Item Information
Title
Review of Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family written by Betty Hodges
Creator
Hodges, Betty
Source
Durham Morning Herald
Date
November 11, 1956
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Type
Text
Text
Betty Hodges' Book Nook
North Carolinians in general and Durhamites in particular will be interested in reading "Proud Shoes," a new book written by Pauli Murray, a woman lawyer whose measure of success came after a struggle not confined to the usual well-known crusade of a woman in what so long has been a man’s field. She had additional obstacles to overcome, for she is a Negro.
But “Proud Shoes” is her story only in part. It is the story of her heritage. Written on a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, it is the history of around her grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, who was one of the early educational missionaries among the freed Negroes of the South during the Reconstruction period.
To tell his story she had to tell the story of the family, and doing so she pulls no punches. Going back to official civil records for the facts, Miss Murray added the reminiscences of aunts and grandparents and came up with a book that is both history and biography.
Starting from the beginning, Pauli Murray went back to her great-grandparents. On her grandfather’s side she found her origins in Delaware, where her great-grandfather, a free Negro, married the 15-year-old daughter of a farming family of mixed white and Indian blood. One of their children their was Robert Fitzgerald.
On her grandmother’s side she found a fascinating antebellum story. Set on the Dr. James Smith plantation near Chapel Hill it concerned a beautiful slave girl of white and Cherokee Indian blood and the younger Smith son. Pauli Murray’s grandmother was their daughter Cornelia, who was well acquainted with her origins and was raised in the “big house” as a partly acknowledged member of the family.
Robert Fitzgerald grew up with a yen for learning and a yen for teaching. When the Civil War broke out he fought for the Yankee cause both in the Navy and in the Army and received wounds that impaired his sight and eventually blinded him.
During Reconstruction days he came to North Carolina as a teaching missionary among the freed slaves. It was the beginning of a long and difficult struggle against insurmountable problems and in the face of indifference and hatred.
He found time, however, to court and wed Cornelia Smith and a union of widely diverse backgrounds was formed. Their children and grandchildren were to grow up among the unbelievable contradictions and the competing prides and loyalties this union provided.
Pauli Murray was to receive from her grandfather a heritage of pride from honorable service and the Union Army and the accompanying sense of freedom. From her grandfather she was to come into the bequest of white “aristocrats . . . going back seven generations right in this state,” and the traditions of blood-conscious Southern gentility.
It was inevitable that her mixed heritage would result in bitterness and confusion, and that she seldom knew where to turn for the stability she needed to become a person in her own right. If she turned more to one than to the other it was to her grandfather and his proud record of personal integrity and accomplishment. As she herself pointed out “If grandfather had not volunteered for the Union in 1863 and come south three years later as a missionary among the Negro freedmen, our family might not have walked in such proud shoes."
Enclosed in Pauli Murray’s story are the phrases of her resentment at the situation she faced—"the barbed-wire wilderness a person of color must travel,” “the unremitting search for whiteness." “belonging wholly to neither yet tied irrevocably to both.”
In telling of her childhood she describes the Durham of pre-World War I days and of the Fitzgerald house hovering on the hill between the edge of the old Maplewood Ceme- tery and the “Bottoms" which lay between their property and the back porches of Cameron Street Hill.
Miss Murray ends her family history with the death of her grandfather when she herself is barely nine. She withholds the events which transpired from that time until her picture appeared on the dust cover of “Proud Shoes” some 37 years later, showing a handsome woman smiling without bitterness and wearing on her lapel pin a Phi Beta Kappa key.
The publishers (Harper & Brothers, New York, 276 pages, $3.50) added the information that Miss Murray is an attorney with degrees from Hunter College, Howard University and the University of California, and that she is the editor and compiler of “State’s Laws on Race and Color.”
The years in between are another story, and it may be that Miss Murray is saving that for another book.
North Carolinians in general and Durhamites in particular will be interested in reading "Proud Shoes," a new book written by Pauli Murray, a woman lawyer whose measure of success came after a struggle not confined to the usual well-known crusade of a woman in what so long has been a man’s field. She had additional obstacles to overcome, for she is a Negro.
But “Proud Shoes” is her story only in part. It is the story of her heritage. Written on a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, it is the history of around her grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, who was one of the early educational missionaries among the freed Negroes of the South during the Reconstruction period.
To tell his story she had to tell the story of the family, and doing so she pulls no punches. Going back to official civil records for the facts, Miss Murray added the reminiscences of aunts and grandparents and came up with a book that is both history and biography.
Starting from the beginning, Pauli Murray went back to her great-grandparents. On her grandfather’s side she found her origins in Delaware, where her great-grandfather, a free Negro, married the 15-year-old daughter of a farming family of mixed white and Indian blood. One of their children their was Robert Fitzgerald.
On her grandmother’s side she found a fascinating antebellum story. Set on the Dr. James Smith plantation near Chapel Hill it concerned a beautiful slave girl of white and Cherokee Indian blood and the younger Smith son. Pauli Murray’s grandmother was their daughter Cornelia, who was well acquainted with her origins and was raised in the “big house” as a partly acknowledged member of the family.
Robert Fitzgerald grew up with a yen for learning and a yen for teaching. When the Civil War broke out he fought for the Yankee cause both in the Navy and in the Army and received wounds that impaired his sight and eventually blinded him.
During Reconstruction days he came to North Carolina as a teaching missionary among the freed slaves. It was the beginning of a long and difficult struggle against insurmountable problems and in the face of indifference and hatred.
He found time, however, to court and wed Cornelia Smith and a union of widely diverse backgrounds was formed. Their children and grandchildren were to grow up among the unbelievable contradictions and the competing prides and loyalties this union provided.
Pauli Murray was to receive from her grandfather a heritage of pride from honorable service and the Union Army and the accompanying sense of freedom. From her grandfather she was to come into the bequest of white “aristocrats . . . going back seven generations right in this state,” and the traditions of blood-conscious Southern gentility.
It was inevitable that her mixed heritage would result in bitterness and confusion, and that she seldom knew where to turn for the stability she needed to become a person in her own right. If she turned more to one than to the other it was to her grandfather and his proud record of personal integrity and accomplishment. As she herself pointed out “If grandfather had not volunteered for the Union in 1863 and come south three years later as a missionary among the Negro freedmen, our family might not have walked in such proud shoes."
Enclosed in Pauli Murray’s story are the phrases of her resentment at the situation she faced—"the barbed-wire wilderness a person of color must travel,” “the unremitting search for whiteness." “belonging wholly to neither yet tied irrevocably to both.”
In telling of her childhood she describes the Durham of pre-World War I days and of the Fitzgerald house hovering on the hill between the edge of the old Maplewood Ceme- tery and the “Bottoms" which lay between their property and the back porches of Cameron Street Hill.
Miss Murray ends her family history with the death of her grandfather when she herself is barely nine. She withholds the events which transpired from that time until her picture appeared on the dust cover of “Proud Shoes” some 37 years later, showing a handsome woman smiling without bitterness and wearing on her lapel pin a Phi Beta Kappa key.
The publishers (Harper & Brothers, New York, 276 pages, $3.50) added the information that Miss Murray is an attorney with degrees from Hunter College, Howard University and the University of California, and that she is the editor and compiler of “State’s Laws on Race and Color.”
The years in between are another story, and it may be that Miss Murray is saving that for another book.