{"id":569,"date":"2018-12-31T12:53:02","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=569"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:53:02","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:53:02","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=569","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, <\/span>freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>TEXAS HISTORY\/PHOTOGRAPHY\/ESSAYS<\/p>\n

Marti Corn<\/span><\/p>\n

The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen\u2019s Town<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Texas A&M University Press<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-6234-9376-9 (also available as an ebook), 160 pgs., $40.00<\/p>\n

June 6, 2016<\/p>\n

\u201c… there\u2019s no me without you,
and no you without me\u201d
\u2014Shirley Grimes, director of the
Tamina Community Center<\/p>\n

An unincorporated community in Montgomery County, Texas,<\/span> north of Houston and ten miles south of Conroe, Tamina began as a settlement for freed slaves (a \u201cfreedom colony\u201d) in 1871. Some of the settlers came from adjacent Texas counties; others came from as far away as Virginia and Maryland, through the Port of Galveston, previously the United States\u2019 busiest slave port (\u201cfrom the Congo to Conroe\u201d).<\/p>\n

The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen\u2019s Town,<\/span><\/a><\/span> a handsome book with an arresting cover portrait of Johnny Jones, railroad worker, musician, and resident of Tamina (whose challenging gaze is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), is volume twenty-two of Texas A&M University Press\u2019s Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life. This is documentary photographer Marti Corn\u2019s<\/span> contribution to this venerable series, which seeks to explore the history and culture of individuals and communities throughout rural areas of eastern Texas.<\/p>\n

Corn mixes her current photographs and portraits with historical images, conveying the passage of time, for good and ill, in Tamina. Her portraits (\u201cThe Faces of Tamina\u201d) are often striking with character, the personalities leaping off the pages. Some of the dwellings, like the people, are trim and spry while others have fallen into disrepair. The surrounding woods have initiated a reclamation project and some buildings, as well as vehicles (and one cemetery), are in the process of disappearing.<\/p>\n

The accompanying essays are first-person accounts by the residents themselves, many of whom are descendants of the original settlers. These essays read like a collection of linked short stories that, while engaging individually, come together to create a more-complete, complex picture of Tamina. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The residents are teachers, preachers, and tree-cutters, grandmothers and children. The unifying theme throughout these accounts is a sense of bonding with each other, with the land, and with history\u2014an appreciation of what it meant to their forebears to have a place of their own and to live more on their own terms.<\/p>\n

Corn and a number of residents are apprehensive that Tamina is vulnerable to gentrification as land values rise and the surrounding communities ogle it for development. \u201cPerhaps the risk of losing this unique Texas heritage,\u201d Corn writes, \u201ccompelled me to document \u2026 the lives of these individuals \u2026 and their community.\u201d As Annette Hardin, a Tamina resident, says, \u201cThe value they [developers] place on it is vastly different than ours. What they don\u2019t understand is that it\u2019s not just property\u2014it\u2019s our legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are recent encouraging developments: Conroe ISD and Harris County schools have begun teaching the Tamina story in their social studies classes, and several of the residents are involved in developing the curriculum; Rice University hosted a solo exhibit of the photographs and essays; and a trio of filmmakers are at work on a documentary. It would be a great loss and a shame to Texas if Tamina were to be sacrificed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}