Mann was largely raised by an African American caretaker named Virginia Carter, whom she affectionately called Gee-Gee and referred to as “the best mother a child could want.” Looking back at this relationship as an adult, Mann struggled with what she described as the “fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private.” She came to understand that while her family had worked hard in support of the civil rights movement, they had also benefited from a social and legal structure that oppressed African Americans.

In the early 2000s, Mann sought to learn more about the life of Carter, the granddaughter of a former slave and the daughter of a woman who had likely been raped by a white man. In addition to reconsidering her own photographs of Carter, who had died in 1994 at the age of one hundred, Mann reached out to Carter’s children and grandchildren, collecting snapshots of her with her own family and with Mann’s.