Green - Something must be done about Prince Edward County: a family, a Virginia town, a civil rights battle

I grew up thinking of her as our Elsie, not as someones mother. She was the black woman who had cleaned my parents house once a week since 1975. She had worked for my grandparents for two decades before that. Until I was in high school, she was also the only black person I knew.

Every Wednesday morning at nine, Elsie Lancaster appeared at the back door of our house in Farmville, a small rural town in southern Virginia. As a young child, I listened for Elsie to be dropped off and then ran to let her in. Petite and bird-thin, she wore a neat, pressed cotton blouse with a cardigan, an A-line polyester skirt, and pantyhose with sensible leather shoes.

Her shy face, typically cast down, brightened when she saw my three younger brothers and me. She hugged us, then quickly got to work, hanging her sweater in the closet by the front door and pulling out the Electrolux cylinder vacuum. She pushed it back and forth over the dark brown living room carpet while one of my twin brothers, a toddler at the time, rode on the back. She darted up the L-shaped staircase on wiry legs, her tiny but strong arms lugging the heavy cylinder behind her.

My mom would make a quick escape to run errands, leaving Elsie to keep an eye on my brothers and me. Elsie also swept and mopped the kitchen floor, scrubbed the bathroom sinks and toilets, and dusted the furniture. She hummed and sang while she worked, and Id trail behind her as she made her way through the house, waiting until she had silenced the vacuum for an opportunity to talk with her.

Mom returned in time to prepare sandwiches for lunch, and when I was older, I sat with Elsie and my mother around an oval oak table in our tidy kitchen. We held hands and prayed before the meal. God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. By His hands we all are fed. Give us, Lord, our daily bread.

My mom liked to say that Elsie was part of our family. My parents treated her better than other families who expected their housekeepers to eat separately. Mom bought Elsie birthday and Christmas presents, sent her home with vegetables from our garden, and, most important, treated her with kindness and respect. My grandmother prepared her lunch, instead of the other way around. Yet I didnt realize that Elsies own family had been ripped apart two decades earlier, when she was working for my grandparents, and that my grandfather was partly to blame.

In 1959, faced with a federal court order to desegregate the schools, Prince Edward Countys civic leaders refused to fund public education. They locked the doors of the public schools instead. It was a dramatic stance that set them apart from communities across the nation that preferred desegregated schools to closed schools. White leaders, including my grandparents, established a private school for their own children. The school was attended by both of my parents, and, years later, by my brothers and me as well. Black students like Elsies only childher daughter, Gwendolynhad nowhere to go. For five years, the public schools remained closed.

During my childhood, our family rarely discussed what had happened and only in broad strokes. No one mentioned that my grandfather had opposed integration. No one explained the effects of the school closures on our loyal housekeeper, her daughter, and other black residents of our county. And Elsie never revealed that she and her husband, Melvin, had made a heartbreaking decision to ensure that their daughter received an education. I didnt know that Elsie regularly replayed that decision in her mind, wondering if she had done the right thing. That she would second-guess it forever.

I didnt know that the past lived on, a painful history hidden in plain sight.