The title Feild Notes on Little Rock is an "E before I" play on an anachronistic spelling of an old family name. The book weaves that Feild family history, extensive research, and a trove of photos, maps, and documents together to tell a story not only of the family but also of one Southern town and by extension the American South.
Feild Notes is not another Old South hagiography. There are no heroes or bold deeds-but there are lapses and wrongdoing by persons and by the culture at large. With ironic humor, and more than a bit of cynicism, Feild debunks efforts to rewrite or deny history. Details of four centuries of Feilds in America add color to local, national, and world events. The family's arc reaches from Colonial Virginia to the frontier of Tennessee then to Arkansas past and present. It's a history that includes Antebellum slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, two world wars, financial booms and busts, and a segregated Baby Boom.
Feild shares gripping first-person accounts of the skee-daddle, otherwise known as the "Battle" of Little Rock, as well as the Occupation/Liberation from the viewpoints of both Confederate and Union soldiers and of locals-white, enslaved, and emancipated. The book also contains previously unpublished accounts by Freedmen that belie Lost Cause myths.
While researching the book, Feild identified and transcribed handwritten records and bank records that illuminate the communities and local economy of newly emancipated Freedmen linked to his forbears. His personal recollection of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, the Little Rock Nine, and the 101st US Army Airborne fuel a passion for the truth-telling of race relations over the years.
With a wry sense of irony and understated cynicism, he covers people's lives and events big and small, and he closes with the ongoing questions of "Who am I?" and "How did I get here?" This well-crafted work stretches beyond Little Rock to the South, then and now, in the tradition of "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
