Hershel Parker is called “The Dean of Melville Studies” for his two-volume biography of Melville (1996 and 2002). The first volume was a Pulitzer finalist and winner of the top Association of American Publishers Award (the Hawkins Award), and the second also won the top AAP Hawkins Award. Earlier, he won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and the first Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship, then a Guggenheim Fellowship. After his retirement in 1998 his books include in 2002 the second volume of the biography; the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2002); Melville: The Making of the Poet (2008); Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (2013; the 1917 third NCE of Moby-Dick; and the 2019 Library of America Melville: Complete Poems. At intervals, from the 1970s on, he wrenched himself from Melville to write urgent original studies of American fiction and poetry--Tender is the Night, The Red Badge of Courage, Pudd’nhead Wilson, “The Germ Theory of The Scarlet Letter,” “Live Oak, with Moss,” The Art of Fiction, Absalom, Absalom!, An American Dream, and “Textual Criticism and Hemingway.” His 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, a book of textual scholarship and theory, continues to be influential.
In 2002 Parker began assembling family documents, learning odd episodes of American history as he went. In the mid-2010s he wrote articles on North Carolina for the Journal of the American Revolution and an essay on the hate term “Okie,” thinking it might go into a book called Ornery People. When George Floyd was murdered on 25 May 2020, Parker knew what he could do. From more than 10,000 files, now too intimidating for Ornery People, he pulled several thousand documents on whites, Indians, and blacks, (to start with) determined to find stories. He became fascinated by hundreds of kinfolks (new to him) who played crucial roles in historical events, and began drafting their stories. After the Introduction come seventeen chapters, from the Revolution to the first World War. Here are four samples. In northwest North Carolina a Sparks cousin in 1843 performed the marriages of the Siamese Twins and in 1863 a first cousin of his risked his life to give a pro-Union speech in public. In 1873 an aristocratic McGehee cousin gained amnesty for all crimes of the KKK in North Carolina, defeating Albion Tourgee, who much later defended Homer Plessy only to have the racist Supreme Court rule to keep Jim Crow the law. Freed from a North Carolina owner, black Moses Costner failed at sharecropping in South Carolina, took his family (including Dovey, the baby) to Grimes County, Texas, where slaves had been needed. Now blacks were not needed and were driven out. The Costners went just over the Red River into Indian Territory where soon racism imperiled them again. In 1911 terrified blacks fled by train loads while newspapers around the country reported on Dovey Costner’s campaign to be sent to a safer place, Nigeria. One bad cop, another Sparks cousin, caused the Houston riot of 1917 by pistol-whipping black women and black men as usual, thoughtless of the Buffalo Soldiers newly stationed there. (How timely are all these chapters? In mid-November 2023 the Army decided to excuse itself and the 110 Buffalo Soldiers it had hanged or imprisoned.) In the appendix are family stories and documents from the 1600s to the present. Four years in the making, here is An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.
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