In 1998, Atlanta author Mark Beaver’s father asked him to write to the governor of Texas and call on him to stay the execution Karla Faye Tucker—a question that left him to ponder the tug of war between mercy and justice.

After the Civil War, the Atlanta Ladies Memorial Association erected a monument to the Confederate dead in the city’s historic Oakland Cemetery. In 2021, it was removed. Writer Mark Beaver ponders what the evolution of that cemetery tells Southerners about themselves.