IT WAS MY FRIEND CLARK WHO told me how my Southern grandfather had died. Clark, if you remember, was the one who had taken me spelunking beneath Christ Church. He was a bit of a self-styled rogue, a stoop-shouldered, hatchet-faced boy with a perpetual wild hair up his ass. He had a way of goading me into action, or at least into acquiescence, by muttering the same challenge every time: “Have you no spirit of adventure?” He said that before he drove our pickup into the surf at Carolina Beach and when he proposed a BB-gun fight between tents on an Explorer camping trip. Never mind that the pickup got stuck in the sand or that a BB got lodged in the cartilage of another boy’s ear and had to be dug out, with considerable effort, using the pointy end of a church key—Clark had a way of forgetting his fiascoes.

Clark idolized my father. His own father was a soft-spoken architect who worked in a converted brick water tower downtown, so my father’s constant bombast and engagement with everything and everybody must have been attractive to Clark. Both of us, I suppose, longed for what was conspicuously missing at home.

One day, as I often did after school, I walked through the woods to Clark’s house. When I asked him about a fresh scratch on the side of his face, he dismissed it manfully as nothing, then led me down to Nicotine Alley, his secret smoking place in the woods. There, lighting a Lucky and speaking in the mumbling tones of a B-movie hood, he told me he’d been in a fight with another kid, a kid whose name I didn’t recognize. Clark said he had been defending my father’s honor.

“About what?”

“He called him ‘the suicide’s son.’”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Because your granddaddy killed himself.”

I was dumbfounded. “How do you know that?”

Clark just shrugged. “Everybody knows that.”

Everybody did know that, including Mummie, who was on her Stauffer machine when I got home that afternoon. A Stauffer machine was a vinyl-covered bench that looked like a modern massage table, only lower, with a center part that moved from side to side at various speeds in the name of exercise. It was wildly comic to us kids, since Mummie looked like a horizontal hula girl when she used it.

I stopped at the door of her walk-in closet, not far from the head of the Stauffer machine, which seemed to be set at its highest speed. My mother was always svelte and beautiful, so I couldn’t imagine why she thought she needed it. In those days people often said she looked like Elizabeth Taylor.

I got to the point right away.

“Did Daddy’s daddy kill himself?”

“Oh, Teddy . . . you frightened me!”

“Sorry.”

She turned off the machine and sat up on the bench in her terry-cloth jumpsuit. “Who told you that?”

“Clark.”

“Well, that was very naughty of him.”

“He wasn’t being mean. He was defending Daddy. Is it true?”

She told me she didn’t know much about it herself. My father had spoken of it only once, just before they got married, and she had never raised the subject again, realizing it would be too painful for Daddy. It had happened at home, she said, at night, while Mimi and her other two children were in the house. He had used a shotgun. Daddy was nineteen and away at college, so an old family retainer had driven to Chapel Hill to break the news in person. “Your daddy done kilt hisself.”

Zebedee, I thought. That must have been Zebedee.

I had met Zebedee only once, when Daddy had suddenly taken a different route to a nursery to stop in front of a rundown house in the country. A skinny old black man had come out of the house, recognized Daddy, and thrown his hat to the ground in a gesture of amazement and joy. They clearly had not seen each other for years. Daddy got out of the car to talk to him, but I couldn’t hear their conversation. Afterward all he said to me was: “Zebedee used to work for us. Fine fella.”

I asked my mother if they knew why my grandfather had killed himself.

“Not really, but . . . it was during the Depression. And he had too many old ladies to deal with. That might have been part of it.”

“Old ladies?”

“Who lived at the house. Aunts and such. Mimi’s folks. It may have gotten too much for him. I don’t know, darling.”

I couldn’t imagine why he would kill himself because of old ladies. That was another family house I couldn’t begin to picture, since I had seen it only from the road. Daddy’s father had built it in the twenties, out at the far end of Clark Avenue, near Meredith College. It was a big brick place with square white columns set back among oak trees. I could see Daddy with Zebedee in a Model T, heading home to that house, wondering what remnants of his father were still on the walls, realizing he had just become the man of the house, whether he wanted it or not.

Mummie could see where my vivid little mind was going.

“And you mustn’t ask Daddy about it, darling. Do you understand? We don’t need the details.”

Maybe she didn’t, but I did. I was thinking about those overwrought condolence letters in Mimi’s dresser and the time I’d heard Mimi weeping in her sleep and her persistent delusion that the ladies of Christ Church were investigating her. Daddy wasn’t the only person who’d been left with a mess to clean up. And what about his brother and sister, who had still been young children at the time? Had they all heard the shot? Who got there first? Yes, a few details would have been useful, but Mummie was a lifelong list keeper of Things That Might Hurt Your Father, and she was very clear about this one. He shouldn’t have to think about this ever again.

At least Daddy’s rage finally had a reason. Twenty years after his father’s suicide he was still lashing out at the world, at goddamn integrationists and goddamn Communists and mild old Fred Fletcher with his subversive philosophy of tempus fugit. Tempus would never fugit for my father; it was stuck in 1933.

Unreconstructed.

And something else occurred to me once I’d learned about my grandfather: Daddy had a way of threatening to die whenever he argued with my mother or endured the pouting disapproval of his children. “Well, you don’t have to worry about me, anyway. I won’t be around much longer.” I had never taken this seriously, considering it little more than histrionics over his high cholesterol, whatever that was. Now I wondered if suicide might run in the family, if the gun he kept in the bedroom closet, right there on the shelf above the Stauffer machine, might do the job one day. Whenever Daddy blew up at dinner and stomped off to the bedroom in a blind fury, I would consciously count the seconds after he left, as if marking the distance between a flash of lightning and the terrible thunder that was certain to follow.

The truth about my grandfather made me look at my father through different eyes. He seemed more breakable to me now, more broken; but rather than question the values that had sprung from his trauma, I chose to embrace them completely. He needed me on his side, after all, and I needed him to love me, so I resolved to follow in his conservative footsteps. There was already a national movement afoot to take back the country from the Communist sympathizers, and I would be part of it.

I started reading my father’s copies of Human Events (where, at this very moment, Ann Coulter is writing love letters to Donald Trump) and studied the flyers that Daddy got in the mail from the John Birch Society. When, at sixteen, I was named student City Manager of Raleigh for a day, I told a reporter that young right-wingers like me would soon be of voting age, and that should serve as fair warning to liberal politicians who wanted big government and socialism. I had just read 1984 and Brave New World, so I thought that’s what we were fighting against, a totalitarian regime that wouldn’t stop at putting rats on your face. My father’s face was flushed with pride when he read my adolescent war cry in the morning paper.

“Attaboy, son! You tell those sonsabitches!”

Not long thereafter the old man gave me a book called Race and Reason: A Yankee View. It was written by someone named Carleton Putnam, a businessman who eventually ran Delta Air Lines, and who was, in fact, a Yankee—a smart one, to boot, according to my father, since he went to Princeton and Columbia, and was an aristocrat, and wasn’t afraid to speak the goddamn truth. This made him a perfect last-ditch voice for the cause of segregation. Putnam had studied the skulls of whites and Negroes and come to the conclusion that Negroes needed another five hundred billion years of evolution before they could breed with the whites without damaging bloodlines. This timetable served everyone, he argued, black and white alike, since it let the races evolve at their own rate and achieve their highest biological destinies.

Or something.

My father loved Race and Reason. It was his go-to political tract on the subject of race, his Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It didn’t mince words, he said, but it was written in such a calm scholarly voice that it sounded, well, reasonable—just as the title implied. It wasn’t racist to make a case for segregation, just reasonable.

Daddy’s own thoughts on racial mixing tended to run to the practical side:

“Don’t worry, son. If you ever knock up a little nigger gal, we can send her to Puerto Rico for the operation.”

It seems to me now that this was his feeble effort at wishful thinking. I’m pretty sure Daddy already knew that I would not be knocking up anyone in the next five hundred billion years, but he didn’t want discrimination to stand in the way of my manly fulfillment. Poontang was different, he said. Poontang was fine.

THERE WERE STILL plenty of white people in Raleigh who thought (and talked) the way my father did, but their ranks had been diminishing since the mid-fifties, when the Supreme Court had ruled for the desegregation of public schools. It was easier for me to accept my father’s bigotry as gospel because I had never known a black person beyond our maid Camilla, a thin, soft-spoken spinster with whom I watched American Bandstand every afternoon after school. She insisted on coming in the back door, calling herself “an old-fashioned colored lady.” Sometimes, when we dropped off our old clothes at Camilla’s house, I saw her brother Lovelace, who worked as a porter for the Seaboard Railroad. Beyond them, not one black person. Not in the Boy Scouts or my private grade school or either of my public high schools, junior or senior. Black folks were almost as invisible to me as queers were to everyone else in the South, including other queers. In 2008, when I was invited back to Broughton High as a guest of the Gay-Straight Alliance, an African-American girl was astonished to learn that there had been no kids of her color in the school when I was there forty-five years earlier. No more astonished than I, certainly, that LGBT kids were now walking the hallways of Broughton in HERE AND QUEER T-shirts.

The South makes social progress, like everywhere else, though it does its level best not to notice it while it’s going on. Only later, when it stands a serious risk of looking like a total asshole, does it claim to have always been on the side of decency and justice. (The same style of black-on-silver historical marker that identifies the home of my slavery-defending Grandpa Branch now celebrates the site of a 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro.) It’s hard for the South to get things right from the start, because, ever since the Civil War, it has taught itself to equate righteousness with losing. We must be on the right track, y’all, because everyone else is against us. In my seventy-two years I have heard Southerners offer this excuse for everything from segregation to miscegenation laws to the “religious liberty” currently invoked in the name of subjugating gay people. And in every instance, when the Supreme Court reminds them that decent Americans don’t act in this way anymore, they haul out the states’ rights flag and brandish it in a Rebel-gray fog of amnesia.

When my father died in 2005, one of his obituaries said he’d always been sorry he’d been born too late to fight for the Confederacy. He meant that. And in a sense he achieved it. If slavery could not be preserved as an institution, at least he could still fight to see that those folks stayed in their proper place. That’s what he thought he was doing, I suppose, on the unforgettable Sunday when he marched the whole family out of Christ Church in the middle of one of Dansapp’s sermons.

Christ Church had never completely excluded black people from its services. There was a steep, dark balcony that had once been a slave gallery, and black folks were still seated there on occasion, if they were, say, the beloved family maid of someone getting married or buried. They were never offered communion at the rail. Dansapp thought it was time for that to change, and stated as much in his sermon, creeping up on the subject with talk of Christian love for our Negro brothers and sisters. When my father realized what was up, he muttered an order to my mother.

“Let’s go. Right now!”

Mummie was as confused as the rest of us and didn’t immediately respond.

“Diana, goddammit! We ain’t listenin’ to this!”

Gathering her wits and her children, my mother organized our exit from Pew 17. I was a teenager and fully capable of backtalk, but I headed down the aisle like a dutiful duckling, still wondering if Daddy could be right about this. What if the races weren’t meant to be together in church or anywhere else? What if Dansapp was a troublemaker trying to upset the natural order of society and my father was just the only one brave enough to take a stand? I figured at least a few other families would join us in our righteous exodus, but the Maupins were the only ones leaving the church. There were a few quick backward glances from the congregation to see what we were doing before their heads jerked back to the pulpit. Only Reverend Sapp never took his eyes off us, smiling serenely and swaying ever so slightly, as he often did for emphasis during pauses in his sermons. I don’t remember how he had dressed for this pivotal moment, but it was probably something in raspberry.

Things got quiet in the Country Squire on the way home. We had suffered public humiliation and everyone knew it. I wasn’t surprised when we didn’t stop to pay our respects at Oakwood Cemetery, and I was glad, really, since all I wanted was to be home in the privacy of my room with the consolation of Ian and Enid, my Java Temple birds. There was still lunch to be surmounted, however, so back at the house my mother split the funny papers between her children and set about making egg-salad sandwiches in the kitchen. The rest of us staked out places in the Chimney Room (so named because Daddy thought Family Room sounded common).

No one said a word. I stared out the window at the big poplar down by the creek. Daddy sat in the red leather armchair under his Confederate flag, gripping the arms as if he were about to take off in an airplane. I knew he was tallying his losses, counting the traitors who had not followed us out of the church. Some of them were Daddy’s oldest friends, well-bred folks from the Terpsichorean Club he had known since childhood. Some of them must have seen him there on the day of his father’s funeral, twenty-some years earlier, when a coffin full of God-knows-what had been solemnly hauled past Daddy in Pew 17. Some of them might have been pallbearers.

Eventually, Daddy got out of his chair and came to the window, where I was sitting. He gazed down at the creek for a moment.

“Looks like the rain has played hell with the dam again.”

This was how he ran from subjects too painful to face. He just veered away abruptly and waited for us to follow, as if nothing had happened.

“Yes sir,” I said, looking at the creek. “It’s already down by a couple of feet.”

Daddy had built a cement dam across the creek, creating a small murky pond that had become a home for crawfish and copperheads. The copperheads would sun themselves on the dam until Daddy came down from the house and chopped their heads off with a pickax. The dam was always eroding around the muddy edges, so Daddy was constantly prying planks out of the basement—cannibalizing the house, in effect—to plug up the persistent leaks.

He clamped a hand on my shoulder. “I could use some hep with this, sport.”

(My father was an educated man but he had learned to say “hep” instead of “help” and “ain’t” instead of “am not” when addressing a jury. It made him sound folksy, I suppose, like a man of the people, not the aristocrat he fancied himself.)

So I wolfed down my egg-salad sandwich and followed him to the basement, where he picked up a crowbar and began to pry two-by-fours from his workbench. Then we set off for the creek, where I handed him the planks and watched him plug the unpluggable. It was a moment of father-and-son intimacy, or as close as we could get to one. The two of us against the unrelenting forces of nature.

The endurance of that dam was the least of my father’s many illusions. For years he nursed the idea that he would one day run for governor of North Carolina. I fantasized about this with my “sissy” friend Eddie, imagining us down at the red-brick Victorian governor’s mansion on Blount Street watching The Twilight Zone on television. But I knew, deep down, that the old man’s chances of being governor were slim to nonexistent, given his work as a lobbyist at the state legislature.

Among his less-than-appealing clients was the North Carolina Outdoor Advertising Association, so his primary job was to get legislators to refuse federal subsidies in exchange for the banning of billboards on the new interstate highways. It was all about free enterprise, he said; farmers should be able to build whatever the hell they wanted on their own damn land. The federal government was running amok. And those rest stops the feds proposed for limited advertising would be crawling with robbers in the parking lot and sexual predators in the toilets.

It was a winning argument, given that Southerners, despite their tolerance of what I recall as some of the nastiest public toilets in the land, have always been fretful about who’s in the next stall. (It was black folks when I was a kid; nowadays it’s trans people.) But even my father’s eloquent fearmongering was no match for the growing unpopularity of billboards, which were blocking the very scenery they advertised in places like Cherokee and Blowing Rock. Daddy didn’t get this, the way he didn’t get so many things. That’s why our garden was the place I could love him the most. We could talk about day lilies and busted dams, and leave his lost causes alone for a while. It was so much easier to believe him there.

I’m sure no one was surprised when Daddy brought his family back to Christ Church on the Sunday after he ordered us out of the service. For one thing, he was too proud to surrender the pew to the Goddamn Housepainter. His insistence on the way things had always been done may have sent him storming out of the church, but that’s just what would bring him back. He needed Christ Church; it was one of his constancies.