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This is the country’s piedmont region, where the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia meet southern Virginia’s rolling hills. It is sometimes referred to as “God’s country” for its scenic landscape of wooded forestland, slightly sloping terrain, and grassy fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. It’s a part of the world where things don’t just look different, they are. Relaxed and slow. Nobody is in any particular hurry, and nothing seems to change, not very quickly anyway. Even conversation comes slow. Words get strung out like laundry on a clothesline, “stairs” becomes stay-urs and “past” is pronounced payist. My dad likes to say that the signs at the entrance to town should read, “Welcome to Farmville: Set Your Clock Back Twenty Years.”

It is the Virginia of my childhood, where summers are sultry and the house cooled with noisy box fans, the air always thick. Where plump, juicy tomatoes are plucked from backyard gardens and washed down with jugs of sweet tea. Where the roads are full of mud-caked Ford pickups, where children skip school at the start of hunting season and the region’s twice-weekly paper, the Farmville Herald, runs photos of them holding the prized bucks they score. Where nobody is a stranger for long. Where the back door is always unlocked and where neighbors are glad to lend a cup of sugar, where handwritten thank-you notes are expected, where people bring over a casserole or a plate of ham biscuits when a family member passes. Where the police seize stills of moonshine and cows escape their farms, blocking country roads. Where locals stare as if they’re mapping your face, trying to identify your kin. Where roots go back generations, where people never leave.

Now a Hampton Inn sits at one entrance to town across the street from an eightplex theater, enormous brick buildings incongruously perched on formerly wide-open fields. A development of new condominiums has also popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, like a crop of corn. A smattering of auto body shops, tractor parts stores, and humble brick office buildings line this stretch of blacktop leading to town. Just down the road, the streets of downtown Farmville feel more cheerful, even quaint. Three blocks of brick buildings that date as far back as the 1800s have been mostly restored to preserve the town’s original character. With welcoming signs hanging from handsome lanterns and young trees planted in the medians, the quiet Main Street is charming. The gracious campus of the now coed Longwood, founded in 1839 as Farmville Female Seminary Association, sits blocks away.

Many Virginians know Farmville for one thing: not its tragic history, but Green Front Furniture. Wealthy homeowners from up and down the Eastern Seaboard flock to the town to fill their houses with Oriental rugs and fine wooden furniture at bargain prices. In the 1960s, Richard “Dickie” Cralle, a graduate of Prince Edward Academy and Hampden-Sydney College, helped his grocer father grow the business from a discount furniture store to one that would gross sixty million dollars a year at its peak. For decades, he has traveled the globe collecting furnishings, paying cash to buy up warehouses full of hand-stitched rugs, carved treasures, and traditional furniture. In his original store on Main Street, Oriental rugs hang on two-story racks, like dresses in a department store. Over time, the famously cranky Green Front owner bought at a considerable discount a handful of abandoned tobacco warehouses. He also purchased the Craddock-Terry Shoe Corporation plant and Baldwin’s Department Store, eventually amassing more than a dozen buildings and renovating them into imposing showrooms. The smell of tobacco, which once permeated the buildings, has grown faint.

By resuscitating old warehouses, Cralle breathed new life into the town. He lured a restaurant, Charley’s Waterfront Café, into one of the tobacco warehouses. He also donated land along the Appomattox River to the town, and the property has been converted to a park where free summer concerts are held. His stores attract tens of thousands of visitors each year who wouldn’t otherwise come to Farmville, providing customers for other downtown businesses. Across the street from his first building sits the historic—and, now, bright yellow—Walker’s Diner. A European bakery, a modern art gallery, and several antiques shops have sprung up, too. The single-screen theater, the only place to see a movie during my childhood, was transformed into an outdoor amphitheater after its roof caved in, while a former Roses department store became an art museum. The town converted yet another former tobacco warehouse into a market where farmers sell produce year-round. Near the original Green Front store, the state opened a thirty-one-mile crushed limestone trail that weaves through three counties on old railroad tracks, crossing over the historic 125-foot High Bridge that sits in Prince Edward County.

The south end of Main Street provides a glimpse of how downtown Farmville might look were it not for Cralle—nearly deserted, like many small-town centers. There are a few locally owned stores that have been around for decades, including the athletic goods store Pairet’s, Key Office Supply, and Red Front Trading Company, a clothing store that sells work overalls. But most of the retail spaces are empty or boarded-up. Gone is the First National Bank that once anchored downtown and over which my grandfather’s dentistry practice was located. The old bakery, where my parents bought me cinnamon twists when I was a child, gone. Martin the Jeweler, the family-owned store that repaired a ring given to me by my grandparents, also gone. Vital businesses have long since relocated to shopping centers on the outskirts of town or closed for good.

Farther south, on the same block as First Baptist Church, the historic black church Elsie has long attended, Longwood has built a brick village of apartments for college students. It offers ground-floor stores such as a college bookstore operated by Barnes & Noble and a Chick-fil-A. The rest of the university’s handsome campus sits across Main Street on the edge of downtown, and it features a street-turned-brick-walkway that links its academic buildings with dorms, a library, and the athletic complexes. Across High Street from the campus, a statue of a Confederate soldier stands upright, a reminder of the allegiances of this town and the whole South during the Civil War.

Farmville once had several grocery stores, but only a Food Lion and a Walmart Supercenter remain. The sole department store is a sad little Belk in a mostly deserted shopping center. A few years ago, a Lowe’s home improvement store arrived just outside town. The shopping center where I walked as a child is now mostly empty—Kroger, Dairy Queen, Country Cookin, and a discount store have all left. The company that operates the town hospital is converting some of the vacant buildings into medical offices.

The rural county is majority white—about 63 percent—and not particularly segregated outside of town. White and black farmers are neighbors, sharing tools as well as the crops they grow. In one community, blacks and whites experimented with combining their churches but ultimately decided against it. But the town of Farmville itself remains segregated, though not as dramatically as when I was a child. Back then, it was unusual, even suspicious, to see blacks walking down streets stocked with elegant, century-old houses. A black family that moved onto my parents’ block a few years ago reported feeling accepted.

East of First Avenue, blacks occupy house after house. The homes range from small wooden structures in need of repair to well-maintained brick ranchers with short-cropped lawns. Longwood students have encroached on this historically black neighborhood that sits on the edge of the college’s campus. Black businesses such as barber shops and funeral homes, along with a black church and a Masonic hall, are still located there. Some of the businesses date back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a larger black neighborhood was dispersed after the state used eminent domain to take homes—many of them black—and a black church to allow Longwood to expand. Heading east across Main Street, another predominantly black neighborhood sits at the foot of the hill below Fuqua School, and a road winds around to a subsidized housing complex with eighty units, primarily occupied by blacks.

In Prince Edward, a portion of the population can afford groceries only after welfare checks are issued. The county has a nearly 20 percent poverty rate, almost double the state’s, with a per capita income of $17,500. Yet college professors and other professionals stop by the European bakery on Main Street to buy fresh baguettes, gourmet cheeses, and bottles of French wine. Walmart is the common ground, the place where the two worlds collide: the desperately poor and the professionals both shop here, though some higher income residents prefer to drive to Richmond for groceries, carrying coolers to store perishables.

Farmville is still the quiet community where I spent long summer afternoons floating in my parents’ pool. On the surface, it is a perfectly charming Southern place to grow up, a seemingly wholesome town to raise a family.

That is, until you dive in.

On our wedding night, after Jason and I recited the vows we had written to each other, the ground soggy under our feet, we kissed on my parents’ front porch swing as a photographer documented the moment.

Being with Jason was easy. We met and wanted to be together, and that was it. I never worried about how my parents would react to my having a boyfriend who wasn’t white, and I didn’t care what people in my hometown thought. I was deep in love, and Farmville was 2,500 miles away from San Diego, where I worked as a newspaper reporter.

Maybe I would have been more worried had Jason been black. In that case, the residents of my town likely would have expressed overt disapproval. I figured that a boyfriend with mixed racial heritage—difficult for most to identify—was easier for Southern whites to accept. With skin the color of raw pecans and shiny black hair tucked behind his ears, Jason appears South Asian to some.

Still, when I wanted to take him home to Virginia for the first time in 2001, a few months after we met in San Francisco, I asked Mom to make sure that my grandmother knew that he wasn’t white. It was Jason I was thinking of, not Mimi. I was trying to avoid an encounter like my friend, Crissy Pascual, had with a white boyfriend’s mother when they were introduced: the woman refused to shake her hand. My grandmother was old-fashioned—she still referred to blacks as “colored” and Papa had used the word “nigger.” I had a strong sense that she would be less than thrilled with my bringing home a brown boyfriend. By making sure Mimi knew what to expect, I was hoping to protect Jason from the humiliation my friend had experienced. I never asked my mom how my grandmother responded. I didn’t want Mom to give voice to Mimi’s disapproval. I saw it as Mimi’s problem, not mine. It was easier not to care what other people thought if I didn’t know.

After Jason proposed, we decided to get married in California, where we had met three years earlier. Our lives were there and so were most of our friends. Plus, it would be easiest for us to plan a wedding where we lived.

I first noticed Jason on the dance floor of a nightclub when Crissy and I were visiting San Francisco for a weekend. I watched him dancing across the room, carefree, caught up in the music. When our eyes met, I flashed a bright smile, and I looked up a moment later to find him standing in front of me. We danced and talked the rest of the evening. He called me in San Diego the next week, just after I had returned home from work at the newspaper. I slipped off my flats and walked barefoot across the smooth hardwood floors as we talked about our experiences growing up in the South—he was from Fort Worth, Texas—and about newspapers, books, and travel. He told me about moving to California to attend Stanford University. I talked about my job as a reporter. He had a quiet confidence, different from other guys I had dated. Seven months later, after a long-distance romance, he moved to San Diego to be with me.

It made sense to get married in the place where we began our life together. Although Farmville was my hometown, it didn’t connect to our life as a couple. But as I scouted wedding venues in San Diego, none of them felt right. I thought about how expensive attending our wedding would be for my parents, brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins, and for Jason’s mom and stepfather, who lived in Maryland. If we married in California, our relatives would have to travel across the country, rent cars, and reserve hotel rooms. Mimi wouldn’t be able to make the trip. The wedding would cost significantly more in California, and Mom couldn’t help with planning.

My mind wandered to Virginia, to its lovely historic homes, to its enormous magnolia trees and fragrant flowers, to the farms that stretched into the horizon, to my quaint Southern town. I pictured the food we could serve, from steaming shrimp and grits to country ham tucked inside delicate rolls, food that would echo our Southern upbringings. When my dad asked us to consider a Farmville wedding, he sealed the deal. Getting married in my hometown was the most natural thing to do. I could envision the ceremony on an estate that family friends owned on the outskirts of town. I could see us reciting our vows under a tree next to the house, which dates to the 1800s, surrounded by fields of flowing yellow grass where horses graze. We could move the reception one-and-a-half miles to my parents’ intimate backyard, which contained my family’s history. The party would take place under tents in my mom’s gardens, bursting with zinnias. In my mind, I could picture the whole event unfolding.

But then my thoughts turned to Jason, to his father and brother, and to the Asian, Latino, and black guests we planned to invite. I remembered Farmville’s history, still vague in my mind. What would it be like for Jason and his family and our many friends of color to walk into a community that was still segregated—geographically, economically, and socially?

I thought of them streaming into my little town, bringing their different religions, cultures, and accents. I wanted them to see the beauty of the South, particularly my little neck of the woods, to admire the homes with wraparound porches, the extravagant gardens, and the rural landscape. But I worried about them encountering its ugliness, too. It would only take one slur uttered by a drunk guest to make me regret the decision.