Well, what do I say, that was a very nice story and I hope and believe that your reading of your family's African-American neighbors and their relationship is accurate.

As a child, I grew up in West Point, Mississippi and then in Memphis, Tennessee. As an adult, I have visited and re-discovered some of my dad's black employees and two (2) "maids" that I shared many hours of time that included much laughter and a seeming caring for me, personally. Unfortunately, it became clear to me upon meeting them as an adult, that my childhood view of my relationship with these people was my perspective, only. Though they were accommodating and accepted my interest in finding them in later years, they shared little if any of the feeling I had toward them and I felt their extended families were actually resentful of me. As a child, I was a job and income for them and as an adult I became "The Man".

I think we always have to be sensitive to the relative rank of whites and blacks, when we look back to our Southern youth. African-Americans in the pre-Civil Rights South were highly compromised, when it came to showing their true feelings and emotions. What we as whites, in our higher societal ranking, may have viewed and believed to be sincere love, friendship and caring, may, in many cases, have been a necessity for blacks, in that time, simply to "get along" or acquire needed employment. Undoubtedly, many of these relationships were sincere and real, but in my "opinion" and from personal experience, I've discovered that my view, especially from my childhood, in the 1960's South was from my perspective only and was not shared by my childhood African-American acquaintances in later life.

Perhaps this personal experience and my inability to confirm through my own research more than a few instances of Black Confederates in combat has affected my view of this subject. If my own "firsthand" experience is unreliable from my memory, how can I determine motives of people in an even more compromised situation, one hundred years earlier.

I certainly want to give credit and recognize the contributions of anyone, black, white, red or any other color who suffered the rigors of military life in the Civil War, but to assign motives or to call them loyal, disloyal, patriotic or any other similar term, I believe is unknowable.

Jim