I'am a pure bred American mutt. Welsh, Scotch, English-and probably some Native and some African, the silent partners of Southern blood-on my father's side. Irish, German, Lithuanian (maybe Lithuanian Jew) on my mother's side. Like most Americans we "simplify" the bloodline to a more palatable story. I'm Scotch on my Dad's side and Irish on my Mom's. Making me recognizable as one of our country's early settlers, a Scotch-Irish.

Families tell their own histories. And in mine, the Irish tell a coming to America story about crossing the Atlantic without a penny on a ticket gambled in a billiard hall, on making a fortune in furniture and real estate, on losing that fortune, on all's well that ends well because look how far we've come. Emmett Stafford, the senior, is famous for saying, "If you cater to the classes you'll dine with the masses. If you cater to the masses, you'll dine with the classes." Demonstrating his apt grasp of 20th century economies of scale.

In my Southern family, we play a no less familiar tune. Hardscrabble Scotchmen on the lam from the English crown go west to Tennessee in 1700 and 40 to eke out a living on the land. The land prospers and the men become knights of the new realm. See Black Bill Robinson, High Sheriff of Huntsville, AL, w built a house named Quietdale that still stands. Then the War Between the States and the loss of land, wealth, and power. The bloodline gains more import. How can you tell a carpetbagger, a cracker, and a gentleman apart? Just as things start to go well the Depression hits and we lose everything again. How many times can you lose everything?

It's the story of Southern Roots that I have been thinking about for the past week or so. I didn't know I was thinking about it at first. I thought I was just remembering our drive back from New Orleans. But I kept thinking about going past Shiloh Church, the little building in West Tennessee that marked the site of the biggest battle in the western theater of the Civil War. And then about stopping in Cairo, IL, the place where General Grant started his campaign as a lieutenant colonel. And then I started staring at the spine of Shelby Foote's The Civil War and wondering if I should read it again. My friend Scott planted a marker in my brain. I just finished Chicamauga, he said. What a mess Hood made afterwards.

Yesterday the sifting graduated from unconscious to conscious thought. I showed up a few minutes early to my soccer game and remembered I had books in the trunk of my car. One of them was James McPherson's Antietam, an academic narrative describing the import, circumstances, and outcomes of what is to date still the bloodiest battle in American history. McPherson taught at Princeton when I was there. I guess he still does. And he is known as the foremost Civil War scholar in this country. Unless you're in the South, in which case he is know as the foremost Yankee Civil War scholar in this country.

I read about half of the book over the course of the cool rainy Sunday, lapsing into the quiet comforting melancholy that Southern people feel when they read about the War Between the States. Carolyn went to pick her sister up at the airport. I called mine and she wasn't home. So I turned on Sweet Home Alabama on the USA Network. Carolyn said it was good. She likes romantic comedies with happy endings.

I normally stay away from Yankee depictions of the South. Like McPherson for instance. I never took his class. I scoffed when I saw the trailer for Sweet Home Alabama and never went to see it, even though part of me really wanted to. Just to see.

The movie was cute. In it, the South is a place with no economic opportunities where women can only be young mothers and men high school football stars. The main character, played by Reese Witherspoon, moves to New York to re-invent herself and improbably finds herself as a fashion executive engaged to the mayor's son, before returning to Alabama to secure the necessary divorce from her childhood sweetheart. The South, then, is really a place where the small town still exists, for better or worse, and where everyone is accepted, even if their ideologies, beliefs, or identities are negated.

In Sweet Home Alabama, the South is also a place without black people. For Hollywood's purposes that last fact makes perfect sense. No reason to bring the race issue into an hour and a half long romantic comedy. People can watch Beloved, the Color Purple, or Driving Miss Daisy if they want to.

But for me, there was something more significant in the omission. One of the reason's McPherson is so hated by Pro-South historians is that he eschews the classical historical narrative that Shelby Foote uses, sometimes called "the great men" approach to history, for a much more contemporary approach of class struggle and materialism. In his version of the Civil War the defining moment is the Emancipation Proclamation, a calculated maneuver that gutted the South's supply of free labor just when the Northern armies finally leveraged their industrial production advantage under Grant's masterful grand strategy of moving man and materiel into the heart of the South, breaking from the time-honored notion of the supply line as umbilical cord.

Southerners, when talking about the South, or themselves as members of it, don't like to talk about race or slavery. They like it even less when Yankees do it, because Yankees always want to inject their brand of moral superiority, as if they weren't benefiting and/or condoning slavery all along too. As if the war hadn't really been about their own economic success. As if their policies of using immigrants as cannon fodder was better for the soul.

I am part Yankee and part Southern. Half greenhorn and half blueblood. In seventh grade I wrote the first poem of my life, in honor of my namesake John Giles Reynolds, who was a cavalry officer blinded at the battle of Cold Harbor near Richmond. I still remember most of it.

Cold Harbor

One wave crashes and draws back
to be swept up like burning ash by the next.
I hope you people remember.

A blue-blood cripple and a grey-worn king.
I hope you people remember.

What would Dr. King say?
I hope you people remember.

No real resolution. A little overly earnest. Hard to take from a 7th grader. But admirably demonstrates my early preoccupation with the magnitude of history, and with race as the defining issue to work out in my half-breed brain.

The fact remains that when I grew up I wanted to be, at the same time, MLK and Robert E. Lee. And while that may not make sense to you, it makes perfect sense to me. I still prefer Shelby Foote's story of heroes making decisions to McPherson's story about means of production. Even though Foote's 3,000 pages only have about ten pages devoted to the entire black population of the South, which was bigger than the white one.

My friend Henry had us over to dinner on Saturday night. He grew up on an ante-bellum farm outside of Nashville that has been in his family since they "drove the Indians off it." Henry talks slow, has a gap tooth smile, manly good looks, and a gentle sense of humor that hides the fact that he is a very astute judge of the human character. He is the sort of guy Mathew McConaghey is supposed to play in the movies.

Yeah, he said. It's beautiful down there. But the brand of racism they cultivate is... he kissed his fingers. Memphis and Atlanta are the worst.

Back to my metaphor. Why couldn't I find the graveyard? Shouldn't its bones have called to me, like a homing device, until my foot bumped up against Nana's marble marker?

I have, in the last ten years, harbored romantic notions about moving back to the South, about living in a small city like the one my dad grew up in, buying a cheap Victorian house, running the local newspaper, and having a giant vegetable garden. I have dreamed about walking down main street, and saying hello to people who are my neighbors, whose grandparents were my grandparents' neighbors. But neither Henry nor I is willing to move back to a place where race is still as simple as black and white.

My Dad is always fond of saying that in today's South, black people and white people deal with each other a lot more than they do in today's North. That's true. But today's South is still a place where a guy can go to a bar and bitch about niggers. And as long as that's true... No that's not it. People do that here too. As long as the South sticks to its story of being victimized by the North, then its municipal authorities will continue to condone the quiet retribution the South has exacted on its black communities ever since Reconstruction. And as long as that remains the case, the South's scattered sons and daughters can't come home.

The message the graveyard was sending me wasn't quite that tidy. It was just, if you're thinking about your roots, think hard about the soil they grow in.