Seven years after my dad died, I went to the place he was born for the first time.

My dad was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi, or his family were sharecroppers

in the same field that enslaved people had picked cotton for generations and generations before.

Every year, our family would go on family vacations

and we would go on family reunions,

but we would never go to the place of my dad's birth.

It wasn't a place that he really wanted to take us to

or a place that he wanted to return.

It just so happened that my great-a aunt Charlotte, my grandmother's sister, was visiting nearby at the time that I went down.

And it's strange because I'm 38 years old, but I'm so relieved to have this elderly woman with me because for some reason, I'm just a little afraid.

It's just kind of weird, but I really was.

I've grown up with Aunt Charlotte my whole life. She's the one who taught me how to make yeast rolls in her kitchen, and she was this woman who wore heels until she was in her 90s,

who when you would go in her house, everything was always very neat. There was plastic over the

furniture. It was very important for her at all times to appear respectable. And I understood that so

much of that was because in her formative years, she was not

treated with respect in the place that she was born. So we get in the car, and I try, as I had done

several times through the years, to get my great Aunt Charlotte to open up about what it was like to live down there.

And for most of the ride, she was giving me the same gauzy version that she'd always given me,

that life for them wasn't really that hard, that it was a good place to grow up.

As we finally approach Greenwood, I see a big sign.

It's painted in brown, and it says in white letters,

Greenwood, cotton capital of the world.

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