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General Sherman’s Yankee marauders. When I got old enough to research the history myself, I discovered that we’d owned no slaves, no silver, and that General Sherman’s army hadn’t come within a hundred miles of the family homeplace. But I know in my heart that she believed this to be the unvarnished truth, and that it had come to her from people she loved and admired.
    In Oxford, white children often grew up with family stories about the antebellum South, like my grandmother’s gentle hand-me-down fiction, stories that portrayed slavery as a largely benign and sometimes even beneficial social order. “My mama told me that our slaves were just like family to us,” one local white woman recounted, “and that after the war they didn’t want to leave. And my father always said [slavery] was the first chance they got to experience anything like civilization or to learn anything.”
    African Americans in Granville County grew up with a set of slavery stories that reflected a wholly different view of what was civilized. Black people old enough to have heard tales of slavery from their grandparents told their own children and grandchildren stories about families being broken up and sold, black women used by white men as concubines, and slaves whipped mercilessly. Novella Allen, whose grandparents had been slaves, grew up hearing her grandfather recount how their master had announced his intention to sell their family. “His daddy and his mama was going to be sold from the Lawsons to the Thorpes,” she said. But her grandfather’s father had refused to accept the sale, and tried to thwart his master by mutilating himself with an axe. “His daddy went and cut his hand off,” she said, “because he didn’t want to be sold. Papa said that’s what he cut it off for, because he didn’t want to be sold from the people he had been with all his life. But they took his wife and child on anyway.”
    Annie Bell Cheatham, born in 1891, learned from her grandfather about his despair at being sold away from his mother as a boy and having his name forcibly changed to Cheatham, the name of his new owner. “That child crying, him looking back and wanting to go with his mama,” she recounted, “and the mama crying, too, but she couldn’t do nothing. Yeah, we have been through something in this world. Not just me and you,” she said, “but just think about the black folks—Lord, have mercy.” Even though he had been young, her grandfather never forgot the agony of losing his mother and his name, and repeated the story often when Annie Bell Cheatham was growing up. “He told us, he said, ‘We are not Cheathams, we ain’t no Cheathams.’ And then he would tell how they sold him and everything.”
    Judge Chavis, a local black man born in 1898, was raised on his grandmother’s stories about having her brothers sold away from her family. “My grandmother on my mama’s side,” Chavis recalled, “she said there were eight of them. Said she had seven brothers, you know. And they had a sale and they sold all seven of them to a man down east somewhere, bought all seven of them, but didn’t want the girl, and she never did see them no more.” Johnny Crews had been told as a youngster that his family name had been Mayhew and that they had lived in Wendell, North Carolina, but that the family had been separated and some of them sold to a white farmer named Crews in Granville County. “So colored people do not know what they is,” Crews said.
    But enslaved African American families in Granville County remembered who they were, and whose they were, through the distinctive Afro-Christian faith they adapted from the religion their masters sought to impose on them. To the South’s four million slaves, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “God was real. They knew Him. They had met Him personally in many a wild