As kids, we obviously lacked a lot of factual information, but age and ignorance were not our only sources of confusion. Instead, as Americans and white southerners both, we couldn’t be entirely sure who “we” were.

It must have been about the time of the Fort Sumter Centennial that a bunch of us boys found shelter from the Carolina summer and began to struggle with the problem of southern identity. As was likely to happen with ten- and eleven-year-olds in that time and place, our hazy recollections of martial valor and the challenges of impending manhood led to the subject of the “late unpleasantness.”