![]() ![]() On trips further south, to Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida itself, I started to ask people in their 70s and older – not black people, but white people – what it was like to grow up in the era of segregation. His parents are immigrants from Pakistan. ![]() ![]() A neighbour who lives in one of the older houses in the area told me that the deeds for his house contain a clause forbidding its sale to non-whites. Following Brown v Board of Education in 1954, Virginia successfully opposed desegregating schools for decades. Yet in Virginia, at the time of my birth, my parents (one white, one black) would have been forbidden to marry. Virginia wasn’t Alabama, wasn’t Florida – the setting for Whitehead’s novel. I didn’t really worry, because to me Virginia didn’t seem particularly southerly. When I first came to live in Virginia four years ago, friends made jokes, with raised eyebrows, about how we were moving “to the South”. I n the final pages of Colson Whitehead’s forceful and tightly wrought novel, Millie, new partner to the main character, recalls: “It was hard to remember sometimes how bad it used to be – bending to a colored fountain when she visited her family in Virginia, the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down – and then it all returned in a rush, set off by tiny things, like standing on a corner trying to hail a cab … by the big things, a drive through a blighted neighborhood snuffed out by that same immense exertion, or another boy shot dead by a cop.” ![]()
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