the Southern Historical Collection, you have the two greatest treasure chests of Southern history in the world,” Nathans said. “When I first started teaching there was only one traffic light between here and Durham.”

Nathans said as the years went on, he delved deeper into oral histories and old documents, from slave transcripts to interviews with members of the Hargess family on their cabin’s back porch in Alabama.

Research manager at Northwestern University Parks Dunlap said they were interested in the narrative and research methods.

“I think that any work that an academic can put towards, specifically white academics, towards prioritizing voices of color is incredibly compelling and necessary,” Dunlap said. “So I thought that the fact that there was so much focus on storytelling and reiterating direct quotes and talking about the primary documents, that was very compelling.”

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