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xi Preface In the Beginning, a Photograph P erhaps this book began with a nineteenth-century photograph, grainy and indistinct, handed down in my family from mother to daughter for six generations. The woman in the photo is old, her mouth a thin, determined line, her jaw set stubbornly, and her hair the color of the Birmingham steel-mill smog that would, during the early and mid–twentieth century, smother the land where her farm once stood. Those who told the story to me—my mother and mother’s mother—called it a farm. They were good socially progressive Democrats, fans of Martin Luther King Jr., the kind of enlightened white Southerners who did not give money to erect Confederate monuments, did not groom their daughters for Daughters of the Confederacy balls, and avoided using words like “plantation” in relation to their families. The story handed down with the photograph of my great-great-great-grandmother told how she had borne nine children, then lost her husband to the Civil War and—though this was never explicitly mentioned—lost her slaves to the Emancipation Proclamation. She’d never so much as brushed her own hair, the story goes. Yet, left with nine hungry little ones and not a soul who knew how to push a plow, she learned to plant and weed and harvest and haul and barter—and survive; she successfully ran the farm and raised nine children to adulthood. In her old age, she cross-stitched a sampler that read “God doth provide” and hung it over the dining-room table to teach her children and children’s children about the difficult years. And so goes the story’s lesson to each generation’s daughters: you come from a line of women of strength and faith—draw on that strength. Amidst white Southern culture, which, as Lillian Smith has observed, “still pays nice rewards to simple-mindedness in xii Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin females” (Palmer 455), this story was a gift of courage to me as a little girl from women of courage I admired. But the story teaches other lessons too—as my grandmothers and my mother and my daughters and I have been learning, generation by ­generation. Some of the lessons are chilling, to say the least. I was a graduate student living in New England when I thought of that story for the first time since I was a child. I was reading the recently rediscovered Iola Leroy, Frances E. W. Harper’s ultimately triumphant tale of a cast of African American characters who, having endured slavery and the Civil War, go on to secure education, material security, and social respectability. Harper concludes her book by assuring the reader of her protagonists’ virtuous, useful lives: “Blessed themselves, their lives are a blessing to others” (281). Staring out a window, I did not see the Boston skyline in the distance but instead wondered about the women who brushed my great-great-greatgrandmother ’s hair. I wondered if they too managed to raise their children to adulthood, if they too survived—even thrived. And I wondered what my own family’s story said about the God of the antebellum white South.1 Did that deity also provide for the former hair brushers and plow pushers? And what did the story say about white Southern men, so conspicuously missing from the strength it celebrated? What did it mean that the white Southern woman of relative privilege discovered her own abilities only in the absence of the white Southern male and of the slaves she had helped oppress? I wondered too if it had ever occurred to anyone—my great-great-great-grandmother, for example—to divide up the “farm” according to who had worked it and for how long. And I wondered whether, had I been in her shoes, it would have occurred to me. “Grief” is the best word I know to describe the journey into and through this book. In the graduate seminar on American women writers that assigned Iola Leroy, I was also reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time. I had almost read it more than fifteen years earlier in an eighthgrade English class in my East Tennessee hometown, Signal Mountain, a lovely, dogwood-studded little community perched two thousand feet above Chattanooga. These days, National Public Radio and the New York Times tout Chattanooga as a renaissance city—and deservedly so, with its bustling riverfront and...

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