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His black nurse was in the next room as Taylor told me he was accustomed to spending time around blacks. He described how another black nurse had raised him from birth and how he had regularly played with black children. Growing up in Prospect, a little railroad community ten miles west of Farmville, he noticed there were twice as many black residents as there were whites.

But he believed that black and white people were different, he told me. “The morality in the black school”—the black public schools—“was so low that our white children wouldn’t be able to understand,” Taylor said.

He cited tired stereotypes of how black men behave. “You’ll see high school graduates in legal problems or else they’re living off some black woman—or several black women. They don’t work, but they have money and nice automobiles and all that,” he said. “If I offered seven of ’em jobs, I couldn’t find one who would take one.”

I sat in his den, spellbound, rapidly taking notes as his oxygen machine hummed. This was just the kind of conversation the journalist in me found scintillating. I wondered how these black men he described would have fared if they, or perhaps their parents, had gotten an education. On a personal level, his words stung. I was sad that at the end of his life his beliefs seemed not to have changed since he’d founded the academy nearly fifty years earlier. He had wanted his children to get a quality education. But he had also wanted to maintain the purity of the white race, he told me.

“It doesn’t sound good,” he confessed. “It’s going to make a lot of folks mad. But it’s true.”

I asked why separating black and white children in schools had been important to him. “Do you know how many white girls got pregnant by black guys?” he responded.

During the sixteen years I lived in Farmville and the subsequent four years that I came home during college breaks, I had only one white friend who dated a black teenager. I couldn’t think of anyone who’d gotten pregnant, let alone pregnant with a mixed-race baby. And I didn’t remember seeing mixed-race children in town. It didn’t seem to be an issue. I shook my head.

Taylor didn’t buy it. “You don’t?” he asked again, glaring at me.

“I’ve never heard anybody talk about it,” I told him.

“You’ve never heard anyone talk about it?” Now he sounded incredulous.

White girls aren’t used to “the pressure,” he told me. He meant the pressure to have sex, as if white girls didn’t get that from white boys. Black boys impregnate white girls, he explained, and the girls’ parents end up raising half-black, half-white babies: “pinto” babies that nobody wants. The children are socially ostracized, he said, marked by “a cross to their very soul.”

I’d never heard the term “pinto” applied to a person before, but the minute he said it, I understood what he meant.

Taylor knew my husband was not white. Taylor’s son and daughter-in-law had been guests at our wedding, witnesses to the vows Jason and I had exchanged under an enormous oak tree on a farm at the edge of town. The next day they hosted brunch for our wedding guests at their lakeside cottage.

It dawned on me that Taylor wasn’t talking simply about the mixing of the black and white races anymore. He was talking about my husband, and about the children Jason and I wanted to have. Multiracial babies that Taylor both pitied and reviled.

Disgusted, I wanted to get up and leave, to put this whole interaction behind me. But as I sat across from him, frozen, maintaining my Southern civility, I thought about having this conversation with my own grandfather and what it might have revealed about his beliefs. I wondered if Papa had shared Taylor’s feelings about mixed-race children. And I realized that Taylor believed that I had betrayed them both in some fundamental way by embracing what they had tried to protect me from, what they most feared.

My face flushed in anger as Taylor talked. I wanted to dismiss him as the last of his kind—a closed-minded old man whose time had nearly come. But weeks before his death, he was giving voice to what I knew many whites in my hometown, perhaps even my own dying grandmother, still believed, more than fifty years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision: blacks and whites don’t belong together.

SIX MONTHS LATER, I SAT in the front of Farmville Baptist Church, staring at the sanctuary’s lavender walls, tall ceilings, and enormous brass chandeliers as an uncle delivered my grandmother’s eulogy. He told stories about how Mimi had loved her church, and what a good mother and grandmother she had been. He mentioned her devotion to her mother and to Papa as their health declined. He talked about how generous she was, replacing a needy family’s refrigerator and helping a nurse make rent.

As the minister led the congregation in a series of prayers, I considered that my grandmother would never meet the baby growing in my belly. My mind wandered back to my childhood in Farmville, a childhood Mimi had filled with love, the kind of childhood I wanted for my child.

I remembered sitting in this sanctuary, on these pews, twenty-five years earlier, as Mimi removed peppermint candies from crackling wrappers and handed them to me. Papa, a church deacon, slid down the velvet-cushioned pew to sit next to us after he passed the collection plate. During the hymns and the prayers and the long sermon, I daydreamed about the lunch we would eat together at Cedar Brook Restaurant after the service, the fried chicken that would be my reward for accompanying my grandparents and sitting still during church.

Mimi and Papa were numbers three and four in my life, right behind my parents. To my younger brothers and me, they were perfect—silver helmet hair, boat-sized Bonneville and all. They were generous participants in our lives. They rooted for us on the basketball court and cheered our flips off the diving board. Mimi planned elaborate Easter egg hunts, summer cookouts, and family trips to the beach. After a day at work as a dentist, Papa took us fishing at his farm in neighboring Buckingham County, where he tended a herd of Hereford cattle. We regularly visited their pretty colonial-style brick home on Oak Street, less than a mile away from our house. Decades earlier, they had built the house along a little country road that was later expanded to a four-lane highway. While Mimi gardened, we climbed the hill in the backyard. At dinner, she served us seconds of meatloaf without asking if we cared for more and stuffed us full of hot rolls.

Mimi and Papa had both grown up on farms in Buckingham. Papa’s mother’s family had lived in the county for generations. According to a family history, his great-great-grandfather Colonel Jesse B. Holman had owned “a great many slaves,” and his great-grandfather Samuel Daniel Holman had instructed his children to care for the family’s black employees who lived on the 1,400-acre family homestead when he died in 1905. The family of Papa’s father had arrived in Buckingham County in the eighteenth century and at the time was considered to be among the wealthiest families in Virginia. His father had attended medical school and become a doctor, and Papa, the second of eight children, went on house calls with his dad and helped on the family farm. Papa attended the University of Richmond, then dental school at the Medical College of Virginia. He and Mimi, who met on a double date, married in 1943, and then Papa was sent to China and India, serving as a captain in the US Army Dental Corps. Mimi, whose parents were farmers, had attended Pan American Business School and worked as a teller in a Richmond bank. When Papa returned, they briefly lived with her parents while he established a dental practice. Soon, they built their brick home in Farmville, where Papa moved his business and became active in local civic groups. They had three children, and my mom was the middle child.

Mimi and Papa are the foundation of many of my childhood memories. In 1978, my parents dropped my brother Chaz and me at their house, across from Southside Community Hospital, when my mom went into labor with a third child. I was making construction-paper cards for my soon-to-arrive sibling—one in case it was a girl, and one if it was a boy—when Dad surprised us with the news that Mom had delivered twin boys.

Months later, when I underwent testing for high blood pressure at the University of Virginia hospital, Mimi and Papa appeared in the intensive care unit with a tic-tac-toe game for me. Later that year, when I had surgery to replace a blocked artery to my kidney at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, my grandparents drove to Nashville to visit.

No matter the time of year, we saw them a couple of times a week, usually more. During the winter, Mimi dropped off a pot of beef stew for our dinner. In the summer, she sat in the shade of our backyard in a yellow sundress, watching us play in the pool, rarely wading in. Her coifed hair, styled weekly at the salon, wasn’t meant to get wet. On warm evenings, she drove by the house to find us still playing in the front yard, chasing fireflies and finishing off popsicles, and we ran out to her car in bare feet.

Mom regularly loaded the four of us into her tan 1972 Volkswagen Squareback station wagon and drove to Mimi and Papa’s house, where my brothers and I paraded around the circular driveway ringing their home, twirling bright umbrellas from Mimi’s collection. We counted passing cars, making our own games. We sipped lemonade while rocking in iron chairs on the breezeway—the porch between the back door and garage.

Mimi made a big deal of holidays and birthdays. She hosted two dozen family members at Thanksgiving, seating us all around an oversized table in the dining room, added on to the house for precisely those occasions. For my birthday, she took me to dinner at the Golden Corral, where she told me to select a dessert from dishes of green Jell-O and sliced chocolate cake on the cafeteria line and place it on my plastic tray. While I filled my plate at the salad bar, she slipped away to find the restaurant manager and ask him to wish me a happy birthday over the loudspeaker. When I turned ten, Mimi threw a birthday luncheon for me in the same dining room where we ate our holiday meals, serving chicken tetrazzini on dainty porcelain plates. It was too formal for a kid’s birthday, but I loved it. As a child, I thought my grandparents could do no wrong.

Nothing was better than having their attention all to myself, and I waited to be invited to sleep over. During the day, I would play with paper dolls on the cold cement floors of the basement while Mimi sewed. While she tended her irises, I rode my bike around the driveway. When she applied lipstick to her plump lips or rouge to her rounded cheeks, I dressed up in her jewelry and tried on her clothes. At night, I worked puzzles on the floor of the dark wood-paneled den, where the back wall was plastered with dozens of framed family photographs. Papa stretched out on his brown recliner beside me, unwinding. Mimi prepared dinner, slapping pile after pile of buttery mashed potatoes on my plate, until I complained that my belly ached. The next day, she took me shopping for a new outfit at a discount store before dropping me at home. As I climbed out of the car, she would reach into her purse and slip a crisp five-dollar bill into my hand.

Papa, a tall man with large ears, a long nose, and a warm, friendly smile, sometimes took my brother Chaz and me on excursions to his four-hundred-acre farm. We rode on the bench seat of his covered GMC pickup truck while he drove his property line, checking on his cattle and looking for breaks in the barbed wire fence. Several dogs trailed behind, including my aunt’s three-legged collie, Lucky. Papa jumped out of the truck to unlock the heavy metal gates, leaving us in the toasty warmth of the cab, where his hunting rifles hung over our heads. On other outings, we played in the barn while he baled hay or helped him pluck potatoes from the fields. When he took us fishing, Chaz and I ran along the lakeshore while Papa sat patiently waiting for a nibble. Later, we grilled hot dogs and roasted marshmallows on a fire he had built.

Now, in 2007, fourteen years after his death, I sit listening to the preacher talk about my grandmother, glancing a few pews in front of me, where my mom is seated next to Elsie. For decades Elsie had avoided my grandparents’ church, where in 1963 twenty-three people, including Elsie’s daughter, Gwen, were arrested for disrupting the service after they were refused entry. The police arrived as the group of black students and their leaders were kneeling on the church steps and singing. Today Elsie was in the church sanctuary for my grandmother’s funeral, sitting with my mom and her sister and their children, in the ultimate display of loyalty to our family.

I had this sinking feeling that we hadn’t been nearly as loyal. We had ignored the impact of the school closures on Elsie and other black residents. Whenever I asked about the reason the white school existed, my mom said that her parents had been looking out for their children. But who had been looking out for the black children? And what had been the cost to them? What was the story I hadn’t been told?

Prince Edward Academy hadn’t been established, as I long believed, in reaction to the public schools’ closing. Instead, it had been dreamed up five years earlier as a way for the county to avoid integration. And my grandfather had been in on it from the beginning.

FARMVILLE IS CALLED THE “HEART of Virginia” for its location at the geographic center of the state. It is, as its name implies, a small town surrounded by lush farmland and gently rolling hills.

It’s also a place you don’t just happen upon. Rather, you have to make a point of getting there. It’s a college town, population 8,079—including about 3,500 students of the state-funded Longwood University. Farmville couldn’t be more different from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, 170 miles to the north. On a drive south on Interstate 95, through the traffic of northern Virginia, past Richmond and onto local roads, row after row of identical suburban houses and strip malls full of Bed Bath & Beyonds finally give way to farms dotted with cows, hay bales, and faded red barns. Here, on the edge of the Black Belt, the South’s agricultural heartland named in part for its large black population, farmers set up roadside stands to sell just-picked vegetables, fresh eggs, handmade soap, and wildflowers straight from the fields.

At the Prince Edward County line, an enormous farm unfolds, its bright green fields and pair of grain silos reminders of the county’s agricultural base. In this county of twenty-three thousand, rural roads weave through 354 square miles of countryside, passing chicken coops and dairy farms. They wind around a patchwork quilt of tobacco fields and an assortment of historic homesteads, decrepit mobile homes, and tidy brick ranchers.