It was the beginning of my junior year. Through the window of my Honors U.S. History class, I could see a maple just beginning to turn crimson in the September wind. Mr Harrison stood at the front of the room, lecturing while covering the chalkboard in his neat scrawl with details about Roosevelt's New Deal.

Mr Harrison, a gruff man whose accent reminded me of an old Confederate general, was a secret liberal and a devout Cubs fan. A diamond in the rough in the South. I'd had him in tenth grade, too, and in the afternoons, he'd let me sit in his room and listen to the Cubs play the Cardinals, our archenemies. He was an acceptable white man, but not one I could trust. The man still taught that the Civil War was over states' rights.

'Yes, the states' rights to own human beings!' I had shouted in the middle of one of his lectures last year, to stunned silence.