Tangled Fortunes

“For generations, Mississippi politicians thundered about racial purity, but experience on the ground was always more complicated. In this marvelous synthesis of legal and social history, Kathryn Schumaker digs beneath the rhetorical surface, exposing the complex, shifting intersection of race, sex, and marriage in the Magnolia State.”

“This deeply researched, beautifully written book uncovers a forgotten history that changes how we see the Jim Crow South. As Schumaker shows, legal efforts to police the color line did not eliminate interracial marriage. Following the compelling stories of those couples and their efforts to keep their families together, this book reveals the possibilities of human agency and the limits of formal law in dictating the terms of everyday life. This is a must read.”

“Tangled Fortunes is a brilliantly researched and surprising work of historical reconstruction. Kathryn Schumaker illuminates how multiracial families survived and sometimes flourished across a century of Mississippi history, from Reconstruction until the dawn of the civil rights era. The brutality and ugliness of the racial regime and of white supremacy are never forgotten, but the Mississippi Schumaker reveals, filled with hesitant legislators and frustrated prosecutors, and couples and families that insisted on living lives on their own terms, is quite different than the Mississippi we thought we knew. Couples sometimes hid in the deep shadows of the law, or their lawyers mobilized formalisms and contradictions to escape prosecution and imprisonment. But sometimes they lived in quiet but almost open rebellion, and local communities colluded with interracial couples as often as they enforced a racist regime. Maintaining laws against miscegenation was hard work. The racial regime was cruel and harsh and violent, but it was never robust enough to achieve its apparent goal of sexual segregation.”

“A creative, insightful, thoroughly researched history. Told through the gripping stories of countless couples fighting to preserve their unions, Schumaker shows how their resistance led to a surprising level of toleration for interracial cohabitation, while also documenting its limits in stark terms. Not only did authorities repeatedly criminalize those relationships and penalize some couples severely, the white men who governed the segregated South protected their own wealth and diminished that of African Americans by relentlessly denying the inheritance claims of Black members of interracial families. Through Schumaker’s deft narratives, interracial marriage becomes a way to understand anew the intersection of individual experience and the social order.”