Excerpt from Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As soon as kids heard where I was from, their questions were relentless: Did we live in a skyscraper in Atlanta? Had I ever been to a Falcons game? Did I see a bunch of niggers there? Had the niggers ever tried to kill us?

I'd heard kids call black people "niggers" in my old neighborhood, but my father didn't allow it, and I'd seen many times how that one word could turn him fierce. I also remembered Rose, the black woman who'd cleaned house for my mother, and I could faintly recall skinning my knee once when no one else was home. Wasn't it Rose who laid a hand on my back and said, "Alright, it's gonna be alright," pressing my face into the cool white cotton of her apron? And I remembered how a dozen women like Rose used to gather on the corner by our house, then walk down the hill and out of sight—back to their own kitchens and their own little boys, in places I knew nothing about, except that they were very far away.

Sitting on the school bus in Forsyth, I understood that for the kids around me, the color line was drawn not between rich and poor, not between white employers and black servants, but between all that was good and cherished and beloved and everything they thought evil, and dirty, and despised. It was one "nigger joke" after another, and at first I was too afraid to do anything but smile when they smiled and laugh when they laughed. But eventually I got up the nerve to ask my friend Paul why everyone in the county seemed to hate black people so much, especially since there were none of them around.

Paul looked at me in disbelief.

"You don' know nuthin', do you, Pat?" he said, slumping down beside me in the bus seat. "You ain't never heard 'bout the KKK?"

I started to say I had, that I had seen them at a parade once, and that—

Paul just shook his head. "Long, long, long time ago, see, they's this girl got raped and killed over yonder," he told me, glancing out the window. "And when they found her in the woods, y'know what they done?"

When I said nothing, Paul spat in the floor, then broke into a wide grin. "White folks run all the niggers clean out of Forsyth County."


FOR TWENTY YEARS, that was all I knew: a myth, a legend—or at least the faintest outlines of one. And I admit that long after that day on the bus, when I went to college in the North, I'd sometimes tell the story just to shock people. It was a kind of brag, about how I'd grown up in Deliverance country, in an honest-to-God "white county" whose borders were patrolled by gun-toting, rock-throwing rednecks with nooses slung over their shoulders. My classmates were horrified but fascinated, since the story fit every stereotype they'd ever heard about the South and confirmed their sense of being enlightened and evolved compared to all the Jethros and Duke Boys down in Georgia. Yet even after repeating it for years, after making the tale a staple of my act, I knew little more than I had as a kid, and nothing at all about the real mystery at the heart of Forsyth: those nameless, faceless, vanished people who'd once lived in the place that I called home.

By 2003 I was far from my childhood in Georgia and spending most of my time in the library, doing research on the bubonic plague outbreaks of seventeenth-century London. In those days, archives all over the world were digitizing their collections, and it was still astonishing to me that you could summon up old manuscripts and documents with just a few clicks. The more I searched the historical records, the more I realized that the Internet was becoming a kind of Hubble telescope, aimed back into the past. If you looked through it long enough, and with care, once faint and distant events started to emerge like clear, bright stars.

One night I decided to see what the telescope might reveal about the founding myth of my own home place: that old ghost story about a murdered girl and a rampage by white-sheeted night riders. I had always wondered if the whole thing was just a racist fantasy, but when I typed "Forsyth" and "1912" into a database of old newspapers, a list of results came up, with headlines that, sure enough, told of an eighteen-year-old woman named Mae Crow who was raped and killed, allegedly by three black men. "Girl Murdered by Negro at Cumming," one front page read. "Confessed His Deed . . . Will Swing for Their Crime," said another. I clicked a link that led to an article in the Atlanta Constitution, which slowly knit itself into an image. When it filled the screen, I stared in wonder.

Excerpted from Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Phillips. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.