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naval career, I was stationed as a flight instructor at McCain Field, an air station in Meridian, Mississippi, named for my grandfather. One day, as I made my approach to land, I was waved off. Radioing the tower, I demanded, “Let me land, or I’ll take my field and go home,” earning a rebuke from the commanding officer for disrespectfully invoking the family history.
    It is a formidable history, not easily escaped even today by descendants who might wish to pursue some interest outside the family business.
    My grandfather was born and raised on his father’s plantation in Carroll County, Mississippi. The property had been in our family since 1848, when William Alexander McCain moved there from the family estate in North Carolina. My great-grandmother had named the place Waverly, after Walter Scott’s Waverly novels, but it was always called Teoc, after a Choctaw Indian name for the surrounding area that meant “Tall Pines.”
    I spent some time there as a boy and loved the place. The house, which had once belonged to a former slave, became the family’s home after their first manor burned down, and was a more modest structure than the white-columned antebellum mansions of popular imagination. But I spent many happy summer days in outdoor recreation on the property in the congenial company of my grandfather’s younger brother, Joe, who ran the plantation. The house still stands, I have been told, uninhabited and dilapidated, with no McCain in residence since my Uncle Joe died in 1952.
    I have been told that the McCains of Teoc were clannish, devoted to one another and to their traditions. They never lamented the South’s fall, although they had been loyal to its flag, nor did they discuss the war much, even among themselves. Neither did they curse the decline in the family’s fortunes, the lot they shared with many plantation families in the defeated South. By all accounts, they were lively, proud, and happy in their world on the Mississippi Delta. Yet my uncle and grandfather left the comfort of the only world they knew, never to be rooted to one location again.
    I am second cousin to the gifted writer Elizabeth Spencer. She is the daughter of my grandfather’s sister and was raised in Carrollton, Mississippi, near the family estate. In her graceful memoir,
Landscapes of the Heart,
she wrote affectionately of her two uncles and the first stirring of their lifelong romance with military adventures.

    What could they do around farms and small towns in an impoverished area, not yet healed from a civil war? The law? The church? Nothing there seemed to challenge them.
    I wonder if their dreams were fed by their reading. They favored bold adventure stories and poems—Kipling, Scott, Stevenson, Henty, Macaulay, Browning. Stuck away in trunks in the attic in Carrollton, school notebooks I came across when exploring were full not only of class notes but also of original verses that spoke of heroism and daring deeds. Their Latin texts with Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
were in our bookshelves. They were cavalier….
    I thought of my uncles years later, when I read in Henry James’
The Bostonians
how Basil Ransom of Mississippi had gone to Boston in the post–Civil War years because he was bored sitting around a plantation.

    After two years at “Ole Miss,” my grandfather decided to follow his older brother to West Point. At his brother’s urging, my grandfather prepared for the exacting entrance exams by taking for practice the Naval Academy exams that were given some weeks earlier at the post office in the state capital. His scores were high enough to earn him an appointment to Annapolis, which, with little reflection, he accepted.
    He was a popular midshipman but a less than serious student, graduating in the bottom quarter of his class. That rank, however, exceeded the grasp of his son and grandson, who graduated well beneath it and were lucky to receive their