Racial custom was carefully yet obliquely taught. It encompassed all the contradictions that had confronted white Virginians for centuries. We grew up in the constant company of human beings who were central to our lives, yet we somehow came to understand that an unspoken hierarchy required our distance—both physical and emotional—from them. An African American man who worked for my family for decades did everything from shining shoes to mowing the lawn to driving us around the county—to school, to piano lessons, to scout meetings. He was as present in my childhood as my brothers and my parents. He quizzed us on state capitals and the order of the presidents, made sure we remembered our lunch boxes and homework, and told us jokes and riddles. He always spoke not of “driving” us here or there, but of “carrying” us, a usage that to my child’s ears communicated a kind of concerned protectiveness. But I scarcely knew anything about his own life. He had a daughter not far from my age, but I rarely saw her, because she of course went to the segregated black school. I never even knew where it was.
We had—and were taught we deserved—better houses, better education, a better future. Yet at the very same time, we were learning in school that our nation was founded on the belief that all men are created equal; we were hearing in our all-white church that we were all the same before God. “Join hands, disciples of the faith,” the hymn commanded, “what’er your race may be. / All children of the living God are surely kin to me.”
For many white southerners of my generation, a life-defining question has been how long it took us to notice. When did the contradictions become troubling? When did they become unbearable? What was the moment of epiphany, the circumstance that made the inconsistencies undeniable? When did it become imperative to confront the legacies of slavery and segregation, to be honest with ourselves and one another and purge the untruths that, like malignancies, had permeated our society and our lives? “It’s that obliviousness, the unexamined assumption, that so pains me now,” the photographer Sally Mann has written about her 1950s Virginia childhood. “How could I not have wondered, not have asked.” For her, going north to school and encountering the writings of William Faulkner
threw wide the door of my ignorant childhood, and the future, the heartbroken future filled with hitherto unasked questions, strolled easefully in. It wounded me, then and there, with the great sadness and tragedy of our American life, with the truth of all that I had not seen, had not known, and had not asked.