December 13th, 2008
Kentucky Clay
Kentucky Clay
by Katherine R. Bateman
I got a bad feeling about this book while reading the introduction. The author tells us that she is an historian but she never was interested in her own family’s history even as her parents and grandparents tried to pass down their many stories to her. But now that she is a parent and a grandparent herself, she has decided to record her family history for her own children and grandchildren. Right away the feeling I got was that a medieval historian was writing a book about American history because she felt guilty for ignoring her family’s history. OK, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a bad book, does it?
Chapter one ended any thoughts that this was going to be a good story. In the first sentence she tells us that she imagines that her first ancestor in America had brown eyes. Why? Because everyone else in her family has brown eyes. And then she imagines what he felt like arriving in Jamestown in 1613. Again, she has no basis to build her imagination upon, but she imagines anyway. And imagine she does – telling us what she imagines each member of her family felt at each moment in their lives. This isn’t exactly a family history as the author’s imagination of her family history. And once we get beyond the first few Clays we find out something even worse – since she isn’t directly related to the most interesting Clays like Henry and Cassius, she isn’t going to discuss them very much. Instead we get a long family story of alcoholism and divorce that reads more like a soap opera or a bad Hallmark movie than an historian discussing the history of an American family. Claiming that her book is the history of a Southern “dynasty” is extreme hyperbole.
I can see why the author wasn’t interested in her parents’ and grandparents’ stories. They really weren’t that interesting. She could have done us all a favor by keeping them as oral histories, or simply writing them down and passing them around at the next big family get together.
