An African American studies scholar traces his family lineage to a Black Virginia neighborhood in the era of Reconstruction in this historical memoir.

As an expectant father, Lawrence P. Jackson decides to go looking for his late grandfather's home in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, an old house by the railroad tracks in Blairs. Armed with nothing but childhood memories, his journey evolves into a kind of detective story as he uncovers his ancestral history through the turmoil and torment of the 19th century South.

After asking around in Pittsylvania County, Jackson finds himself in the house of distant relations. He becomes increasingly absorbed by the search for his ancestors and soon realizes how few generations an African American needs to map in order to arrive at slavery, the "door of no return." Ultimately, Jackson's dogged research leads him to his grandfather's grandfather, a man who was born or sold into slavery but who, when Federal troops abandoned the South in 1877, was able to buy forty acres of land.

In this intimate study of a black Virginia family and neighborhood, Jackson vividly reconstructs moments in the lives of his father's grandfather, Edward Jackson, and great-grandfather, Granville Hundley, and gives life to revealing narratives of Pittsylvania County, recalling both the horror of slavery and the later struggles of postbellum freedom.