Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Faust grew up on a farm near the Blue Ridge Mountains, a mile and a half from Millwood, Virginia, population 200, most of whom were Black and lived in homes without running water. The white families of Faust’s childhood friends lived on other surrounding farms. All of the Black people that Faust knew worked for white people as laborers or domestics. Jim Crow laws (See: Index of Terms) governed Virginia, but unlike the Deep South, there weren’t “colored” signs in public places; “people just knew […] or learned” (88) to abide by the rules of segregation.

As a child, Faust took segregation for granted. Even in her own home, their Black workers used the back door and a separate bathroom, and it never occurred to her to question the practice. Virginia was a state full of “contradictions,” home to “the architects of American freedom and nationhood” (89) but also the birthplace of American enslavement and the capital of the Confederacy. Faust never saw racially-motivated violence; instead, white people often behaved with “benevolent paternalistic concern” which “had endeavored to cloak the injustices of southern race relations for generations” (92). Her father usually adopted this