remembered from a couple of summer visits we’d made with my parents when I was a kid. I remembered the thick heat of the place and the heavy green drape of Spanish moss on the live oaks, the cypress trees rising from the swamps and the old men fishing on the muddy creeks. There were insects in Georgetown, alarming numbers of them, buzzing and whirring in the evening air like little helicopters.
We stayed with my great-uncle Thomas during our visits, another sibling of Dandy’s. He was a genial high school principal who’d take me over to his school and let me sit at his desk, who graciously bought me a tub of peanut butter when I turned my nose up at the enormous breakfasts of bacon, biscuits, and yellow grits that Aunt Dot, his wife, served every morning. I both loved and hated being in the South, for the simple reason that it was so different from what I knew. On the roads outside town, we’d drive past the gateways to what were once slave plantations, though they were enough of a fact of life that nobody ever bothered to remark on them. Down a lonely dirt road deep in the woods, we ate venison in a falling-down country shack belonging to some more distant cousins. One of them took Craig out back and showed him how to shoot a gun. Late at night, back at Uncle Thomas’s house, both of us had a hard time sleeping, given the deep silence, which was punctuated only by cicadas throbbing in the trees.
The hum of those insects and the twisting limbs of the live oaks stayed with us long after we’d gone north again, beating in us almost like a second heart. Even as a kid, I understood innately that the South was knit into me, part of my heritage that was meaningful enough for my father to make return visits to see his people there. It was powerful enough that Dandy wanted to move back to Georgetown, even though as a young man he’d needed to escape it. When he did return, it wasn’t to some idyllic little river cottage with a white fence and tidy backyard but rather (as I saw when Craig and I made a trip to visit) a bland, cookie-cutter home near a teeming strip mall.
The South wasn’t paradise, but it meant something to us. There was a push and pull to our history, a deep familiarity that sat atop a deeper and uglier legacy. Many of the people I knew in Chicago—the kids I’d gone to Bryn Mawr with, many of my friends at Whitney Young—knew something similar, though it was not explicitly discussed. Kids simply went “down south” every summer—shipped out sometimes for the whole season to run around with their second cousins back in Georgia, or Louisiana, or Mississippi. It seems likely that they’d had grandparents or other relatives who’d joined the Great Migration north, just as Dandy had from South Carolina, and Southside’s mother had from Alabama. Somewhere in the background was another more-than-decent likelihood—that they, like me, were descended from slaves.
The same was true for many of my friends at Princeton, but I was also coming to understand that there were other versions of being black in America. I was meeting kids from East Coast cities whose roots were Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican. Czerny’s relatives came from Haiti. One of my good friends, David Maynard, had been born into a wealthy Bahamian family. And there was Suzanne, with her Nigerian birth certificate and her collection of beloved aunties in Jamaica. We were all different, our lineages half buried or maybe just half forgotten. We didn’t talk about our ancestry. Why would we? We were young, focused only on the future—though of course we knew nothing of what lay ahead.
Once or twice a year, Aunt Sis invited me and Craig to dinner at her house on the other side of Princeton. She piled our plates with succulent fatty ribs and steaming collard greens and passed around a basket with neatly cut squares of corn bread, which we slathered with butter. She refilled our glasses with impossibly sweet tea and urged us to go for seconds and then thirds. As I remember it, we never discussed anything of significance with Aunt Sis. It was an hour or so of polite, go-nowhere small talk, accompanied by a hot, hearty South Carolina meal, which we shoveled in appreciatively,