this project was a part of our lives long before we began writing three years ago. The methodology of our research fought with the alchemy of our memories; we might come across a story in a book, but it is the ways in which it weaved itself with our own experience and knowledge of place that brought it to these pages.
We’d like to share one example of the kind of family stories that motivated this book: One of our great-great-great grandfathers, Hugh Sprinkle, was an established moonshiner and distributor before the Civil War in Yadkin County, North Carolina. When conscription came to the Yadkin Valley—the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains—Hugh Sprinkle, along with many other non-slaveholding small farmers, chose to go underground rather than fight for the Confederacy. They left their families, friends, and homes, and hoped to return at the end of the war. Hugh and his friends holed up together in the Deep Creek Quaker meeting house, a one-room log structure, before they moved on to the next safe house. Within days, they were tracked down by the Home Guard, who discovered their hiding spot after a local gave the deserters out. When the Guard came to apprehend them, a shootout ensued, at the end of which two of Sprinkle’s friends and two Guardsmen were dead. The Home Guard arrested Sprinkle and put him on trial for the shooting, at which point he was forced to choose between going to war for the Confederacy or hanging. Between two deaths, he chose the battlefield. Against all odds, and partly because he became a prisoner of war within his first year of service, he survived the war. He returned home in the summer of 1865 after being forced to pledge his allegiance to the Union and lived out the remainder of his life on their small farm in the valley. Our ancestors would continue to make shine, some above ground and some underground, facing repression and imprisonment into the early twentieth century.
This is not the story of a proud Confederate veteran returning to a wife and daughter who would go on to found a local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy; this is the brutal reality of our ancestors, in all their shame and pride. Hugh was lucky to survive and continue making whiskey with his family, savvily using their grain crops in a world before federal alcohol regulation. Maybe Hugh didn’t have the courage of the others who kept resisting after being captured. But a deeper reading of his capture at Harpers Ferry—the river town in West Virginia that John Brown’s raid attempted to seize a decade prior—by the Yankees can be interpreted as a desperate act of resistance, a statement that he would rather rot in a prisoner of war camp than continue to sacrifice on the battlefield for slavers and planters.
In this one moment, in the midst of a shootout between deserters and guards over 150 years ago, there are multiple overlapping conflicts that reveal historical forces whose legacies we are still reckoning with today: the development of whiteness as a subjectivity through the creation of a policing force, conflict over the legitimacy of violence to defend or refuse an identity, collaboration with the state to avoid punishment, and the enclosure of commons through the hunting down of individuals that refuse to integrate into the war to save slavery.
Beyond any one specific story, the memories and experiences that fueled this writing are diffuse and myriad: listening to our families tell the same stories while sifting through selections of our great aunt’s southern history books; walking into a tiny bookshop on Jekyll Island when we were covered in sand and mosquito bites; seeing yarrow in abandoned fields, wondering if they were descendants of the same flowers that were used to stop the bleeding of fugitives and deserters; watching from the windows of the restaurants where we work, as tobacco mills get refurbished into mixed-use lofts and tech start-ups, while we serve food to the architects of this “new” South; listening to the sound of catfish frying on a grandparent’s back porch; watching parents fight over their rival college football teams, with signs in the yard that say “a house divided”; our pain and confusion about a grandmother never talking about growing up in a segregated town because she was white and didn’t have to; falling asleep to the sound of gunshots on the battlelines of gentrification in our neighborhoods; defacing Confederate monuments; being made fun of for having too much or not enough of a southern accent; watching parents dance in drunken tears to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” until two in the morning; hearing a mother say the words “General Sherman” with no less vitriol than had her grandmother; spending hours with elders who were in the riots and battles of the sixties, and hearing their wisdom of when to pick up the guns and when to put them down.
It is difficult to navigate between the double bind of myth and reality when passing down history. This is a particular problem for the historian or storyteller who wants to highlight the moments when actors and events appeared to shake and break with the common order of the day. We often hear elders talk about the savagery of the past while simultaneously alluding to the idea that “times were simpler” back then. In our work we have tried to reject the myth of a simple and peaceful past in order to see an image of the past in all its dangerous contours, and this practice has been informed by our own intimate relationship to this complicated history.
The remnants of these memories do not have to be mummified by nostalgia or fetishized as artifact. They are partial scabs constantly threatening to be torn open, and when they do, it us up to us as to how we handle the blood. These memories become alive when brought into a historical context. They are made richer through their contexts—through stories that challenge us to a deeper understanding of the world we live in and where we come from. We read them not simply so that we can know our conditions, but so that we can find strength when we need it most.
On this note, in our research it became clear that, if we wanted, it would be more than easy to add to the countless volumes of scholarship around the suffering of southerners—there are thousands of photos and stories of wrongdoing begging to see the light of day. But that is decidedly not our project. Instead we hoped to produce a text that breaks through the narrative of victimization that has characterized the typical southern history book, a text that conjures strength rather than pity.
Structure and Terminology
Each chapter is connected to the next by an interlude that “zooms out” to briefly summarize broader dynamics of struggle and development in the region. It is our hope that this pairing of a microscopic view on the actors and events with a more macroscopic perspective of the interludes will enable readers to connect the major transitions in time, terrain, resistance, and recuperation. We’ve also chosen footnotes over endnotes, so that the anecdotes and broader observations therein can provide useful context simultaneously with a reading of the main text.
Claiming to cover three hundred years of history in one book sounds brazen at best, arrogant at worst. We know it seems like a lot of time, but we also find ourselves in situations that make it feel like not much has really changed in these three hundred years. When Black, Brown, and white youth and families come together to protest the death of a young Latino teenager at the hands of the police, it is, broadly speaking, the same forces that repress these riots as did in the sixties, on the roads around the plantations, and on “the dividing line” between colonial Virginia and North Carolina. Rather than write a detached history of revolt in days gone by, we wanted to—however incompletely—demonstrate the direct connection between the struggles against slavery and plantation society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the street battles and prison riots of the twenty-first. Very popular books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow have thoroughly demonstrated this historical connection, but it is a connection typically drawn from the position of the victim rather than the deliberate insurrectionary. Within this framing—a centralization of the victim of history—readers are left without a deeper understanding of what could actually destroy the prison society we are ensnared in. There is no social-democratic light at the end of this tunnel. We have to dig ourselves out, and it will be messy, complicated, and violent.
We are undoubtedly writing against the grain of a traditional ethnographic history, while also learning how to navigate those archives and libraries where our history is locked up. Even so, the broader writing of this book was directly influenced by several strains of thought: Specifically, we’ve been influenced by the theoretical traditions of autonomous Marxism, postcolonial theory, communization theory, historical materialism, and insurrectionary
