Just the Way It Was

The youngest of the eight by sixteen years, and the only one still living. He grew up in a Louisiana mill town in the last years of legal segregation: separate doors at the doctor's office, two drinking fountains side by side on the same water line, and a Sunday hymn about all the children of the world sung in a church where no Black family sat.

Raised on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in a family where Confederate ancestry counted for more than money. Two of his great-grandfathers fought for the South. He served in North Africa and Italy, then spent a career in a multinational company, and remembers the plant photograph in which the Negro employees were all grouped at the back.

A Sicilian family in the Wards of New Orleans: a grandfather who rented a meat stall behind Café du Monde, a father who dried macaroni by day and repaired barrels at night. Ted worked forty years for the telephone company. He was called names himself, by his closest friends.

The oldest of four sisters, raised poor on the edge of Staunton by a father who slapped her mother most weeks and a mother the neighborhood whispered about. She warned Andy she had only four or five memories worth having. She was amazed at how much came back.

The most private of the eight, and the clearest about why she agreed: she wanted readers to know that the lives of the people she knew in the South were nothing like the scenes in Civil Rights newsreels. She is also the most candid about the limits of her own seeing.

Born on a 200-acre farm in the peach-and-apple country west of Charlottesville. By the time she finished high school she knew someone in almost every White family in her corner of the county, at least by sight, and about a dozen Black people in all.

All he knows of his family is what his mother told him about her side: Tidewater Virginia since shortly after the Civil War, and a great-great-grandfather who fought for the South whose rank nobody would say. His is the only chapter in which a family member belonged to the Klan.

The eighth voice, and the one that turns the book outward. He immigrated in 1987, when apartheid still looked permanent. Not until he read Andy's chapter did he learn that America had once had a system like the one he grew up inside. The two men then spent dozens of conversations comparing them.