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By ANDREA G. HUNTER

Following a tour of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia — one of three visits I would make to the site — I sat on a hillside overlooking what was once a grape orchard. In the stillness, I listened for the black force that was the engine of Monticello and for their lives, loves and sadness, hoping to channel a people long gone.

A fellow tourist approached and we exchanged pleasantries. Then, tentatively, so as not to make offense, she asked: “Why are you here?”

I knew immediately what she meant; my husband and I were the only African Americans present. I smiled and said, “It is our history, too.”

Elsa Barkley Brown, a women’s historian, has written that history is like everybody talking at once with multiple rhythms being played out in relation to each other, as in a jazz composition. In the observance of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War (2011-15) we are confronted with a uniquely Southern dilemma and opportunity: The reconciliation of a cacophony of rhythms — those of pride and humiliation, of slavery and freedom, and of black and white.

I have always thought of the Civil War through the prism of emancipation as a transformative event that was a testament to black survival. We had, after all, come all this way by faith.

This was not something I learned in history class but was transmitted to me through my elder kin through their stories as well as their silences about the days when they came into this world.

I have searched the courthouses of North and South Carolina looking for what no longer exists in living memory, hoping to find what inhabited the silences of my foreparents. I have rifled through the lives and families of black and white folk who have come and gone and with time have grown comfortable with the ghosts of memory.

That I would become so intimate with white families, unfold their handwritten wills, and covet their family stories as much as my own was not what I had imagined when I began my quest. I discovered, too, through reading the genealogies of white planter families that their histories, who they would become, and, indeed, their very identity could no more be divorced from the social and economic system of slavery than could my own family.

I have come to think of blacks and whites in the antebellum South as a kind of conjoined twin. Each with their own mind and soul existing both alone and together, sharing a vital system of vessels and arteries all intertwined and inseparable. And so it is with our histories.

We rightly pull apart the multiple rhythms of this history to remember and honor, but we must also weave them back together again if we are to understand the past. Yet, to bring together that which is unreconciled — our pride and humiliation, the paradoxes of slavery, war and freedom; and of lives black and white — frightens us.

To commemorate the Civil War, we perform the past and through these enactments build the edifice of a time long gone — all bone and no flesh, with no before or after. There is no dishonor in this, but it will not exorcise that which divides us. We protest that the past — the bitter legacy of slavery, the war dead and the jubilation of freedom — belongs not to us and, then, look away.

For far too long, we cloaked ourselves in silences but it did not heal our pain or hide our transgressions. Now, we are left to wrestle with the specters of their memory.

The Civil War and all that came before haunts, and we, as Southerners and as a nation, must stare that apparition down if we are to be left in peace and made whole.

To do this, we must be honest about our truths and our fictions, dissemble our prideful edifices so that we may attend to our grief and let go of our shame, and we must learn to live with the contradictions that are our past.

Andrea Harris is an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at UNCG and a member of the News & Record’s Town Square columnists panel.