The New South and Us

Last week's Newsweek cover on "The New South" featured one of Louisiana's most beautiful plantations, with an alley of live oaks framing a white-columned, immaculately maintained white house at its end.
It is hard not to think of the house my grandfather had built on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, just outside of Washington. It is a two-story (without attic) painted-white brick house with four columns in the front. It looks impressive from the road, but in reality it was originally only one room wide.
As a child we (my bothers and I)loved who now might be called "the help." Jimmy, the light-skinned driver for my grandfather, and Arbell, the cook.
As I look back on it, I can see how people could say my grandfather was running a modern-day plantation, and that Jimmy and Arbell were the house n--grs. But they had in a way a nice situation.
After my grandfather died, Jimmy was able to purchase his dream house in Winchester, VA. Arbell's fate I can't remember, but she certainly wasn't exploited in any way.
People that criticize this arrangement have got to think a minute: what would have become of them otherwise?
For too many, the answer is to abandon blacks to their own devices. We've formed separate societies: they go their way, we go ours. That's why in the South one may not believe in racial equality, but share roughly the same place as blacks. There is a natural vibe there that doesn't come off as patronizing.
Before Obama, I worked for a black owned company (Tourmobile Sightseeing). Blacks there used to always say that Bill Clinton is the closest America is ever going to get to a black president. His kinship with blacks never looked forced. It was just natural in the way he presented himself (especially, sterotypically with food). He was, in a way, blacker, or more african american in background than Obama.
The man in the middle has a jagged line to follow - or to make.