FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Page & Palette will present author W. Ralph Eubanks on Tuesday, June 23, from 6-8 p.m., at the Museum of Mobile on Royal Street in downtown Mobile.

He will speak and sign his book “The House at the End of the Road: A Story of Race, Identity, and Memory.”

Eubanks’ book is an exploration of interracial identity in America through three generations of the author’s Alabama family, on the black and white sides.

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.

If you came there to do the Richardson family harm, you faced Jim Richardson’s rule of justice, represented by a double-barreled shotgun.

And at the end of the road, there was only one way out.

Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks’ grandparents. Eubanks takes readers on a journey back to his grandparent’s house at the end of the road 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.

Through interviews and oral history collected from both sides of the Richardson family’s racial divide, as well as archival research, “The House at the End of the Road” goes into the deep heart’s core of the issue of race and racial identity in early 20th century America.

Eubanks is also the author of “Ever is a Long Time,” which the Washington Post named as one of the best nonfiction books of 2003.

He lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a Fellow at the New America Foundation and the director of publishing at the Library of Congress.

The author will exclusively sign all books purchased from Page & Palette.

For more information, call (251) 928-5295, or visit www.pageandpalette.com.