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 tone with his Black employees, but coming from New England, Faust’s mother was always uncomfortable around Black people.

The “patterns of racial separation and white supremacy” were not the only “manifestations of the past” (98) in Faust’s childhood. She also grew up with Confederate monuments and memorials and reenacted famous battles with her brothers. The siblings fought over who got to be General Robert E. Lee, and for years, Faust had no idea he had lost the war. Lee was regarded as a hero in an idealized portrayal of the past that “obscured and all but erased” the Civil War’s “emancipationist purposes” (100). This point of view represented a larger romanticization of the old South, depicting enslavement as “not a system of cruelty and exploitation that stole millions of Black lives,” but rather a system of “gracious plantations peopled with benevolent masters and docile, devoted, and grateful slaves” (100). The white adults that Faust grew up with were convinced “that Black people both accepted and deserved their assigned, separate, and subordinated place” (100-1).

However, fighting the Nazis in World War II made it more difficult to ignore racial inequalities in the United States. Black Americans fighting in the war advocated for a “Double V” victory—victory in the war abroad, and victory in the fight against discrimination at home. The start of the civil rights movement with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was “the almost immediate outcome of the war” (102).

In 1957, Faust’s grandmother installed a plaque commemorating the enslaved people buried in her family’s cemetery. In some cemeteries, demand for space caused white graves to spill into the space where enslaved people were buried, resulting in the erasure of these graves. Perhaps the plaque was a well-intentioned effort to prevent the dead from being forgotten, but the timing of the plaque’s erection in 1957 perplexes Faust, and its wording seemed to reaffirm hierarchies of race. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, ordering public schools to integrate. This order was met with much resistance and even violence. In Virginia, the governor’s election had become “a referendum on race” to defend “the morality and legitimacy” of racial discrimination (104-5). Within this context, Faust argues that her grandmother’s plaque, which calls enslaved people “faithful and devoted […] servants” (103), represented an effort “to reassure a society under siege that it was not just right but righteous” (105).

In elementary school, Faust was shocked to learn it was against the law for Black children and white children to go to school together. Upset and angered, Faust decided to write a letter to the president. She began by announcing she was nine years old, white, and had “many feelings about segregation” (109). Faust argued that segregation was “unchristian” and “unfair,” urging the president to “please try and have schools and other things accept colored people” (112). As a girl growing up in a patriarchal society, Faust was obsessed with fairness and angry about the injustices she faced as a girl. She wonders if her “finely honed sense of personal injustice [translated] into an empathy for injustices done to others” (112).

Faust’s “epiphany” opened her eyes to the “silence and denial […] obscuring the realities of [her] world” (113). She refused to quietly accept the many contradictions she began to see around her. She quotes civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis, who spoke of “necessary trouble”: Faust feels that her rebellious nature was a kind of necessary trouble that allowed her “to survive amid the stifling silences that threatened to define [her] life” (113).