Looking through the earlier notes on this thread, I was struck by Lois
Leveen writing that Munford documented: "They have less superstition, less
reliance on dreams and visions.” In the 8-9 years of my work on the
Hairston story, from 1989 to 1997-98, I was tormented by sweat-soaked
dreams. One of those dreams was prophetic, but I didn't act upon it, a
wasted chance -- when the book was done I found that the voice in the dream
had tried to lead me to something.

But another time I was granted a vision of three people standing in my
bedroom saying their names “Mary, Frank, Ephraim.” I jumped out of bed and
recovered their story from documents I had put aside months earlier – they
were children sold to Mississippi. It wasn’t a dream, it was a vision.
Because it was real I put it in the book. Another time I was tormented by a
voice, daily, night, just saying a name over and over. The voice would not
stop for three days as I tore through every list I had – the enslaved on
farms and plantations, sharecroppers, cohabitation registers, Freedman’s
Bureau petitions, decades of death records -- literally hundreds of pages
of documents strewn on the floor. My poor wife knew I had at last gone mad.
When will the book be done? I couldn't tell her I was obeying a voice. Then
I found the name in a stack of papers I had stored in a closet, and the
voice left me. I had found the list that proved a long-hidden blood tie
between the whites and the Blacks – the voice had led me to a single page
of paper I’d found in Bristol which neither the Black or White Hairstons
had known of but it was the missing link in their two chains. Years
earlier, I had been tormented thinking “lists of names, that’s all you
have, lists of names.” The voice made me read those lists again and again
and again. There was no way I could have put all of this in my book because
I would have been written off as a crackpot.

In the section of my book about Daniel Hairston he tells of his enslaved
great aunt who got smacked by Ol’ Miss; in anger she ripped Ol’ Miss’s
dress, and in terror she ran away into the forest for two years. And then
she heard a voice: “And the Lord said to her – ‘go on and go back.’ He
would be there. And Ol’ Miss didn't bother her. Having faith unlocks the
door.” Daniel himself in a time of terrible crisis: “And a voice spoke to
me. Twelve o’clock in the day! I started to ask somebody: ‘Did you hear
that voice?’” And the voice directed him what to do.

When the book was done a group of southern Virginia Hairstons came to my
house and when I was alone with one of the elders I confessed to her I had
heard voices and she said, “we hear them too.”

Dreams and visions, voices.

Henry Wiencek

Charlottesville

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