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first time Jessie set foot in the textile mill, she wore a plumed hat and handed out free ham biscuits.
    Black soldiers who stopped in at the Biscoe Sandwich Shop, of course, bought their food to go and ate it standing outside, while whites could enjoy the red-checked tablecloths and comfortable chairs inside. My uncle Bubba, thinking back and asking for a fair-minded understanding of Grandmother Buie’s segregationist ways, called his mother “a woman of her time and place,” but Jessie both defied and defined her time and place. Though she refused the place that society had set for her, the presumptions of white paternalism seemed as natural to her as segregation itself. She clearly did not consider any black person in the world to be her social equal, but she took seriously her responsibility to “those less fortunate than ourselves.”
    Paternalism was like a dance whose steps required my grandmother to provide charity to black people, as long as they followed the prescribed routine—that is, coming to the back door, hat in hand; accepting whatever largesse was offered; furnishing effusive expressions of gratitude; and at least pretending to accept their subordinate position in the social hierarchy. For white people, paternalism provided a self-congratulatory sense of generosity and superiority; for blacks, it supplied dribs and drabs of material sustenance—shoes and books and hand-me-down clothes for their children. Paternalism strengthened the system of white supremacy by softening its sharper edges and covering its patent injustices with a patina of friendship. Accepting black expressions of gratitude at face value, whites congratulated themselves on their friendly relations with “their” Negroes. But paternalism rendered the candor that real friendships require virtually impossible. Grandmother Jessie did not invent or even endorse paternalism. When she and Mr. Buie moved into the big white house that the mill gave them, she merely assumed its privileges and rituals.
    It was more a matter of privilege than responsibility that Grandmother Jessie employed five local blacks at her house. Betty Clegg cooked everyday meals, polished the silver, and prepared the tables for fancy dinners when Mr. Brooks, who owned the mill, came to visit or when “Miz Buie” held a family wedding or hosted Thanksgiving dinner. Mary Alston scrubbed the family’s clothes, first on a tin washboard and later in the electric tub with its hand-cranked, roller-style wringing attachment. Ida Jowers dissolved gluey starch in water and sprinkled Mr. Buie’s shirts with it before the iron hissed over the cotton cloth, creating a wonderful pasty smell. Charlie Ledbetter mowed the grass, scrubbed and waxed the wide porches, washed Mr. Buie’s Lincoln Continental, and trimmed the ivy that lined Mrs. Buie’s brick walkways. Joe Dunlap, who also worked as a handyman at the mill, tended my grandmother’s rose garden.
    One day when my mother was perhaps twelve or thirteen, she was in the laundry room helping Mary Alston, the middle-aged black woman who came every Monday to wash the family’s clothes by hand. As young Martha sorted the clothing into piles, the white girl idly sang, “When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there,” from a familiar hymn. Her hands plunged deep into a galvanized tin tub filled with hot, soapy water, Mary Alston said in a low voice, “Do you really think you will be?”
    The white girl who would grow up to be my mother looked at Mrs. Alston in surprise, thinking she must be joking. “It just kind of shocked me,” Mama explained to me many years later. “I didn’t know what to say.” There was no sign of mirth in Mrs. Alston’s dark face; she had asked a serious question, and she would neither back off nor discuss it further. The tremor was sufficient that Mama always remembered the moment and wondered exactly what