The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White
*Starred Review* Many persons of African American heritage but white appearance crossed the color line at times when racial classification had very real and harsh implications. Legal scholar Sharfstein chronicles the lives of three such families who made the transition from black to white during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Gibsons started as landowners in South Carolina�s backcountry and became wealthy slaveholders and part of the southern elite, producing a senator and a major figure in American commerce. The Spencers owned farmland in eastern Kentucky and eventually Appalachia, scratching out a life as part of an isolated community, in which families were loathe to set hard racial definitions until coal mining and outsiders pressed the broader social mores of the U.S. The Walls gravitated to post�Civil War Washington, DC, and became part of the black elite that challenged racial restrictions until they could no longer resist the temptation to take advantage of the escape their fair skin afforded them. Drawing on archival material, Sharfstein constructs an absorbing history, demonstrating the fluidity and arbitrariness of racial classification. --Vanessa Bush