Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County

Green begins this chapter by recounting a 2006 interview she conducted with Robert Taylor, one of the leaders of the effort to provide private education to Farmville’s white children in the 1950s when the public schools closed. Taylor ran the Prince Edward School Foundation, which opened Prince Edward Academy for white students. Taylor was also a close friend of Green’s family (the author once babysat his grandchildren) and served with the author’s grandfather on Prince Edward Academy’s board. In the interview, Taylor maintains that he was taking care of his family: The schools were closed and his kids needed an education. He confesses no qualms about the fact that black kids were shut out entirely from his initiative and suffered academically. In fact, when Green challenges him about his stance, he unashamedly admits to still being a segregationist, alleging that integration only leads to white girls having mixed-race babies. Green feels angry. In 2006, she is married to a man who is part Native American, which Taylor well knows. But she forces herself to continue with the interview. She wants to learn what she cannot from her own grandparents; her grandfather is dead and her ailing grandmother won’t discuss Farmville’s history regarding race.

Six months after the interview, Green finds herself sitting in church during her grandmother’s funeral. “Papa” and “Mimi,” which is what she called her grandparents, lived near her family in Farmville, where Papa ran his dental practice. They also owned a farm in a neighboring county where the author and her family spent a lot of time in her childhood. Mimi hosted large gatherings at Thanksgiving and held special birthday meals for Green.

Green spots Lancaster at the funeral. She knows Lancaster does not like coming to this church because it is where, in 1963, her daughter Gwen was among protestors arrested after being denied entrance. Still, Lancaster has come out of loyalty to Green’s family, and the author wonders whether her family has returned that loyalty over the years. She has never gotten clear answers about the founding of Prince Edward Academy. And now she has learned that its founding was not in fact prompted by the public school closings but had been planned years before—and that Papa had been part of the effort from the start.

Green closes the chapter by describing Farmville, Virginia. Located in the middle of the state, it is a small, rural town with a slow and relaxed way of life. Friendly neighbors don’t lock their doors. Kids skip school for the start of hunting season. Modernization and development haven’t robbed its old-time feel. Today, its main draw to outsiders is Green Front Furniture, a large retailer of home furnishings housed in renovated tobacco warehouses. The store has anchored a renaissance in one part of downtown, but another part is nearly deserted. Most of the local businesses that thrived during Green’s childhood have closed. Also, the town remains racially segregated though the surrounding county is less so. And poverty has stubbornly persisted: While the local college attracts boutique bakeries and the like, the poverty rate in Prince Edward County is close to 20 percent, almost double that of the state.

Green opens Chapter 2 with the story of meeting, falling in love with, and marrying her husband, Jason Hamilton, who is part Native American. When he accompanied her on a visit home for the first time, she made sure her grandmother knew in advance that he was multiracial in the hopes that Mimi wouldn’t do something offensive. When they decided to get married in Farmville, Green worried how Jason’s family and their nonwhite friends would be received by a community that was still largely segregated.

Green describes the first time she saw an interracial couple: at the beach when she was a child. When she asked her mother about the couple’s children, her mother’s reply that “[i]t must be hard for them” suggested there was something wrong about mixed-race relationships (26). Green notes that the landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia involved an interracial couple from Virginia, where interracial marriage was illegal. Mildred Jeter and Peter Loving were forced to leave the state but decided to take legal action. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, striking down all state laws that prohibited marriages like the Lovings’.

When Green and Hamilton’s first daughter is born in 2007, they are living in Massachusetts. Green begins thinking about how she’d like to live closer to family and give her daughter the same childhood experiences she had. To do so, she knows she will need to confront both Farmville’s complicated past and its present. She begins that process after the birth of a second daughter, when they move to Richmond, Virginia. Because both Green and her husband grew up in the South, it feels like home, but she worries about how her mixed-race family will be treated. She begins reporting on the history of school segregation in Prince Edward County, knowing she will be forced to acknowledge some unpleasant facts: “It will mean moving beyond the story I grew up believing and finding my own truth” (35).