W. Ralph Eubanks

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over their more than 20 years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks's grandparents.

Part personal journey, part cultural biography, The House at the End of the Road examines a little-known piece of this country's past: interracial families that survived and prevailed in defiance of Jim Crow laws, including those prohibiting interracial marriage. As he did in his acclaimed 2003 memoir, Ever is a Long Time, Eubanks uses interviews, oral history, and archival research to tell a story about race in American life that few readers have experienced. in lyrical, evocative prose, this extraordinary book pierces the heart of issues of race and racial identity, leaving us ultimately hopeful about the world as our children might see it.

Eubanks’s story about his grandparents—an American mixed-race couple living openly (and precariously) in the cold heart of 1920s Jim Crow Alabama—enacts the liberating magic of literature: it finds its truth in between conventional wisdom and sociological presumption, in between lies and faulty history. It is a story of race, of family, of place itself, and it tells us that compassion and the stirring force of individual human endeavor finally mean more than anything.”
—RICHARD FORD

“Ralph Eubanks pieces together this intricate story across three generations of his family, and in turn sheds powerful new light on the complex story of race and identity in these United States. A pleasure to read, a poignant American story not to be missed.”
—DAVE ISAY, Founder of StoryCorps

“Ralph Eubanks’s grandparents created an interracial family in rural Alabama nearly a century ago. Now he has taken his family’s story and used it to explore our changing American ideas about what to make of our ancestries. His work should inspire all of us to think anew about our country.” —K. ANTHONY APPIAH,
Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University

“Eubanks writes with a novelist’s sense of story and a poet’s eye for language and detail. Most importantly, though, he writes with sensitivity, understanding and Socratic wisdom. This is not just an important book for these times—it’s a book for all time.”
—STEVE YARBROUGH, author of Prisoners of War

Eubanks narrates a larger story about the decreasing importance of race in American life. That story has many starting points and many heroes, and the particulars of Jim and Edna Richardson's lives -- as understood differently through census documents or through the proudly partisan memories of descendants -- cannot alter the moral of the tale.--Martha Sandweiss, The Washington Post

"Thoughtful and accessible."--John Sledge, The Mobile Press Register

"Highly recommended"--Library Journal, Starred Review