Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Family Saga (Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World)

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Description

A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner turned into a living repository of history. The circle of relatives narrative entrusted to her–“a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved”–started some of the Yoruba in West Africa and continued together with her own century and more of life.
 
In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck started a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner’s storytelling to build the Turner circle of relatives saga, the usage of at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories on the heart in their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner’s African ancestors; Daisy’s father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy’s childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father’s life in Vermont–in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to incorporate voice inflections. Beck, on the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist’s viewpoint on oral history and the hazards–and uses–of memory.

Publication of this book is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.

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