| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Way Out of No Way: Claiming Family and Freedom in the New South. By Dianne Swann-Wright. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. xiv, 195 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-8139-2136-8. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-8139-2137-6.)
"We were from this place" (p. 4). This claim of local attachment anchors Dianne Swann-Wright's book. The work consists of a historical journey by an African American scholar in search of her "enslaved ancestors" (p. 4) in the heart of the Virginia piedmont. The writer expected, Alex Haley–like, to find neat answers; instead, she found that the actions of ordinary people ran counter to the "covers of generalizations which so often hide what actually took place" (p. 7). The result is a detailed familial history that raises questions about historical methodology and the efficacy of community studies.	1
This book provides a history of an upper South community from the perspective of "what happened" (p. 6). It describes the cultural interactions of black and white people in the White Hall and Gravel Hill communities, a five-square-mile area in Buckingham County, Virginia, from 1865 to 1930. Following the conceptual framework of social anthropology promulgated in the works of Eric Wolf and of T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, the author seeks to use "terms that the inhabitants would understand" (p. 6).	. . .

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