The bright orange bus rolled slowly to a halt, warning lights blinking, stop sign extended. A constant babble of exuberant young voices poured from the bus’s open windows. White faces and arms poked out from the windows, the arms waving, the heads turning to shout at the children who played in the schoolyard across the highway. I stepped down from the bus to the shoulder of the road and then walked in front of the bus across the gray concrete. I heard the bus drive off, noticed the high whine of the engine before the driver shifted to second gear....

Wade was much more than the village in which I grew up. For eighteen years it was, practically speaking, my entire world. As a youth I believed Wade to be representative of the world that lay beyond my limited experience. It was, I thought, typically American. Occasionally a radio or television program or a newspaper headline would hint that perhaps Wade differed from much of the rest of the country. It never occurred to me, however, that rather than being representative of the nation as a whole, Wade was in fact an almost perfect microcosm of the rural and small-town...

His name was James Robert Fuller, Jr., but everyone called him Bobo. He was a year younger than I, and I had known him all my life. He lived in a small white frame house in the black neighborhood behind Granddaddy’s store. There seemed to be nothing unusual or special about Bobo; he was just another black boy in the community, of no more or less consequence than any other black child. Nevertheless, it was Bobo, a child I often looked down upon because of his blackness and his poverty, who showed me the emotional power that racial prejudice and...

Of all the blacks I knew in Wade, none fascinated me more than Street. He remains one of the most intriguing individuals I have encountered, and one of the few who possessed all the characteristics I most admire in people. As I came to know him, I learned that Street had an unbounded intellectual curiosity, a strong ego balanced by a deep and genuine concern for others, and the courage of his convictions. He was an original, a truly unique individual, a man of natural wit, intelligence, dignity, and unswerving principles. To a teenaged boy with a hunger to learn...

Universally feared and publicly detested, interracial sex was, paradoxically, a horror that Wade’s whites embraced, as did southerners everywhere. It was a beguiling abomination, nurtured and embellished by southern folklore, a subject cloaked in mystery and tinged with danger, spoken of in tones hushed or indignant, but always spoken of. Sexual relations between blacks and whites became both the ultimate temptation and the ultimate taboo, a symbol of both the reality and the futility of segregation. The constant possibility, or probability, that temptation would overcome taboo charged the emotional atmosphere of the segregated South with a raw sexual energy that,...

The segregated South was steeped in guilt, for whites fully understood the moral implications of the fundamental inequity in their society. Most, however, attempted to avoid guilt by deluding themselves. They pretended, and some actually believed, that racism and segregation were not merely acceptable explanations of their region’s social order, but a part of the natural, immutable order of things. White children of the South encountered the shopworn defenses of segregation at an early age, and so did I. In Wade, the wise (or those considered wise), the old, the prosperous, the community leaders, all parroted centuries-old dogma that attributed...

My attitudes about race remain irrevocably linked to memories of Granddaddy, who, more than any other white, helped to form them. He was a complex man, intelligent, proud, aloof, and supremely confident of his own abilities. He was also a profoundly unhappy man, plagued by some deep-seated, unarticulated lack of fulfillment. He battled life without ever coming to terms with it, never achieving peace with himself. The variety of names by which he was known, names I heard every day, revealed the complexity of the man, and much about his nature. To my brothers, sisters, and me, he was Granddaddy....

As proponents of an ideology of hatred and fear, Wade’s white segregationists relied heavily on stereotypes to support their claim that blacks were inferior. They also exercised their power within the society to see that the image of blacks that they created became a reality. Blacks, they maintained, were incapable of economic progress without white sponsors, unable to administer organizations or institutions successfully without white help, and generally unfit to hold positions of authority. In the South’s economy, they noted, blacks were domestics, tenants, day laborers, hewers of wood and drawers of water. To ensure that this situation would remain...

It was the winter of 1984, and we had returned home for Christmas Eve, my brothers and sisters and I, with our families. This family reunion was an annual event, a night of feasting and gift giving, of sharing childhood memories and parental hopes, of acknowledging the linkage of generations of family. The family was my only remaining link with Wade, and it had changed. Granddaddy died years ago in an automobile accident. It was a providential death, actually, since no one else was injured. He had fallen and broken a hip three years earlier, and had never recovered. Unable...

For the past twenty years I have lived and worked in Wilmington, North Carolina, a still-pleasant port city now simultaneously ensnared and enthralled by the material prosperity that often accompanies rapid growth. My family and I came to Wilmington in part because the Cape Fear River links it to Wade, and thus to my past. Wilmington, the state’s largest port and until the early twentieth century its largest city, sits on the east bank of the Cape Fear River, approximately fifteen miles upriver from the Atlantic. An inland community some 110 miles upriver, Wade had its beginnings as a river...