After the death of his mother several years ago, Little Rock pediatrician Dr. Charles R. Feild took an old wicker basket from her attic with the intention of recycling it.
It was filled with copies of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and a passel of old bills, past-due notices, termite contracts, unopened junk mail and other flotsam that somehow gets held onto over the years.
The basket, he learned from his wife, Chris, had actually been crafted on the Feild Bros farm, most likely by a former slave, to hold Feild's father who was born in 1921.
He took it to the Historic Arkansas Museum, where he met with then-curator Hattie Felton. Along with the basket, Feild shared stories he'd heard of family lore from his father, Robert.
Felton encouraged him to write these stories down, and so he did. The result is "Feild Notes on Little Rock: History and Memoir, 1622-2024," an engrossing, honest, sometimes funny book that explores the history of Little Rock and Arkansas through the prism of the colorful Feild family.
"It really started out as a multi-generational memoir rather than a traditional history," said Feild, who is retired. "I worked on my own voice and I could hear myself and my father talking."
Feild traces his roots to the arrival of the first Feild on these shores in the early 1600s. From there, he follows along as other ancestors make it to Arkansas and doesn't stray when that history gets ugly. This is not a romanticized version of the Natural State and the South.
His forebears were slave owners, and Feild digs into the history of enslavement in Arkansas, the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. He reports on Edward McGee, an enslaved man owned by William Feild. McGee lived as a free man in Little Rock after the war, and Feild wonders if he ever crossed paths with his former owner.
"Later, as they all moved about town, did they greet one another? And if so, how," he writes.
Feild explores the early days of baseball in Little Rock and his grandparents' faded gentry lives during the Depression. He also delves into the current political climate, disputing what he sees as the erasure of some elements of history and criticizes Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her 2023 Executive Order To Prohibit Indoctrination And Critical Race Theory In Schools.
"Since this project began, public discussions have distorted the past, the truth, of chattel slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause. The truth is characterized as wokeness (sic) and indoctrination," he writes.
"Feild Notes ... " is available at WordsWorth Books in Little Rock.
"I had a whole lot of fun," Feild says of writing it. "Now I'm having a lot of fun talking to people about it."
Email: [email protected]