'We Sort of People' by Henry Horenstein and Leslie Tucker is published by Kehrer Verlag in 2023

We Sort of People by Henry Horenstein, Leslie Tucker and Shannon Thomas Perich. Published by Kehrer Verlag

Henry Horenstein’s most recent book, his 31st book, ‘We Sort of People’ is published by Kehrer Verlag in 2023.

Henry and Leslie began working together in the summer of 1997, when she invited him to Maryland to shoot the mysterious, little-known Wesort clan.

During the mid-twentieth century the Wesorts were a kind of urban myth among black people in Washington, DC. They were known by a single name—Proctors. They looked white but didn’t claim any race. They kept to themselves. Many belonged to the Catholic Church.

The Wesorts had done something odd in America. They had stepped out of race. They sustained this status with constant intermarriages. Three races— black, white and native american—combined into one family with cousins making dozens for centuries. They mixed, mated and migrated in between whites and blacks from the earliest documented records of the nation.

Even though the project started as a genealogical search for a family whose roots stretched back to the founding of the first Catholic colony, it grew into a mystery about the origins of race in America, then became a race against time as the Wesorts and their descendants disappeared and died.

While Henry photographed the last generation of Proctors and their disappearing world, Leslie recorded the conversations she had with the wise women of her family. A living archive emerges, with voices that portray the complex realities of their lives in their own words, as seen through their eyes. This family history is elastic, moldable, and often lost. It isn’t necessarily permanent or durable or even correct.