Unlike at Concord Academy, at my segregated boys’ day school, any hint of dissent, and indeed of unsanctioned thought, was—as elsewhere in segregated society—an occasion of horror and closed-door consultation; a child’s reputation for independent thinking brought down the full weight of adult bullying, both inside the school and outside, in the larger society of white Richmond. In my senior year of high school, I made the most modest imaginable gesture of protest against a symbol of segregation (an American flag that the school did not lower after King’s 1968 assassination). The adult reaction was a firestorm; adults in the larger community were at pains to tell me how dreadful the flag protest had been, and the school leaders told me they would see that my acceptance to Harvard was rescinded. (I don’t know whether they tried, but, in the event, it wasn’t.) That was a lesson about the power of symbols to define our segregated world and was one reason why, far from the South, I felt myself breathe easier when Richmond tore down the motionless ghosts of Monument Avenue.
Faust had to evade this same adult bullying at home (at her mother’s funeral, she reports, a neighbor who knew of their frequent mother-daughter conflicts grabbed Drew by the hair and hissed, “You killed her, you know.”) and societal suspicion of the intellect. An academic star from an early age, she recalls a note from a teacher to her mother suggesting she discourage Drew from reading books over the summer: “Enough is enough.” She never explains why her parents allowed her to evade the dark heart of Southern life. Perhaps they understood that nothing good could come from forcing her to conform—that her path was set because of what was clearly a strong character. At any rate, the central fact of Necessary Trouble is that this child of fading privilege and gentility came, from an early age, to embody a decorous but insistent dissent from the injustices among which she lived. In 1957, at the age of 10, she wrote a long, ceremonious letter to President Eisenhower, asking him to alleviate the inequalities of segregation: “Colored people aren’t given a chance. ‘They don’t have a good education,’ says [sic] many people. Is it their fault if their fathers are so poor, they must be taken out at an early age to find jobs?”, she wrote. Mild as this dissent was, it was all but unsayable for most white Virginians even by the time I reached high school seven years later.