“Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”   --Matthew 18:20

In the beginning their voices were largely silenced, their laments smuggled across the fields in hollers and chants, or rising skyward in spirituals and “corn ditties” sung in makeshift churches where clouds formed the ceilings and piles of brush made do in place of walls. Their blood and their toil were clearly evident, however, in the lush fields of cotton, the palatial homes and the lavish plantation social system that set the stage for what others knew as the “chivalrous South.”

With the Civil War came freedom, however, and with freedom African Americans in the Mississippi Hills found their voices, rich, clear and strong, and today what seems remarkable is not only how unique and powerful each of those voices proved to be, but how beautifully they harmonized with others. The African American story in the Mississippi Hills is a chronicle of both triumphant individualism as well as transcendent community, beginning with African Americans’ very first exercise in freedom—an experiment, really—in Corinth, in 1862.

In that year, with his eye on his own prize in Vicksburg, General U.S. Grant faced a nagging problem in Corinth, where thousands of escaped slaves had fled seeking refuge. What to do with these crowds of not-quite-free people?

While it ultimately proved to be an opportunity lost, for one brief moment Grant’s solution was a paradise found, a social experiment ennobled by a communal spirit that defied the odds to create a model for the rest of the nation. The only surviving accounts of this time and place are those of white observers and participants. This may explain why this astonishing utopia was born and died under the mundane and misleading name of Contraband Camp.

Perhaps Noah Webster could take partial credit for the misnomer, for it was a new and slightly surreal definition that gave rise to it in the first place.