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“I really liked those kids,” he recalled. They liked him, too, and some of his prejudices began to fade away. He was realizing that blacks weren’t “slow thinking,” as he had been taught.

Mom took a job teaching swimming, physical education, and drama at Janie Porter Barrett School for Girls, a school founded to rehabilitate black females who had been incarcerated. School officials called her their “token WASP,” as she was one of only two white employees. She quit in April 1973 when, five months pregnant with me, a student pushed her down.

Dad graduated from dental school and joined the US Army as a dentist. He was assigned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and I was born weeks after they arrived. There he worked with a gifted dentist who happened to be black. It finally occurred to Dad that race and intelligence were not connected.

His views had been based on his limited exposure to blacks and on beliefs passed down to him by his grandmother and the country people he grew up around. But in Kentucky, working side by side with a capable black dentist, he admitted to himself that he had been wrong.

AS DAD’S TWO-YEAR STINT WITH the military wrapped up, he and Mom considered where they should settle down. When he had left home for college, he couldn’t get out of Farmville fast enough. But returning to his hometown to start a business and raise a family made sense. Granny Vale was getting older and feebler—she was in her seventies—and none of her children lived in town. Dad wanted to be able to help her after all she had sacrificed to take care of him and his brothers. Mom liked the idea of being near her parents, and Mimi and Papa still lived in the brick house where Mom had grown up. It also made sense for Dad to start a dentistry practice in a town where he already knew a number of people.

When they thought about what they wanted in a town, Farmville had the qualities they were looking for. They liked how quiet the town was. They liked that people were friendly, that they waved when you passed on the street, that they could leave the backdoor unlocked. They knew the whole community would be keeping an eye on their children as we grew up. My parents chose to return to Farmville because it was what they knew. To them, it didn’t represent segregation—it represented family.

In 1975, soon after the birth of my brother Chaz, they bought a rambling Sears, Roebuck and Company–designed craftsman home a block from the abandoned Farmville High School. Our family quickly grew into the house. Three years later, the twins were born.

I went from toddler to child, sitting out long summer rainstorms on the front porch swing, watching the magnolias and dogwoods bloom. I waved at passing neighbors, all of them white. I played hopscotch on the sidewalk out front. I chased fireflies in my nightgown and captured bumblebees in glass jars. My brothers and I ran through the neighbor’s yards, sledded down the hill behind the school, and rode bikes to an ice cream shop.

The house was our haven. In the summer, we spent all day in the pool my parents had installed. Mom whipped up cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches on white bread and trimmed off the crusts, and she served bowls of popcorn with glasses of bright red Kool-Aid. When Dad got home from work, he threw ball after ball to us as we jumped off the diving board, trying to catch one midair. We played dodge Frisbee and basketball in the backyard, then jumped in the pool again.

Helen Henson, our elderly neighbor, hosted her granddaughter from California every summer, and I peppered the girl with questions when she came over to swim. I grew up healthy and happy. And desperate for information about life outside my town.

AS MY FIFTH BIRTHDAY APPROACHED in 1978, my parents considered where to send me to school. I didn’t get a spot at J. P. Wynne Campus School, a publicly funded laboratory school that had been established on the Longwood campus for the children of faculty and staff. That left my parents with two options: the public schools or Prince Edward Academy. Their alma mater was still open and still all-white, nearly twenty years after its founding. Prince Edward County Public Schools were still mostly black, though the number of white students was creeping up and would reach 23 percent by 1980. Many liberal newcomers to town, professors at Longwood and Hampden-Sydney colleges, enthusiastically supported public education and encouraged their friends to do so as well.

Mom and Dad talked with other parents of young children, mainly people they’d grown up with, most of whom sent their kids to the academy. They toured the public schools, and they weren’t sold. When I asked Dad about it years later, he told me, “It just didn’t look like a dynamic, well-functioning environment.”

They debated their options. It wasn’t just me they were making a decision about, but also my three younger brothers. They believed Prince Edward Academy was academically superior, in part because a majority of students—about 80 percent by then—attended college after graduation. They had heard reports of bullying and violence in the public schools, and they worried about my safety. The rumors about rapes in the bathrooms scared my mother, even though the reports were unsubstantiated. Besides, my parents liked the discipline the private school offered, and they figured the odds of us playing sports were higher there. Tuition was an expensive proposition for a family with four children. Mom and Dad disliked the school’s segregation history, but it was their alma mater. My grandfather still sat on the board of directors.

They struggled for weeks with the decision until my father came home from work one evening and asked my mother where she would send me if money was no object. Without hesitation, she told him she wanted me to attend Prince Edward Academy. She believed it would be best for us.

“I tried very hard to convince myself that the public schools would be fine, but I just couldn’t send you there,” Mom told me.

With their decision made, my mother and father followed in the footsteps of her parents and his grandmother, enrolling us in a school that represented segregation to the nation. “Maybe we can make some changes at the academy,” they told themselves.

Prince Edward Academy became central to our lives, a second home. When I was in middle school, my mom, with a fresh master’s degree, was appointed the school’s guidance counselor, a position she would hold for twenty-five years.

The academy was a cocoon, protecting and sheltering us. For thirteen years, I moved through the grades with the same group of white friends—save the occasional addition of a student new to town whom my classmates and I viewed in wide-eyed amazement. Some of the teachers had taught my mom or dad when they were students, including the gym teacher who called me by my mother’s maiden name. My parents knew not only the teachers and administrators but also my classmates’ parents, many of whom had been their classmates.

On paper, I was well rounded, a student athlete and a leader. And yet, I was rarely exposed to people who were different from me. For most of my time at the academy, all the students were white, and so were the teachers and administrators.

CHANGE WAS AFOOT. IN 1978, my first year at the academy, the Internal Revenue Service pulled the school’s tax-exempt status for its failure to desegregate. When I was a child, my mom told me there were no rules forbidding black children from attending Prince Edward Academy—a line Robert Redd repeated to me more than twenty years later. No black children had applied to attend, and Mom understood why: without any black students, it was difficult for the academy to attract them.

My grandfather still wasn’t ready for the school to integrate. When he started thinking about retiring from the private school board, he asked my father if he was interested in replacing him. Years earlier, my dad and another coach had invited a black boy to join the baseball team they were coaching on the Prince Edward Academy fields—the first instance of a black child participating in any formal activities on the campus, my dad believed. He told my grandfather he thought it was time for the school to integrate, too, and that he would quietly push for it. “I don’t think I can recommend you,” Papa responded.

He asked my dad why he supported integration. Nearly half of my dad’s dental patients were black, and he thought admitting black students to the academy was the right thing to do. But he told Papa he also believed that the school would not survive without making the change. My grandfather didn’t react. Dad got a seat on the board, and he believed Papa had nominated him. They never discussed it again, and Papa stayed on the board a few more years.

The school’s leaders were beginning to realize that without tax-deductible contributions, the academy could not survive. Redd accepted that the school would have to change its admission policy, and he worked for years to persuade key board members that it was time to do so. He had secured every vote except one—an unnamed board member who was steadfast in his opposition. Redd asked the board member to accompany him to the elementary school. Redd walked into a classroom and asked the board member to tell the students that he was the reason they would no longer be able to attend their school. The board member cussed at Redd, but finally agreed to the policy change.

In 1984, rather than watch the school they had worked diligently to build close its doors, the board members adopted a new admissions policy. The next year, the IRS restored the tax-exempt status the school had lost seven years earlier. Prince Edward Academy began working to actively recruit black students, publishing its new admission policy in advertisements in the Farmville Herald. “Prince Edward Academy admits students of any race, color and national ethnic origin,” its brochures read. The school also appointed a black board member and established a scholarship fund for minority students.

Some county residents were critical of the decision, and they suggested that the academy was desegregating only to keep its tax-exempt status, which likely was the reason some board members agreed to the change. Redd is careful in his description of what happened. The school did not integrate, he tells me, correcting my word choice. Rather, it changed its admission policy.

During my eighth-grade year, five black students attended the academy. Given the school’s twenty-seven-year history of segregation and the resistance many people had to integration, the reaction was surprisingly muted. White parents did not pull their children out, and black parents reported that their children were making friends. “There are no problems,” Jerry West, the father of two black children attending the school, said.

When a Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter interviewed my father, who was serving as the president of the PTA and as a member of the school’s board of directors, Dad said he was pleased that the school had accepted black students, calling the change “inevitable.” Many younger parents of academy students had supported desegregation, he said. He told me later that he had not been comfortable sending me to the public schools, but he wasn’t in favor of segregation, either. “I didn’t want my kids to go to a racially separate school,” Dad told the newspaper. “They are missing a true reflection of the cultural composition of this community.”

Although Dad acknowledged that the admission of five black students did not constitute “a significant change,” given that nearly half of the county’s population was black, he predicted that more black students would matriculate. “I think, eventually, the school will reflect a better cross section of our local society,” he told the paper.

But soon a new wrinkle would arise. A $676,000 trust left to the school in 1968 by a tobacco plant manager from Lynchburg had been subject to a provision in his will that all the students be white. After the academy admitted black students, the trust became the subject of a lawsuit, which the school lost when the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” my mom told the Richmond Times-Dispatch when the ruling was handed down in 1990. “We have worked so hard to turn around history. We have overcome the past, but the government is penalizing us for that.”

As the case was winding through the courts, a black teenager joined my class. In her role as guidance counselor, Mom worked to help diversify the school, encouraging black students to enroll and providing support when they arrived. Over the course of her career, she helped organize a diversity forum to introduce students to other cultures and religions and supervised a black intern who founded a support group for students of color. As an administrator, she quickly dealt with racial slurs, calling offending students into her office and explaining why the words were hurtful and would not be tolerated.

She urged me to be friendly to my new classmate and help him feel welcome. I made a point of saying hello but I felt awkward and rarely talked with him. In junior English class, where we spent days discussing The Scarlet Letter, I found myself staring at his sad, round face, framed with black glasses. I wondered what it was like to be one of few black students on campus. He seemed unhappy, and I could understand why.

In 1991, he walked across the stage at Longwood’s Jarman Hall with our class. It was the same stage where, in the 1950s, the county’s white residents had discussed their plans to open a private academy. Thirty-two years after the school was founded to keep blacks and whites from attending school together, my classmate became the second black graduate of Prince Edward Academy.

SOON AFTER I LEFT FOR college, Prince Edward Academy’s officials faced a pressing reality: the school was in danger of closing. The money that for years had flowed in from segregationists around the South had dried up, and the school had been denied the significant inheritance after admitting students of color. Plus, the academy had never charged enough tuition, and the administrators didn’t try especially hard to collect it, even though it accounted for most of the school’s operating budget. Prince Edward Academy was more than a million dollars in debt.

That’s when Robert Taylor, the chairman of the school’s board, thought of his old friend J. B. Fuqua, a successful seventy-three-year-old businessman who had grown up poor, raised by his grandparents on a Prince Edward tobacco farm. Now he was a multimillionaire living in Georgia. Fuqua hadn’t attended college but had educated himself in law and business by reading books he borrowed by mail from Duke University. He had served four terms in the Georgia legislature before founding Fuqua Industries Inc., a conglomerate of businesses that included movie theaters, radio stations, and oil distributors, some of which were on the New York Stock Exchange. Fuqua was also a philanthropist, donating more than $140 million in his lifetime, including $40 million to Duke University, which named its school of business for him.