'Kaleidoscope' Portrays the Unveiling of an Old Family Secret

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree ($19.95 paper and e-book), by Margaret Jones Bolsterli.

The book, the seventh Bolsterli has written or edited, covers how Bolsterli learned in 2005 that her great-great-grandfather was a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis who owned an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The news was a shock; Bolsterli had heard about the plantation in family stories, but her ancestor’s name and race had never been mentioned. She found that when Chavis’s children crossed the Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they passed into the white world.

Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and of the rise and fall of the Chavis fortunes in Mississippi, from a frontier farm in 1829 to ownership of over a thousand acres and the slaves to work them by 1860 to its eventual loss in the 1870s. Bolsterli learned that in the 1850s, when all free people of color were ordered to leave Mississippi or be enslaved, Jordan Chavis’s white neighbors successfully petitioned the legislature to allow him to remain, even as three of his sons and a daughter moved to Arkansas and Illinois. She also learned about the agility with which Chavis survived the war and took advantage of the opportunities during Reconstruction. In Kaleidoscope, long-silenced truths are revealed, inviting questions about how attitudes toward race might have been different in the family and in America if the truth about this situation and thousands of others like it could have been told.

Margaret Jones Bolsterli, who grew up on a cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta during the Great Depression, was a University of Arkansas literature professor for many years., As an emeritus faculty member of the U of A. she was the winner of the 2015 Governor’s Arts Award for folklife from the Arkansas Arts Council and also the 2013 Porter Prize.

She will be reading from and discussing Kaleidoscope at the Books in Bloom Literary Festival in Eureka Springs on May 17.

The University of Arkansas Press, founded in 1980, is an academic publishing house that is part of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.