The Stories
They Left Behind
STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION
“A personal history is an account of the past that seeks to explain how and why events transpired as they actually did. History is so much more than a chronological listing of names, dates, and places. It is a story about how the past came to be and how, ultimately, it gave birth to the present.”
— Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By
Virginia: The Wounded Heart
Until 1865, Virginia had been the jewel of the Confederacy—home to its capital, its generals, its pride—and so her fall was the most dramatic. Richmond lay in ruins, and the fields were stripped bare. To walk her roads was to walk among ghosts.
Yet humiliation quickly hardened into something else: myth. Virginians began spinning their loss into romantic legend, casting Lee as a saint, the Confederacy as a noble cause betrayed rather than defeated. This was the birthplace of the “Lost Cause”—a veil of honor pulled over the graves, yet the veil itself was woven with violence. Freedmen who sought dignity and independence were met with lashes or a noose, as if every act of brutality was a way to rewrite the outcome of the war. In Virginia, memory itself was sharpened into a blade, and nostalgia became a weapon.
Part I:
The Great Dismal Swamp
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Flat Rock, Virginia, 1860;
Striking detail: His father enlisted in the Confederacy, fought in one battle, and died of pneumonia when George was three.
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Born in Norfolk, Virgina, 1866
Striking detail: she was orphaned at a young age and sold into servanthood; her father may have killed all his wives.
North Carolina: The Bitter Quiet
In North Carolina, the aftermath felt like a silence too sharp to bear. The state had been torn down the middle—mountain men loyal to the Union, planters clinging to the Confederacy—and the war only deepened the cracks. When peace was declared, neighbors did not embrace the end of conflict. They turned inward, eyes wary, hearts bitter.
The violence here was less spectacle and more shadow. Freedmen who tried to practice their newfound right to vote found themselves beaten back into the dark holes of society’s order. Schools for Black children were burned before their lessons could begin. The Ku Klux Klan slunk into being, not yet fully unmasked but already whispering through night rides and burning crosses. North Carolina lived in the hush of constant threat, as if the soil itself was holding its breath.
Tennessee: The Powder Keg
Tennessee was fire where Virginia mourned and North Carolina suppressed. Divided loyalties had made her a battleground long before Appomattox: Unionists in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, Confederates in the west, and guerrillas who only trusted their own guns. When the war ended, those divisions did not heal—they ignited into something bigger.
From Pulaski in 1866 came the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, born of bitterness and fed by fear. What began as a brotherhood of resentment swelled into a reign of terror and relentless aggression. Black men were shot in their fields for daring to carve out a life as an equal citizen; white teachers were flogged for instructing freed children; and women lived with the knowledge that nightfall could bring masked riders pounding at their doors. In Tennessee, violence did not recede with the war. It became the avenue of disillusionment and terror that would endure into the next century.
Part II:
The Smoky Mountains
Toward a New Reckoning
To reckon is to hold two truths at once: the beauty and the brutality, the resilience and the ruin.
The South gave us the blooms of magnolias and dogwoods, hymns sung in one-room churches, and porches where neighbors became kin. But it also gave us silence, shame, and blood, all in the name of pride. To honor one without the other is to tell only half the story.
My own story is stitched with loss — a mother, a brother, a father gone in seven years’ time. Grief alone became the river that carried me back to the past, searching for the roots of sorrow in the lives of my ancestors. In their choices, wounds, and endurance, I found reflections of my own.
Reckoning does not mean despair. It means refusing to look away. It means seeing how pride, violence, and silence have shaped us — but also how music, faith, and community carried us through.
The reckoning I imagine is not about condemnation alone. It is about clarity. It is about stepping out of the shadows we inherit and into the possibility of light. If we can name both the violence and the beauty, perhaps we can choose to build a future less captive to pride, less bound by silence, and less divided by illusions of honor.
Dogwoods still bloom, while storms still break and pass. And in their wake, we are left with the task of tending the soil — together, with honesty and grace.