I recently read Isabel Wilkerson’s very impressive The Warmth of
Other Suns, about the migration of black Americans out of the
south throughout the 20th century. And then I immediately read
Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain, about Thomas Jefferson
and the more than 600 slaves he owned throughout his life, and
his treatment of them. (That review will post closer to the
book’s publication date in mid-October.) This was a neat
coincidence, and had me on a roll, thinking about slavery in the
United States and the aftermath for freed slaves and their
descendants; so I moved smoothly on to The Invisible Line, in
which Daniel Sharfstein follows the transitions made by three
families from being seen as black to being seen as white. It
raises some interesting questions about the lines we draw and
our tendency to think of race as having sharp corners and firm
divides. The mixed-race men and women Sharfstein tracks and
studies in this book include “colored aristocrats” in Oberlin,
Ohio and Washington, D.C. who hold