Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South

On Christmas Eve 1984, McLaurin is back in Wade. McLaurin is now a professor of history living in Wilmington, North Carolina, and has two daughters. Things have changed. His grandfather and his grandmother Ma Ma are dead, and his father sold the store. His father clings to rural traditions, driving a huge new truck and drinking bourbon from paper cups. Every winter, Daddy’s friend Earl kills hogs for him. Daddy has no use for the lard due to his cholesterol. His father suggests they drive to Dora Lou’s to bring her some lard. His gift to Dora Lou replicates the paternalistic approach to race relations of McLaurin’s youth. McLaurin realizes that his father remains part of the Wade of the past. This is the Wade that McLaurin has left behind. The separate pasts of him and his father become clear as they drive through the town.

McLaurin lives and works in Wilmington, North Carolina, as a historian and university administrator. Wilmington is a port city with beautiful beaches, and McLaurin often visited as a child. Racial inequality and conflict shaped Wade and Wilmington.

McLaurin traces the historical connections between the two communities in the period between the end of

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