Freedom's Child

In Carrie Allen McCray's memories of her childhood is the recurring image of a framed photograph on her mother's bedroom mantelpiece. It showed a white man in uniform. She remembers wondering who he was, but being afraid to ask. This book is the result of her decision to ask. What she found out was that the white man in uniform was her mother's father, John Robert Jones of Harrisonburg, Virginia, a retired brigadier general in the Confederate States Army. Her mother's mother, Malinda Rice, a freed slave, was his servant. Their child, Mary, was born eleven years after the end of the Civil War. Malinda Rice died when her two children by the general were still very young. Though the Rice family raised Mary and her brother, their white father recognized them publicly and paid for Mary's education. For this, he was cast out of society and belittled by contemporary Civil War historians. But Mary grew up to become a college graduate, a teacher, wife of the president of Virginia Seminary and, as his widow, acting president, wife of a leading African-American lawyer, mother of ten children, and lifelong activist working for what she called "full freedom" for African-Americans. Freedom's Child is a loving remembrance of how this beautiful and very determined woman spent her life beating down barriers to equality. Carrie McCray's memories reward us with an extraordinarily vivid and intimate portrait of a woman who overcame the legacy of scandal to pass on a legacy of personal courage, conviction, love, and joy. But perhaps even more remarkable is a black woman's slow acceptance of a white Confederate general as her grandfather and her public acknowledgment of his legacy to her - the courage to accept kinship across racial taboos.