But more than the money I was earning, which would greatly help my family, I was gradually coming to understand how little I knew about the world I’d grown up in here in the South. I’d studied slavery and the Civil War in school, but the history I’d been taught never told tales like those I’d heard from Frankie the past two days. Slave labor was a necessity in those days, and they lived and worked on plantations and farms in much the same way laborers do today. Or so I’d believed. Yet if what Frankie said was true—and I had no reason to think it wasn’t—it put plantation owners like my
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