The plantation still sits there on the banks of the river.  It’s still farmed, farmed by some who are descendants of its former slaves.  The buildings, some of them at least, are still solid and can withstand the occasional hurricane that maintains enough strength to blow across the width of the coastal plain.

I co-teach two of my classes at the high school with Gordon.  He has 25 years of teaching experience behind him, in both special education and general ed.  I have one and a half years of teaching surrounding me.  He’s a native of this rural county – the epitome of the prodigal native who ran wild and, after awhile, ran back.  I was raised in sprawling urbanity and then later on a small coastal island – quiet but always trembling with passion.  He attended the hated rival of my alma mater – years before my parents married.  He is short, but not quite as short as me (5’8”) with a stocky build and wide, whitened eyes and whitening hair.  He is more than old enough to be my father – I am 25.  He plays the guitar in church, and in churches across the region, on any day they’ll have him – devout and convicted in his Christianity.  I am a non-believer who reads Russell on Sundays.

He is black.  I am white. 

We spend most of our time circling one another, tossing out revised versions of one another’s statements.  I philosophize, he breaks it down.  In issues of discipline I jokingly bite with sarcasm and he brings out the honed instrument of shame.

He had a heart transplant two years ago and sometimes cannot help but sit down because of the strain teaching puts on him.  I flutter around the classroom like a demented butterfly, bumping into body parts, walls, bookbags, desks and drama.

They are sophomores and they watch us.  They are fortunate to have him and I hope that they know it.  We are teaching “The Joy Luck Club” and we are talking about names.  The players are Student A, Student B, Mr. J (me) and Mr. C (Gordon).

Student A: “Mr. J., Smith isn’t an African name is it?”

Me: “No, for some people it means that at some point in their family’s history, someone was a blacksmith.”

Gordon: “You know, guys, my last name actually belonged to a slave owner.”

Student B: “Why do you have it, then?”

Gordon: “Well, slave owners usually gave their last names to their slaves to identify them easily.”

Student A: “Mr. C., you were a slave?”

Gordon: “No, I wasn’t, but my ancestors were.”

Student B: “I’m glad mine weren’t.”

Gordon: “But tell me your last name.”

Student B: (hesitating) “Bennett.”

Gordon: “Did you know that there’s a place called Bennett Plantation not too far from here, on the river?”

Student B: “You mean…”

Gordon: “Did you notice that there are a whole lot of Smiths, Bennetts and Ingrams in this county – black and white?  That’s because of slavery; some of those white folks’ ancestors might have owned some of your ancestors as slaves.”

Student A: “What?  That’s racist!  Mr. J., did your family own slaves?”

Me: “Yes, on both my mother’s and father’s side of the family.”

(Silence descends upon the 85% African-American classroom).

Gordon: “And that’s all right.  It’s nobody’s fault now.  Mr. J and I are both in here with you guys, and that’s saying something.”

Student B: “Yeah, that’s all right Mr. J., you cool.”

The legacy floats around the community, silently hanging over Confederate statues in front of the county courthouse and swirling around the streets where black and white share surnames. 

A county of slaves and slave owners turned into a county of landholders and sharecroppers turned into a county of millworkers turned into a county collapsed into abject poverty.  The great equalizer of rural southern depression hangs tight to the walls of my classroom, where a forty-year-old radiator clangs and bangs and spews out steam.

A sixteen-year-old girl, a student in my 3^rd period, is having a Caesarean section tomorrow at 5 p.m.

Other girls are hanging on that edge, and other boys are both afraid and titillated to push someone over it.

“We’re stupid, we’re gossips, that’s just how black people are, we black and we on crack, Mr. J. is you a Christian?  ObamaObamaObama!  That’s racist.  NiggaNiggaNiggaNigga.”

It will play in my head on the way home today, and tomorrow, over the weekend and through the rest of the year and on until the next. 

The exterior of the small duplex where I live with my wife is brick-red-brick, the walls inside are white and comfortable; the town where I live is 45-minutes from here on a thin gray street.  More Confederate markers, statues, memorials but less flags.

My days here are shaped in little patterns of mulatto and blue, orange, black, brown, yellow, it smells like colors sometimes.

I love them and I love you Gordon, though in my youth I will not say it except in smaller ways.  The Legacy is where I live, let’s go ahead and capitalize it, here on this road in this town – but for clarification, whatever I may mean by here – it’s not just a simple dichotomy.