At Home in the Briar Patch

Most of the author's extended family members are South Carolinians. Yet she grew up and attended college in North Carolina (Duke University), and afterwards she moved to Connecticut for her graduate degree (Yale University) and her college teaching career at Fairfield University. In mid-life, she began to hear the opinion that "slavery is America's original sin". That was when she learned belatedly, from a cousin, that her ancestors in South Carolina- both maternal and paternal - had indeed owne