The House at the End of the Road

In defiance of his middle-class landowning family, around 1914 a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Eventually, together they built a house at the dead end of a road in a black community in rural south Alabama. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks’s grandparents. In The House at the End of the Road Eubanks takes students on a journey to where he reconstructs their life and times and seeks lessons for America’s multiracial future. In a past filled with tightly conscribed formulas for racial identity and laws that prohibited interracial marriage, making it punishable with up to seven years of hard labor, Eubanks seeks to understand the common humanity Jim and Edna Richardson were trying to embrace through the way they lived their lives.