Moving On Up -- `Homelands' Chronicles An African-American Family's Rise To Prosperity, Beginning In The Civil War Era

"Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926" by Adele Logan Alexander Pantheon, $30

Contrary to popular belief, a black middle class existed prior to the Civil War, with education and income on par with its white counterpart. There are too few volumes of African-American family histories to erase the view that slavery and poverty are the African American's only heritage. Fortunately, Adele Logan Alexander, professor of history at George Washington University, presents, in "Homelands and Waterways," a remarkably vivid and unforgettable portrait of her family's rise from the working poor during the Civil War era to solid middle-class respectability during the Jazz Age.

Here's Alexander's family history, on which she hangs her delightful tale:

It begins in Liverpool, England, in 1846 with John Robert Bond, "the bastard son of a white mother and a father of African ancestry," who immigrated to New Bedford, Mass., in 1862. With no friends or family in the United States, John Bond joined the Navy in 1863. Wounded in 1864 and honorably discharged with an $8-per-month pension, Bond was recovering in Norfolk, Va., when he met and married a former slave, Emma Thomas, in June 1865. A son, John Percy Bond, was born in 1868.

By 1870, the South was not as hospitable as it had been immediately after the Civil War, so the family moved to Massachusetts, where John Bond found employment as a fireman (a worker who stokes the furnace) at the elegant Bay Street House hotel in Worcester. Later, he moved his family to Hyde Park, a village on the outskirts of Boston. There, Emma bore three more children, Bob, Lena and Tooty Bond.

From this inauspicious beginning, Alexander weaves a tale of the expanding family's economic and geographic migrations, always in search of education and success. Caroline Stewart Bond, for example, John Percy Bond's stepdaughter, decided in 1914 that although she already had an undergraduate degree from Atlanta University, a Radcliffe College degree would be more useful. Radcliffe, at first loathe to accept her, finally did (after two years of quibbling), forbidding her to live in the dormitory.

Percy, her stepfather, a gifted stenographer, found a position at famed Tuskegee Institute. He eventually left to open haberdashery stores in Birmingham and later Selma, Ala. When Washington, D.C., seemed a better place, Percy and family relocated there in 1916. By now, Percy was a successful representative of the black-owned Standard Life Insurance Co. When that company failed in 1924, Percy - now with two young children, a large house, live-in servant, an automobile and a summer cottage at the African-American resort at Highland Beach, Md. - deftly found a high position with another insurance company. The family by now was well-positioned as one of Washington's elite.

His younger brother, Bob, contracted syphilis during a three-year stint in the Navy, a disease that plagued his immediate family. Nonetheless, he became a very successful entrepreneur in the antique and dry-goods business. Bob's sisters, Lena and Tooty, married stable and gainfully employed men, all living near Emma Thomas Bond, "grandmother," who, according to her nine children, could do no wrong. The story ends with her death in 1926.

Alexander has written an exceedingly delightful book, giving us details of the political, social and economic climate surrounding the family as its members migrated to various cities of the U.S. She notes that John Bond's white mother and black father "inverted the characteristic colonial pattern of gender and racial relations that prevailed whenever enslaved, or at least dependent, Black women often (reluctantly) bore the children of lustful white men."

Her description of Liverpool and its docks on the Mersey River is so detailed and skillfully graphic that the place soon seems to be as familiar as one's own neighborhood. Bob Bond's bouts with syphilis reveal in the telling not only the history of syphilis and its usually useless remedies, but also its etiology and the public and medical response to the disease. The reader fully understands his social and physical plight.

Recounting the Percy Bond family's move to Washington, D.C., at the height of Woodrow Wilson's administration, Alexander devotes a number of pages to the president's racism. In reference to the unsegregated Easter Monday egg-rolling contest on the White House lawn, she observes that "those eight Mondays during his two terms in office seemed to comprise the entirety of Woodrow Wilson's reluctant acquiescence to a minimally desegregated capital city."

Details like these make the book much more than a family saga. Vivid historical and physical descriptions of various family locales, and stories of vicissitudes and troubles successfully negotiated, present an unforgettable, stunning portrait, not only of the Bond family, but of the American social fabric. Alexander has given us a wondrous weave of scholarship, geography and biography, as well as a joyous tour de force through American history.

John C. Walter is professor of history in the American ethnic studies department at the University of Washington.