A White Southerner Tries to Grapple With Family Heritage and History

Growing up in the semi-rural South of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the civil war did not seem far away. On daily summer forays to the Lumbee River, I routinely passed the shack of a woman born into slavery, marveling that Liza, at 100 years old with a bent back and prune-like hands, managed to walk a mile into town and back nearly every day with a knapsack on her back to fetch vittles.

We, children, made it a ritual, as we rode in the back of my parents’ blue Pontiac station wagon, our feet dangling or swinging off the back — no seat belts of course — to shout a greeting, “Hey Liza, hey Liza, hey Liza!” as we passed her cabin on the way to the river. She always gave us a big wave and a big smile.

As a child, I frequently heard that Robert E. Lee was a saint, the pure image of white manhood, and Martin Luther King was a demon, a “rabble-rouser.” My mother and uncle, outspoken integrationists, were, in the words of some neighbors, “scalawags”; my aunt, who moved down from New York and taught at a local African American prep school, was a