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“I swore I would never ever come back to this prejudiced place,” he tells me. “But it changed.”

How so? I wonder.

“I’m sitting here talking to you,” he says.

Farmville is not the same place it used to be, he tells me. When he was looking for a house, his real estate agent showed him every available property. There’s nowhere in town that he doesn’t feel welcome. He can eat or shop anywhere he likes. And he doesn’t have to worry about the negative sides of city life—being robbed or mugged. “It’s a nice little town,” he tells me.

He said town leaders want the school closings to be forgotten so they can transform Farmville into an upscale community. “They’re just waiting for all of us to die so they can pretend it never happened,” he tells me.

With black former students around, white leaders are reminded of the stain on this town. That history won’t disappear until the generation of children that was locked out is dead and gone, until residents stop gathering at Moton to rehash the past.

I think about the deaths of Robert Taylor and other segregationists who took their beliefs to the grave. Maybe my own grandfather did, too. This man is on to something. If Farmville is ever going to progress, it won’t happen until they’re all gone.

It is an exceedingly slow evolution, growing from a racist place to one that is not. It can’t be forced. It is an unlearning process that takes generations, a natural progression that still has not been completed, and may not be in my lifetime.

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE CHAIR of the county school board gets me thinking about other ways Farmville can be made whole.

Russell L. Dove can clearly pinpoint one reason that the public school system isn’t better: it doesn’t receive the community investment it needs from businesses and parents. He believes that business owners instead donate to Fuqua School, attended by their children or grandchildren. Many parents with resources volunteer at Fuqua, not at the public schools, he suggests.

If what Dove says is true, Fuqua’s existence continues to sabotage the public schools. During my second year as a public school parent in Richmond, I’ve seen that parental involvement and donations can be critical to a school’s success. I often think how much better Richmond’s schools could be if more wealthy and middle-income parents sent their kids to public instead of private schools. Spending time on the Fuqua School campus, it’s easy to see that involved parents benefit the school. And attending county school board meetings, I notice how few residents advocate for more resources for the public schools.

Dove stopped short of calling for Fuqua School to be shut down, but others have said as much. During a community dialogue in 2009, Skippy Griffin’s younger brother, Eric Griffin, a pastor in Greensboro, North Carolina, suggested the school should be closed. Woodley, the Farmville Herald editor, told me that suggesting Fuqua School be eliminated to heal decades-old wounds just creates more wounds. Yet he acknowledges that Fuqua School’s existence prevents the public schools from reaching their potential. “There’s an impact on so many levels, because if we’re a great big stew, there’s lots of ingredients that aren’t going in the public school pot,” he said.

In the course of my reporting, I come to believe that Fuqua School can never leave behind its tragic legacy, no matter how much it tries to reform, no matter how many students of color it brings in or how many scholarships it offers. The presence of two school systems in a tiny county prevents either from reaching its potential. Both Fuqua School and Prince Edward County Public Schools are experiencing declining enrollment. The public schools also suffer from a lack of public support and parental engagement. It’s not hard to imagine that if even half of the approximately one hundred Fuqua students who live in Prince Edward County attended the public schools, the public schools could better engage parents. Perhaps the public schools could retain more, and better, teachers. The combined schools could build a more successful athletic program. They could pool resources and work together on fund-raising efforts. They could create unity in a community that has been divided for so long.

The apologies issued to black students over the years have never been enough. It is asking too much of black residents, particularly former students shut out of school, to move past the pain caused by the school closures when vivid symbols of segregation still remain. That the former Prince Edward Academy is still open, even under a different name, suggests that white Farmville’s repentance is conditional: we want to move past our history, but we still cling to the most powerful symbol of segregation.

In order for this county to unite, community leaders need to find a way to make victims whole again. Instead of working to support two separate school systems, the community could unite to transform the failing public school system into a successful one, a school system that provides a quality education for all of Prince Edward County’s children.

IT NOW SEEMS LUDICROUS THAT county leaders in Prince Edward, or anywhere else, thought they could keep the races from mixing by preventing blacks and whites from attending school together.

Before Jason and I moved south from Boston, I worried that there wouldn’t be many children in Virginia who looked like my daughters. But multiracial children are everywhere: on the playgrounds, at the frozen yogurt shops, in my daughters’ classrooms. The population of people like my husband and daughters is growing rapidly, with nine million Americans now identifying as multiracial. The US Census Bureau found that the number of multiracial children increased by almost 50 percent between 2000 and 2010, making mixed-race children the fastest growing group of young people in the country. Even in the Deep South, where race mixing has been especially taboo, the multiracial population is flourishing. The 2010 census found that in the previous decade it had increased by 70 percent or more in nine states, all but one of them in the South. That population will continue to grow nationwide because of the increase in interracial marriages, which in 2010 accounted for 15 percent of new marriages.

Looking at the circle of friends Jason or I have known for ten to twenty years, I see examples of America’s changing face. My white college roommate, Anne Chi, married a Chinese man. Crissy Pascual married a white man, and so did our half-Mexican, half–Puerto Rican friend, Cristina Byvik. A black friend is dating a white woman. Jason’s white friend wed an Indian woman. His Korean friend married an Indian man.

Acceptance of interracial marriages has grown steadily, too. A Gallup poll found that 86 percent of people nationwide supported black-white marriages in 2011, compared with 4 percent in 1958, making it one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history.

There has also been progress in Farmville. Not long after my mother canceled her Farmville Herald subscription, the paper began running wedding photos of couples. And in 2014 the paper placed on its front page a photo of an interracial family celebrating the father’s safe return from a military assignment.

Despite the progress, there are still uncomfortable, even heartbreaking, moments in this period of transition. Some friends’ parents did not accept their marriages for years. One of Crissy’s relatives used the term “slant eyes” in her presence. When she became pregnant, she felt like she had to remind her parents-in-law that the twins in her belly were mixed-race, not white, explaining how being part Asian would affect their grandchildren’s lives.

Still, as the parent of multiracial children, I face fewer challenges than my in-laws did thirty years ago in the same situation. Strangers stare at our children and ask if they are mine. When I’m alone with Selma, dark-skinned and dark-haired like her father, people ask if she is adopted. They point out that she doesn’t resemble me. But we don’t attract much attention.

Yet from a young age, my children have been aware of the differences in our skin color and want to discuss them. When Selma makes a family portrait on a paper plate in preschool, she gives Jason, Amaya, and herself brown skin. When I inquire why my skin is orange in her artwork, she tells me she couldn’t find the right color for me. One day, on the drive home from kindergarten, Amaya informs me that no two people have the same shade of skin. Another day, she describes an experiment her kindergarten teacher conducted, cracking a brown egg and a white egg into separate bowls and observing that, inside, both eggs were exactly the same. People are that way, too, she informs me—the same inside, regardless of their skin color.

I’m relieved that it is easy, natural even, to talk about race with them. Because I attended an all-white school for so many years, I was long uncomfortable around people of color. I equated being black with being poor. People of any race other than white were a curiosity, and I stared. But my daughters will view the world differently. At four and six years old, they have already been exposed to a wider spectrum of people than I had been by the time I went to college. Black and mixed-race children come for playdates at our house. In preschool, Selma hugs a black boy in the hallway and informs me that he is her boyfriend. I know my daughters will grow up having friends—and boyfriends—of every race, because this is their normal.

I realize that my children and their friends are the future of better race relations, not just in Farmville, but nationwide. President Obama acknowledged as much in a 2013 speech after George Zimmerman was acquitted in Trayvon Martin’s death. “Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race,” he said. He told the nation that when he talks with his daughters, Malia and Sasha, and when he watches them interact with their friends, he is left with a feeling that “they’re better than we were on these issues.”

“We should also have confidence that kids these days … have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long, difficult journey … we’re becoming a more perfect union—not a perfect union, but a more perfect union,” the president said.

I think about how much progress has happened from my grandparents’ generation to mine. On this journey to understand my hometown’s past, I was at times frustrated with my mom for instructing me to stop referring to Jason as multiracial and “just let Jason be Jason.” It’s easy to forget that Farmville has been her world for decades and that my views have been shaped by living in other places and by having a multiracial husband and children. Over time I have decided to focus on how deeply she and my dad love Jason and the girls. I consider how sweet it was for her to cancel the newspaper subscription, how thoughtful she was to buy brown dolls for my daughters and Native American gifts for Jason. She is trying to connect, to be a good grandmother to them.

It dawns on me that my girls will one day be as irritated with me as I have been with my mother. Maybe multiracial people will become so normalized that my daughters will deem me old-fashioned, rolling their eyes when I bring up the subject of racial diversity among our friends and family. Maybe they will question the decisions Jason and I make about where to live and where to send them to school.

Imagining Amaya and Selma as high school or college students makes me wish my own grandparents were around to meet them. If Mimi had lived just six months longer, she would have confronted a new reality—a mixed-race child in her own family. In Amaya, my grandmother would have come face-to-face with this changing world: her rapidly growing family would soon include six more brown and black great-grandchildren. After her death, she and Papa’s mixed-race and black great-grandchildren would briefly outnumber their white great-grandchildren.

I wish my daughters could have had the chance to know the grandparents who profoundly shaped my life. I wish Papa could take them fishing and Mimi could serve them a plate of buttery mashed potatoes. I’ll never know if my grandparents could have moved beyond the commitment to segregation that drove Papa to join the Defenders. I’ll never know if Mimi and Papa would have looked at my daughters’ brown skin and seen something unlovable. Maybe my grandparents would have surprised themselves, surprised us all, with feelings of pure love for my beautiful girls.

It’s nice to think so.

Over time, Mimi’s relationship with Elsie changed and deepened. They ate their meals together. In the car, Elsie sat in the front seat. At my wedding, Mimi motioned for Elsie to sit beside her, and Elsie declined.

After Papa died in 1993, Mimi moved into a smaller house up the street from my parents. She didn’t need help cleaning, but she still wanted “little Elsie” to come once a week, as she had for years. Mimi had stopped inviting friends over and even gave up walking the pretty tree-lined streets around her home. But she enjoyed Elsie’s company.

In the last years of her life, when Elsie came to clean, Mimi often invited her to lunch at Shoney’s, where they sat across from each other in a booth, talking. After the meal, they would return to Mimi’s house and continue the conversation seated at her dining room table, cleaning her silver collection. Mimi rubbed each piece of silver clean and Elsie wiped it dry. Mimi started leaving out the silver, which Elsie interpreted as evidence that Mimi trusted her, after more than fifty years of service. “I’d been working for her a long time,” Elsie explained. “I really had.”

Weeks before Mimi died in 2007, Mom drove Elsie to the nursing home where Mimi was staying so they could say good-bye. Mimi had refused visitors for weeks, but she sat up to greet Elsie, calling her “my dear old friend.” My mom, deeply moved, left the room in tears.

Elsie continued working for my parents once a week, doing light cleaning. When I visited home from Massachusetts, I stopped by her house or talked with her when she came to my parents’ house on Wednesdays. Sometimes while my parents were at work, Elsie asked me what she should clean first. “You don’t work for me, Elsie,” I reminded her.

Still, I sensed she viewed me as her employer. But the more we talked over the years, the more comfortable she became with me. One day, seated in a chair across from me in my parents’ den, she was describing what it was like to grow up in Prince Edward during segregation. She suddenly stopped herself. “Oh, I forgot you’re white!” she exclaimed. Another time, as I was driving her home, she told me that my grandfather would roll in his grave if he knew I had married Jason.