ANOTHER BOOK
When Associated Press correspondent Chris Tomlinson began to research the five generations of his Texas family, he found another Tomlinson family: the descendents of his family's slaves.
By Caroline Kelly
Contributor
Researching and mapping out one’s family history is often cited as one of the top hobbies in America, but in his new book, Tomlinson Hill, former Associated Press correspondent Chris Tomlinson takes curiosity about personal history to another level altogether. He also proves remarkably bold and determined to face his direct connections to one of the ugliest blots on American history: slavery.
Since childhood, Tomlinson was fascinated by Tomlinson Hill, his
family’s namesake land plot, and its ties to a family history that was as
celebrated as it was mysterious. So in a more advanced version of his childhood
perusal of family scrapbooks, Tomlinson searched through countless Falls County
records to learn about the lives of his ancestors. Along the way, he discovered
the story of the other Tomlinson family – the African-American family,
descendants of his ancestors’ slaves (who also happened to be the family of
famous San Diego Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson).
Tomlinson had always been told that his fifth-generation Texan
pedigree was something to celebrate, and he was raised with a rose-colored view
of the South and its “noble” antebellum history. His great-great-grandfather
Jim’s sister Susan Tomlinson Jones was the first Tomlinson to live on the Hill
in 1854, joining her husband, Churchill Jones, who had already established a
cotton plantation flourishing on the exploitation of slaves. Jones would soon
become one of the wealthiest and most politically active members of his
community.
The family took root, becoming true members of the growing city of
Marlin. They experienced the ups and downs of each life cycle, and race became
the rigid yet unquestioned determinant of each family member's way of life. The
coming years would take the Tomlinson family on and off the HiIl. The last
white owner chronicled in the book sold off many parcels of the original
plantation to various members of the Tomlinson family and their relatives and
friends, hence the creation of the close-knit Tomlinson Hill community.
The parallels and disparities that unite and divide the white and black families are stark. While three generations of white Tomlinsons attended Texas A&M University, former sharecropper Charles Tomlinson recalls a very different perspective on education, saying, “I could read and write.That’s what my dad said you are going to learn in school anyway, read and write and knowing to subtract so he white man will not cheat you out of everything you got.” Later on, while the author attended a brand new public school equipped with a private pilot's training ground and many helicopters, LaDainian’s mother Loreane was scrimping to send him to the Boy’s and Girl’s Club in Waco.
Putting together the family’s history as the
Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement tear through Texas,
Tomlinson is quick to point out that each generation of the white Tomlinson
family made the conscious decision to continue participating in a racist system
that ensured power by keeping others down. This is a brave move on Tomlinson's
part, not only because he is willingly accepting culpability as part of a
family narrative long considered noble, but because he takes the reader through
the exact decisions taken by his ancestors to allow them – and him – to enjoy generations
of white privilege.
However, Tomlinson’s historical explorations, while extensive and
for a noble goal, are often over the top. Although the evocative details of
what each generation of each family ate and how factors like climate and social
unrest affected them individually are interesting and help to portray them as
real people, the same cannot be said of reports on the family’s specific debts
and the winding lives of distant relatives, inclusions which start as annoying
and soon drag the story down. The lack of a thorough visual family tree or
chart is also confusing given the Tomlinson family’s repetition of names over
the years, as well as the narrative's cutting back and forth between the author's
family and that of LaDainian.
But for readers fascinated by family legacy, "Tomlinson
Hill" offers a very thoroughly fleshed-out account of the generations
descending from one extended household divided into two by race. The story also offers an interesting perspective, on a smaller scale, on
the culture and history of Texas itself.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2014/0731/Tomlinson-Hill-tells-the-parallel-stories-of-two-Tomlinson-families-one-white-and-one-black?cmpid=mkt:ggl:dsa-np&gclid=Cj0KCQjwuuKXBhCRARIsAC-gM0g-tpb52H5o18FMoBDVi9X92TK0tvDnRjKX93G16J848lzUsX6nLDEaAu0UEALw_wcB
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