The man standing in the field under the blazing sun is the eighth generation of his family to work this ground. Eighth. In this field—his field—in the enormous silence it holds suspended in the heat, I realize there is something of great weight I had not guessed was there and which I still cannot touch, a truth beyond my understanding.

I ask him why he does it—why he keeps farming through the tariffs and the drought, the low prices and the war’s smashing of any hope to make a profit this year, through the betrayals of politicians in Washington and the news of yet another friend who breaks the generational chain and leaves farming for good. He says something I will hear again and again over three days in Burke County, Georgia, from almost every farmer I sit with:

“It’s a way of life.”

He means: this is what his father did, and his father’s father, back through a line that runs to before the Republic. He means: the land and the labor are braided together in a plan set down by God himself to make him the man he is. He means: it is not a job you can quit when it gets hard, because it is not a job. He means all of that, and more, and he is right.

I had come to Burke County to find out how farmers there are faring in the face of hard times, made harder by some of the actions taken by President Trump, a man most of them voted for. You can see our report later this week.

But while I was in Georgia, I was reminded of something else.

I love the South.

It is not (only) romanticizing to note that the rural South still has a deep culture. All the farmers I spoke with made a point of telling me—unbidden—how long their families had been tilling the land. Four generations. Five. Eight. I met fathers who were handing off the operation to their sons—and daughters.

The sound of the South is different. Accents are disappearing across America, a destructive process that’s been at work for a century, as first radio and TV and now the internet relentlessly flatten the sound of American speech. But not in Burke County. The people of the Deep South hold on to their regional accent, that deep, sweet drawl, more fiercely than anywhere else in our country. It feels almost as if in every conversation, people are telling you two things. I’m from here, not just living here. And: We are not another version of you. I like that.

Prayer is a constant in most farming families. Not the grotesque performative prayer we see more and more in some precincts of our politics and government—“Hegsethian prayer,” you might call that. Just prayer. And they mean it. When people say to you in Burke County, “Bless you,” you’re blessed. For real.

As it has been for centuries, the South is a place apart, an identity that nourishes our country with its abiding difference.

And yet.

In the South, “a way of life” is a phrase with ghosts. It was the phrase the Confederacy used to defend what it defended. It was the phrase spoken, and unspoken, through the long century of Jim Crow.

The farmers I met in Georgia did not mean anything like that. I heard nothing from them—nothing at all—I would call racist. The thing I heard most from so many people I spoke with—including Sheriff Alfonzo Williams, a Black man who grew up in Burke County, left, and returned to serve—was a determination to make things better in their community. And it seemed to me that the people I met understood the pragmatic reality that making things better in the South entails reckoning with the past. They surely know that better than any visitor does.

The soil that the farmer is the eighth to work was worked, before him, by people whose names were not on any deed and whose choices were not their own. That is not his fault. It is his inheritance, the same as the hardpan under the loam.

I grew up in an America where the South was embraced—honored, even, as a beloved part of our shared story. Think of the old movies: there was always some characterful Colonel, or a beloved Big Daddy, or a gracious belle. The defeat of the Rebel South was spoken of tenderly more than triumphantly.

But that tenderness was bought cheap. It was paid for by Black Americans, whose rights and whose full humanity were the currency of the peace our nation made after the Civil War; our country simply did not have the courage or the character to live out the true meaning of our creed, as Martin Luther King put it.

We have, thank God, broken the spell of the Lost Cause. But we have not yet written a new story. Together. Triumph does not heal the wounds of war and civil conflict. It closes them; the scars still rankle.

One afternoon, over a lunch of meatloaf, collard greens and baked beans, we talked about the Confederate monuments coming down. There was sorrow in the voices I heard (the men I was lunching with were white). They seemed puzzled at what felt to them to be an absolutist and punitive erasure of what is, for better or worse, part of their story. I have no brief to write for the Confederacy; I am Team North all the way. But life, and living in community, are more complicated than that. These Southern men understand that. Do the rest of us?

My own view is that the people who live with the monuments should decide together what to do about them. All the people. And when they decide, they should decide with mutual understanding and magnanimity. Let the truth be told, the full truth. Tell it straight and tell it all.

The single best and truest verdict on the Civil War that I know comes from Ulysses Grant, in his Memoirs, one of the greatest American autobiographies.

This is what Grant wrote about the meeting with Robert E. Lee to accept the surrender of the South at Appomattox:

“What General Lee's feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”

The cause was wrong. The men were men. That is the Union verdict: just, and kind. Magnanimity is not the same as forgetting.

This week’s poem is Natasha Trethewey’s “South,” from her Pulitzer-winning book Native Guard. Trethewey has appeared in this column before; she is one of our greatest writers.

A daughter of Mississippi, of a Black mother and a white father, Trethewey has made it her life’s work to give the South back its memory, the whole of it. The land that tried to unmake her is the land she claims, and the ground she will be buried in.

The farmer is the eighth generation. The poet is a daughter of the same soil. The American task—the task after every broken peace—is to let both of them speak, and to listen to each, refusing to rejoice or condemn, but rather to try, to keep trying, to understand.

—Terry

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I returned to a stand of pines,bone-thin phalanxflanking the roadside, tangleof understory—a dialectic of darkand light—and magnolias blossominglike afterthought: each flowera surrender, white flags drapedamong the branches. I returnedto land's end, the swath of coastclear cut and buried in sand:mangrove, live oak, gulfweedrazed and replaced by thin palms—palmettos—symbols of victoryor defiance, over and overmarking this vanquished land. I returnedto a field of cotton, hallowed ground—as slave legend goes—each bollholding the ghosts of generations:those who measured their daysby the heft of sacks and lengthsof rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plantsstill sewn into our clothes.I returned to a country battlefieldwhere colored troops fought and died—Port Hudson where their bodies swelledand blackened beneath the sun—unburieduntil earth's green sheet pulled over them,unmarked by any headstones.Where the roads, buildings, and monumentsare named to honor the Confederacy,where that old flag still hangs, I returnto Mississippi, state that made a crimeof me—mulatto, half-breed—nativein my native land, this place they'll bury me.