List 6 Startling Things About Sex Farms During Slavery That You May Not Know

[Roadside Attraction]

27. One of the best-kept secrets in the South . . .

I'm a Mississippi native, great-great-grandson of slave owners. One of the best-kept secrets in the South -- but something that is known by most Southerners -- is the presence of "shadow families" -- mixed-race children, fathered by white men with slaves, usually plantation owners or their sons, cousins, etc., fathering children with slave women.

William Faulkner's great-grandfather, William Cuthbert Falkner (1825 - 1889; the "Old Colonel" of several Faulkner stories) was a slave-owner who had a "shadow family" of mixed-race children born to one of the Old Colonel's female slaves. Several Faulkner biographers tell of the Old Colonel's black mistress, Emeline Lacy Falkner, whose grave is in the Ripley, MS, cemetery, not far from the Faulkner family plot. She had at least one -- possibly two -- daughters by the Old Colonel Falkner. The first, Fannie Forrest Falkner Dogan, was named after the Old Colonel's favorite sister and a Confederate general. The Old Colonel paid for her education at Rust College, a prestigious black Mississippi school where she was class valedictorian.

In my own family, my grandfather's cousin's brother-in-law and his common-law black wife had 11 children. The children carried their mother's name until the early 1950's when they all had their names changed to their father's name . . . much to the chagrin of their white cousins.

During the Civil Rights Era, one of the black students to seek admission to a major Southern state university was blood kin to a white member of the university's Board -- who fought against the black student's admission.