As our country prepares to mark 250 years, a son of Selma, Alabama, writer Tad Bartlett, audits the accounts his people kept in blood and cotton. He finds no entry that will ever balance the books.

Tad Bartlett was born in Ankara, Turkey; grew up in Selma, Alabama; and married into New Orleans, where he earned a J.D. from Tulane Law School and an MFA in fiction from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His creative nonfiction received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays recognized it as “notable.” His nonfiction work has appeared in The Chautauqua Literary Journal, Salvation South, and Oxford American,among others.His fiction, also Pushcart-nominated, has appeared in Salvation South, Massachusetts Review, Carolina ...