Four Memories:The South J. David Stevens (bio) 1977 It's a Sunday morning, and I wait in the den with my father and brother while upstairs my mother finishes her preparations for church. I've recently learned to knot my own tie, and my tweed blazer has suede elbow patches where my fingernails rake patterns when I'm bored. The room is dark: oak beams in the ceiling, brick fireplace consuming one wall, sunlight buoyed away from the windows by old-growth pine outside. I'm in the fourth grade and have spent the week listening to lectures on the Civil War by my social studies teacher, Mrs. W——, a leading historian of our town of Midlothian, Virginia. I don't know how the topic comes up. We're just plugging gaps in the Sunday air when I volunteer a thought. "I'm glad the South lost the War." My father wants to know why. "The South wanted slavery," I continue. "The South was bad." He looks around the room like someone rearranged the furniture without telling him. My brother slides deeper into the corduroy recliner, looking straight ahead. My father moves to sit on the couch and curves his hand around my leg above the knee. "There were lots of reasons for the War," he says. [End Page 49] But I have seen too much at school: a photograph of the zippered scars on a whipped slave's back, a drawing of slaves laid spoon-fashion around a ship's deck. I want him to understand that those images make his frustration moot. "Slavery was bad," I say. His fingers tighten on my leg. "Lots of people fought in the War for lots of reasons." Perhaps he wants me to understand, too. But we are speaking different languages, and now my own anger trembles to the surface. "Slavery was bad," I repeat. "I'm glad the South lost!" His hand rises suddenly then whips back into my thigh, seconds before my mother appears to ask why I'm crying. No one offers an answer. ________ Once, in my early thirties, I shared this story with a writing workshop, and everyone agreed I had been traumatized. The verdict came as a surprise. Other workshop members had spent weeks discussing their tragedies: a mother dead from overdose, a family riddled with cancer, a brother who killed his girlfriend before committing suicide. But I don't recall any other manuscript being met with an immediate assurance of the writer's anguish. I protested. The story was an aberration. My father and I had a good relationship. The workshop demurred, encouraging me not to look away from pain. They had my interests at heart, wanting to confirm that my story possessed the gravitas for memoir. But when they suggested revisions, what emerged was a portrait of my family as Southern caricature—this single episode packaged in a way that non-Southerners found familiar. In the workshop's version, my father became a closet racist who had never accepted the demise of "separate but equal." This upbringing was my cross to bear, the subterranean prejudice I had battled. There was only one problem. Such readings were false. Categorically. In most ways my father has always been—and remains—more progressive than I am. In his late seventies, he still volunteers at soup kitchens and homeless programs, tutors reading in elementary [End Page 50] schools filled with nonwhite students. When I was a kid, I joined him delivering Christmas presents to parts of Richmond where, later in life, I would think twice about traveling alone. Maybe these activities were tinged with an element of middle-class, churchgoing noblesse oblige. But there were also times I watched my father challenge other white men over racist jabs, men whose professional or public prominence imbued such confrontations with genuine risk. If my father has a totem, it's a newspaper clipping from 1941, the year after his birth. I don't know how he got it, but over the years he's made copies to stow in various nooks for safekeeping. The clipping is an editorial letter about my grandfather, who was a pastor in Kilmarnock, Virginia...