A Dream Uprooted

My grandmother’s house is the center of my pine tree galaxy. As a child, I spent every holiday in that place, surrounded by family, sharing food, and telling stories. Mary Emma Graham, my father’s mother, was the keeper of our secrets and our memories, and her yellow two-story house tucked into a canopy of pines provided the setting for family gatherings, her walls and drawers overflowing with our photographs, awards, and scribbles. The acreage around it has been in my family’s possession for more than a hundred years. At a time when many other African Americans were still sharecroppers, we owned the place we called home, naming the streets after relatives, leaving our mark on the land.

Situated on the edge of Newberry County, South Carolina, the town of Silverstreet proper isn’t much to look at—one traffic light, one gas station, no grocery store. But the Saluda River flows