Reviews

“In an illuminating and aptly titled book, The Invisible Line, Daniel J. Sharfstein demonstrates that African-Americans of mixed ancestry have been crossing the boundaries of color and racial identity since the early colonial era. An associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University and an author with a literary flair, Sharfstein documents this persistent racial fluidity by painstakingly reconstructing the history of three families. In a dizzying array of alternating chapters, he presents the personal and racial stories of the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls. The result is an astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights.’’
—Raymond Arsenault, The New York Times

“[A] spellbinding chronicle of racial passing in America . . . Sharfstein may be a law professor, at Vanderbilt, but he approaches his subject with a storyteller’s verve and a novelist’s gift for the telling detail. . . Sharfstein’s you-are-there approach to history produces dozens of vivid set pieces — Wall rescuing an escaped slave from slave catchers; Gideon Gibson taunting the commander of South Carolina’s militia; Senator Gibson delighting in owning the mansion once occupied by President Lincoln’s secretary of war. In every case, the author clarifies the context that makes each family’s progression from black to white unique . . . The Invisible Line is not only a work of serious scholarship based on exhaustive archival research but an immensely satisfying read.’’
—Dan Cryer, The Boston Globe

“In this meticulously researched history, Sharfstein’s ace-in-the-hole is his ability to recreate dramatic events and build flesh-and-blood characters from courthouse records, family letters, or forgotten contemporaneous accounts. He sets out to change the way we think about race, and he succeeds brilliantly in showing us that before politics began hardening colour lines in the run-up to the civil war, pragmatism often trumped prejudice. . . [F]or me, what makes this book a must-read are Sharfstein’s revelations about antebellum America.”
—Wilbert Rideau, The Financial Times

“Everyone knows when slavery ended, but few know how Slavery Lite continued under the oppressive sharecropper system. The persistence of such amnesia long after the triumphs of the civil rights movement makes The Invisible Line must reading. With dogged research, lawyer and journalist Daniel J. Sharfstein has stitched together the stories of three families toeing America’s racial trip wire across several generations. Woven into a novelistic narrative, The Invisible Line presents a primer on the hypocrisies that confronted everyday Americans from the Revolution through to the 1960s.”
—Bruce Watson, The San Francisco Chronicle

“For every advancement and setback in America’s struggle with questions of race, there’s a universe of unintended consequences, and this dynamic makes for great storytelling. The Invisible Line reads like a collection of short fiction in which Sharfstein never succumbs to clichéd endings or oversimplified character arcs. The Gibsons, the Walls, and the Spencers are real people who were operating during complicated times, and such stories, when told by a writer with Sharfstein’s narrative skill, can be as compelling as any in the world of fiction.”
—Paul V. Griffith, Chapter 16 and The Nashville Scene

“Many persons of African American heritage but ‘white’ appearances 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.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Enhanced by its almost lyrical prose, [The Invisible Line] explores questions of elective identity, usually based on wealth, behavior, and reputation, rather than color, as well as the often tumultuous events that led to historical and personal compromises. American social history scholars, genealogists, and general readers who wish to learn through vivid case studies will be interested.”
—Library Journal

“The Invisible Line offers a trilogy of remarkable tales brimming with risk taking, camouflage, irony, narrow escapes, misgivings, regret, delight, and full-scale human drama. Excellent histories have been published about the Great Migration of twentieth-century African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, but, until now, no authoritative and cumulative work has looked at this preceding and overlapping social movement of race changing. One by one, or family by family, since the dawn of American history, individuals have slipped through the loopholes of racial identity. This book overthrows nearly everything Americans thought they knew about race.”
—Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Her Country’s Children

“An original and often startling look at the vagaries of the ‘color line.’ Sharfstein shows definitively that it was not a doctrinaire belief in racial purity that gave the South stability but rather a fluid understanding by its people and its institutions of racial difference and its multiple permutations.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“The sweeping stories of family, struggle, and triumph told in The Invisible Line represent an incredible feat for the author and a gift for any reader enthralled by how history can reshape our present perspective. Sharfstein brings his remarkable original research alive with a novelist’s eye for vivid detail and narrative. A groundbreaking work that will stir reflection and debate.”
—Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club

“With lively prose and remarkable research, Sharfstein creates a fresh and stirring epic of American life. In uncovering the stories of three American families who  move across the color line from black to white, he shows how difficult it has been to define race, but also why it has so often mattered.  With a tale that spans two centuries, moving between South and  North, rural hamlet and urban center, he weaves the vexing problem of race into the very fabric of national life and shows just how unsteady and complicated racial identity can be.”
—Martha A. Sandweiss, author of Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

“The Invisible Line is a stunning achievement. It is a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the role of race in American history, and particularly the role of those individuals and families who found themselves in the borderlands of racial identity.  It is one of those rare books which makes history come alive.  What these families endured and achieved, what they suffered and what they accomplished is part of the true story of the people of America, but one which is rarely told.”
—Lawrence M. Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor, Stanford Law School; author of A History of American Law

“Deeply intertwined in the American story of race are these stories of camouflaged families and their passages across the color line. Daniel Sharfstein disentangles them with eloquence and compassion, opening a hidden chapter of history that offers new insights in the struggle to overcome.”
—David K. Shipler, author of A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America

“A beautifully written book that stands proudly at the crossroads of narrative history and the cultural history of American law.  The stories that unfold across these pages reveal not only how the law has shaped American ideas about race, but also how the complexity of human experience has pushed against the rigid boundaries of our legal categories. Sharfstein’s masterly work allows us to appreciate more clearly just who we have been as a nation—and who we are.”
—Mark S. Weiner, professor of law, Rutgers-Newark School of Law; author of Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste

“Daniel Sharfstein’s brilliant The Invisible Line . . . unmasks the fiction of race and, in exquisite detail, exactly how race was—and is—made in the United States. ”
—Ira Berlin, professor of history at the University of Maryland, author of The Making African America: The Four Great Migrations

“A powerful indictment of one of America’s most enduring myths: that black and white are separate and meaningful racial categories.  Written with a novelist’s eye for fascinating characters and a rich sense of place and a scholar’s precision and panoramic perspective, The Invisible Line makes visible the shifting artificial nature of the “color line” and its dire, life-changing consequences.  Read this book if you want to understand the roots of our knotted racial history.  Read this book if you hope to untangle it.”
—Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets