Description: Contemplating this document becomes Dew's first step in an exploration of antebellum Richmond's slave trade that investigates the terrible--but, to its white participants, unremarkable--inhumanity inherent in the institution.
Dew's wish with this book is to show how the South of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of her life to serving his family: Charles, why do the grown-ups put so much hate in the children?
Review Quotes:
Each one of Charles Dew's books has helped shape the conversation on the history of race in this nation. His new book, which combines an honest autobiography of life in the 1950s with a sobering account of archival history and reckoning, is a characteristically eloquent reflection. Dew allows us to understand just how deeply racial thinking saturated white southerners who were otherwise admirable people. Charles Dew is one of our wisest and most humane historians.
--Edward L. Ayers, University of Richmond, author of The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction