In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America’s most
respected historians of the South-and particularly its history of
slavery-turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the
halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to
segregation. Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his
childhood-in many respects a boy’s paradise, but one stained by
Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow.
Through entertainments and ""educational"" books that belittled
African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own
family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best,
was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, brutally
intolerant. The fear that southern culture, and the ""hallowed
white male brotherhood,"" could come undone through the slightest
flexibility in the color line gave the Jim Crow mindset its
distinctly unyielding quality. Dew recalls his father, in most
regards a decent man, becoming livid over a black tradesman daring
to use the front, and not the back, door. The second half of the
book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of
Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery’s most passionate apologists,
went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the
South and its deeply conflicted history. The centerpiece of Dew’s
story is his sobering discovery of a price circular from 1860-an
itemized list of humans up for sale. Contemplating this document
becomes Dew’s first step in an exploration of antebellum
Richmond’s slave trade that investigates the terrible-but, to its
white participants, unremarkable-inhumanity inherent in the
institution. Dew’s wish with this book is to show how the South
of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of
honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois
Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of
her life to serving his family: ""Charles, why do the grown-ups put
so much hate in the children?"
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