In my mind’s eye, it’s always autumn in Athens. Those sweltering days of summer are immediately forgotten when the first red leaf twists off its branch. On North Campus, a gold winged elm and scarlet oak stand like sacred guardians, ancient harbingers of wisdom and secrets. Just before the unadorned face of New College, a sugar maple shudders in the wind. But despite the breeze stirring the leaves on the pavement, the day is heating up. There’s a trickle of sweat between my shoulder blades. And there’s something else, something I can’t quite define, a tingling under my skin, a shadow at the corner of my eye. A feeling that the world’s askew and waiting to right itself.

I climb the concrete steps to the iron light poles of the university’s arches and stride through despite the local lore that says I have no right to do so. The buildings strangling the long stretch of browning grass are what’s left of the original campus. If you take a tour, overeager sophomores will tell you about Greek Revival architecture and the Old Chapel, with its famous painting of St. Peter’s Cathedral, once upon a time the largest framed oil painting in the world. They’ll tell you the meaning of the words inscribed in Latin above the massive columns of the library entrance: to teach and to inquire into the nature of things. They’ll tell you that there are other libraries on campus and between them all, there are more than 4.5 million books, 6.5 million microforms, and thousands of newspapers, photographs, and other documents. They might tell you about the double-barreled cannon three blocks away in front of city hall and the tree that owns itself at the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets. What they won’t tell you are the less quaint, more shameful symbols of the university’s long history—the ghosts of the hushed-up murder-suicide in Waddel, the skull under Baldwin Hall, the sorority girls in blackface in an old yearbook—all the barely concealed secrets that rear their heads at the wrong moments, like some Barnesian grotesque animal, reminding you that cruelty’s predictable.

The building that houses my mother’s office is no exception. Named after a Georgia governor who was a firm believer in public education for free whites and slavery for all Blacks, he advocated secession during the Civil War, then resisted the Confederate draft, was briefly imprisoned, and got a shout-out in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. After the war he found a new, state-sanctioned way to keep slavery alive and leased Black convicts from the Georgia government for his coal mining operations. Now there’s a statue of him and his wife at the state capitol and a U-shaped building named in his honor on the university’s campus.