My daddy drove our big white station wagon around Dothan sporting a GEORGE WALLACE FOR GOVERNOR bumper sticker. When Wallace’s term limits as governor ended and his wife Lurleen Burns Wallace ran as his proxy (she won), my daddy cut up two Wallace stickers, rearranged and inverted letters, and fashioned a new bumper sticker: MA WALLACE.

My daddy pulled our station wagon off two-lane Highway 231 late one night. He walked me and my two little brothers down a grassy slope and through a sedge field to a Klan rally.

Three crosses burned in that field that night. Whatever else, the Klan could put on a show. What young mind could ever forget the powerful images of white spectral figures with gaping eyeholes and cans of gasoline setting Jesus’s own cross on fire? At age 10 or so, I could easily have swallowed the bait of bigotry. Hook, line and sinker.

So many others did. I’m still not entirely sure why I didn’t.

So, fellow Southerners, here’s the ugly thorn. Look at it. Right at it. Here’s my father, the bigot. His brown eyes gleam in the light of burning crosses. His three impressionable sons stand in his giant flickering shadow.

But now let me give my daddy’s story a little twist.

Just about everything in the South gets more complicated if you scratch the surface. Nothing is skin deep here.

Life fell apart at age 12 for my daddy.

One afternoon when the kids got in from school, his mother dropped dead in the front room of their house in Troy. The McNair children watched their father leaning over her already lifeless body. He rubbed a wrist, crying, “Mary! Mary!”

Before the shock subsided, the aftershock.

The father remarried, to a woman who worked very hard, if you believe the family tales, at driving away all four children of the first wife.

My dad found himself a runaway at age 15, sleeping in the straw of a barn full of dairy cows. At age 17, with his own father’s help, my daddy enlisted in the Air Force.

After two tours in the Philippines, he came home to Alabama, met my mom just as she was graduating from Troy State Teachers College, and started a family.

He tried his hand at carpentry. He built one house and sold it. He built another, and it sold too. Soon, he bought land tracts and sold lots to other builders until he made back his investment. He turned a profit on the remaining subdivision parcels, building and selling houses as McNair Construction Company.

He quickly learned that to make real money he needed to stop driving nails and start driving deals.

So who built the houses?

He hired two permanent crew members. His white foreman, Gene, had thumbs on both hands somehow flattened out into the shape of big toes by years of hammer blows. Gene could read house plans, and Gene could use a framing square, the two essentials for building a three-bedroom, one-car-garage McNair home. Gene showed up for work in a blue Chevrolet pickup every day precisely at 10 minutes to 7 a.m., rain or shine.

The second crew member, Willie Rogers, hired on at age 18. Willie rode to work in the mornings and rode home from work in the evenings in the cab of my daddy’s truck for more than 30 years. Every model Chevrolet we ever owned smelled like my daddy’s Tampa Nugget cigars and the eye-watering body odor of Willie Rogers.

Willie was black. A nigger, back then.

Like John Henry, Willie was a steel-driving man, only the steel he drove came out of a cloth belt full of 16-penny nails. Willie could outwork any human being I ever saw … and I know this as an eyewitness.

Every summer from age 10 to age 25, I crewed with my daddy, desperately attempting to earn his approval and to amount to something in those stern brown eyes.

I flung dirt from a hundred miles of ditches with Willie Rogers. I hammered a half-million nails into floors and decking and two-by-fours and trim alongside Willie Rogers. I hoisted hundreds of wheelbarrows full of heavy wet concrete with Willie Rogers.

No matter how fast I dug or nailed or rolled or did anything else, I would look up, pouring sweat in the brutal Alabama summers, to find Willie already moving on to the next job. He just seemed superhuman.

He was my daddy’s man.

In 30 years, Willie might have voluntarily spoken 30 words to my daddy. Daddy did the talking. Willie did the working.

Every Friday at 4 p.m., my daddy signed a paycheck for Gene, one for Willie, one for me and my brothers, if they happened to be working. By Friday midnight, Willie had generally blown his week’s pay. So he showed up nearly every Saturday afternoon, in a car driven by some weekend buddy, reeking of Hai Karate and malt liquor, to make a draw from his next paycheck.

This went on for decades, a circadian rhythm of work and reward, loan and repayment.

When Willie got cut up in fights, my daddy paid the hospital bill. When Willie got thrown into jail for eyeballing – serving as a lookout for two thieves taking apart a Coke machine – daddy posted bail. When Willie got slapped with a paternity suit (Judge: Willie, is this your child? Willie: I reckon) my daddy made sure the child support reached little Freddie Rogers.

My daddy began to buy land as he grew prosperous selling homes. He quilted together 4,000 acres, most of it planted in loblolly and slash pines … most of the pines planted by Willie Rogers.

On the coldest days of the year, Willie would climb out of daddy’s green pickup before the sun rose, step out on the frozen ground, then start the back-breaking work of hand-planting pine seedlings, one by one. Except for a break at lunch – always a can of Vienna sausages, a box of soda crackers, a honey bun and a Coke – Willie worked till the sun went down.

He worked can to can’t, as the saying went. I know, because I planted pine seedlings too, trailing far behind on my rows.

Willie worked weekends when he needed to make good on his deeper debts. He worked holidays.

You could call the relationship of my daddy and Willie Rogers a metaphor … or a stereotype. How many white men for three centuries rose to prosperity by exploiting black muscle and sweat? How often had the nests of white children been feathered … with black feathers?

So … here’s the old bigot at the construction site barking orders to his hired man. Here’s the old bigot riding for miles to reach fields where young pines wait to be put in the ground. Here’s the old bigot frowning in court beside Willie as a judge dispenses justice.

And here is where things get really complicated.