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Mary Alston had been thinking. This was the first sign for Mama that there existed a world on yonder side of the color line, where white eyes and ears could not readily penetrate and where black people did not necessarily accept white valuations of moral worth.
    From the early days of slavery, in fact, African Americans had forged a Christian faith that affirmed their own humanity and sometimes called their masters to judgment: “Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t a-goin’ there,” the unknown poets of the spirituals observed. This was the faith that rejected what Dr. King called the “thingification” of human beings, and that he evoked for the world when my mother became Mary Alston’s age. By that time, Mama would be ready to hear and understand it.
    I never knew my mother’s father, Charles Buie, who died when I was an infant. But I grew up knowing that Grandmother Jessie was a woman of vast and immeasurable wealth. Stacked in her basement, for example, stood eight or ten wooden crates of small, seven-ounce Coca-Cola bottles and taller, light-green Frescas. To a small boy, these seemed like riches that Arab oil sheikhs and European monarchs could only envy.
    When I was seven or eight, I saw Mr. Dunlap sweating in the sun amid Jessie’s rosebushes, and I carried him one of the Coca-Colas and a glass of ice. “You’re just like your grandfather,” he said, smiling at me. And then his face became grave. “I want you to know something, son,” he told me. “Back during the Depression, when nobody had any money, Mr. Buie kept me working at the mill when he didn’t have anything for me to do. They weren’t selling any cloth, but he would have me out there planting flowers or working over here in Miz Buie’s garden so my children would have something to eat.” As he sipped his Coca-Cola, Mr. Dunlap’s eyes began to water. “Your granddaddy put shoes on my children’s feet, and they wouldn’t have had any to wear to school if he hadn’t done it.” Mr. Dunlap pulled out his handkerchief, swabbed his eyes, and handed me the empty glass. “You ought to be proud of your granddaddy, son.”
    The Buies bought truckloads of shoes, “seconds,” at cut-rate prices and gave them away. Even after my grandfather died, Jessie Buie kept the trunk of her car filled with shoes and clothes, which she handed out to poor families, most of them black. Many years later, when I was cleaning out her garage so that we could move Jessie to a nursing home, I found an enormous pile of what once had been shoes. There must have been several hundred pairs of them, their laces knotted together, but they were molded and matted into a thick mulch, rotting into their original elements, and I had to toss them into the dumpster with a pitchfork. But “Miz Buie,” teetering around behind me, her mind wandering back through nine decades, kept repeating, “I do wish we could find some nice colored people who might like to have those shoes.”
    Their ethos of paternalism gave my grandparents a sense of doing what was good and right, a feeling far more luxurious than the crisp, clean sheets, “angel biscuits,” and tomato-asparagus aspic that Betty Clegg made for them. I have never doubted the sincerity of Joe Dunlap’s gratitude to my grandfather, and I am proud of the Buies, and of course I love them. But the hierarchy of white supremacy, at its heart, was as rotten as that pile of old shoes, and the generations that follow will be many years cleaning it up.
    One way my grandmother Jessie instructed me in the obligations and rewards of racial paternalism was through her favorite story about the Civil War. Many times over the years she told me that our family had always treated their slaves like family members. In fact, she always said, our slaves had loved us so much that they’d hidden the family silver from