Sally and Tuck had a second child in 1970, a boy named Greg who now lives in Florida. They married in September 1979, six years after the state repealed its miscegenation law, which made marriages between a white person and a black person illegal.

They kept to themselves. Most of their friends were neighbors or members of their church, all from the black community.

Tuck died in 1981 at age 60. Sally got her GED, then earned a nursing assistant's certificate from Forsyth Technical College. She took care of elderly patients.

Everyone who knew Sally knew about Gene. "I know you're tired of hearing this," she would say. "I've told you a thousand times. But thank you for listening."

Sally never got over what happened. She died of an aneurysm on April 30, 1995, at age 64.

Jesse Cheek

In April 1973,12 years after they separated, Jesse divorced Sally. He never remarried. He died Oct. 10, 1987, of multiple organ failure at age 61. His death certificate listed malnutrition and alcohol abuse as contributing conditions.

Randy Tucker

Because of what happened to Gene, Tuck and Sally rarely let Randy out of sight. Tuck wouldn't let him play football or baseball or go to dances.

When Randy told Tuck how much he wanted to play sports, he says the answer was always no. Tuck told him that people might act a little strange. They might try to hurt him. If he got hurt, it would hurt his mother.

"I don't think I'm going to let you play this year," Tuck said. "Maybe the year after."

When the year after came, Tuck said the same thing. Randy's birth certificate listed him as Randy Steven Spainhour, the made-up last name Sally used at the hospital. He was christened Randy Steven Tucker. Before he joined the Navy in 1980, he had his name officially changed. Randy is 37, a civilian aircraft mechanic at Cherry Point Marine Air Station in Havelock, near the N.C. coast.

"I love Gene because of the sacrifice that he put up for me. If it wasn't for Gene, I wouldn't be here. I had the opportunity to be with my mom and dad. They took Gene away. The only time we could be a family was when he sneaked away.

"What kind of childhood was that: to have to sneak away to actually be with your mother and father? Your mom isn't a criminal. She's not a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. She's a loving kind of person who fell in love with the wrong man. And you make him pay the price of being away from her all those years. He's a bitter person about it and he has a damn well right to be. I'm bitter about it too—I spent a lot of years being away from him."

Fred Crumpler

Crumpler, 69, is the lawyer who represented Jesse Cheek in the custody case. He handled thousands of custody cases and Gene's is one of the few he remembers—not the legal details, but the boy in old clothes a size too small.

"I felt so sorry for the little boy. He strongly wanted to live with his mother. He obviously was trying to protect her. It was an unfortunate and sad situation...

"I don't recall seeing another case like that because interracial mixing was so unacceptable in that day. There were closet relationships and this one they tried to keep in the closet, but couldn't. What was a tragedy was that they came along at that point in time. Later on, it wouldn't have been an issue."

Judge E.S. Heefner, Jr.

Edward "Ned" Heefner served 15 years as a judge and received the Humanitarian Service Award of Hadassah, the Jewish women's organization. He was soft-spoken with a reputation for compassion. He died in 1973. His obituary said he tried to solve family problems "on a family level." When that failed, he said, "We just have to get down to some stiff law and see how that works."

Bob Cheek

Bob Cheek, 73, sat with his brother Jesse in the courtroom. He said they did what they thought was best for Gene. "We didn't feel like Gene needed to be in that situation. If this same thing happened today, I don't think it would matter... I hate that it happened that way. But it's all over with, all done. I just put it behind me."

Bill Anderson

The only person who ever apologized to Gene was his Uncle Bill, Sally's brother. He telephoned Gene when he was dying of cancer, wept and asked Gene to forgive him. Gene said he would: "I told him, 'The thing I held against you more than anything was that you abandoned Mom when she really needed you. She was your sister. She loved you to death.'"

Goldie Creson

After nearly 20 years of not visiting Sally, Creson went to see her shortly before Tuck died. They met a few times for lunch and dinner. "I should have been stronger. Sally was a fantastic person. But back then, it was such a horrible thing for a white woman to be with a black man. After her husband died, I told my husband one day, 'She is my sister and I love her and I'm going talk to her any time I want to.'"

After Goldie's husband died in 1993, she and Sally became closer.

Kathleen Cheek

She and Gene separated in January 1998 after 26 years of marriage. "Gene never had any closure on what happened. I really believe it ruined our marriage. He was afraid to get close to anyone. He had a lot of anger. He felt that everybody owed him. He felt he had been ripped off."

Gene Cheek

Gene moved to Black Mountain in May and started a new job as a salesman for Thermal Swing Windows. For two years, he sold siding and windows for John Dula Construction in Charlotte.

He wanted to sue the state, but lawyers said he waited too long. "I want somebody to answer for this. I want to see them squirm. I want to see them sweat. And I want to see them apologize. Period. There's a lot of pain that's there that this all digs up."

Sally used to ask Gene's wife if he was angry at her. Sally never asked Gene. They never talked about what happened.

"Now that I know the whole story, if she were still alive, I would ask her, 'How in the hell did you get caught up in all this mess?' That was ungodly in 1961. I'm firmly convinced that Tuck was a sympathetic ear and they just fell in love accidentally. I don't feel any anger toward her. I never have...

"I want to be at peace with this situation from here on. I don't want to keep fighting the battle I've fought all my life. I want to let it go. I don't know if it'll make any change in me at all. I'm older and set in my ways. At least it's out. I know the whole story now where I never did before."

He said he understands why Sally didn't try to regain custody of him. "Mom and Tuck were scared they'd take Randy.

"It was almost dehumanizing because of how secretive they had to be. They couldn't go fishing together. They couldn't go to ball games... Or watch the Christmas parade together. Everybody was robbed. Tuck was robbed. Randy was robbed. And Mom was robbed."

(The Gene Cheek story is reprinted with permission from The Charlotte Observer. Copyright owned by The Charlotte Observer.)

Elizabeth Leland's Account of the Story

In February, 2000, a white man named Gene Cheek e-mailed 50 lawyers in North Carolina with this story: In 1963, when he was 12, a family court judge declared his mother unfit to raise him because she had fallen in love with and had a child by a black man. The judge did not declare his mother unfit to raise the black child, but made her choose between keeping her 12-year-old white son or raising her 17-month-old black son. Cheek became a ward of the state.

Cheek never understood being taken from his mother. It haunted his life. Now that she had died, he wanted to know from the lawyers, if he could sue the state.

One lawyer, out of the 50, invited Cheek in to talk. That was my husband, Luke Largess, a civil rights attorney in Charlotte. He quickly determined that Cheek had no legal case: The statute of limitations ran out years ago. But he told Cheek that he knew a writer who might like to tell his story. I telephoned Cheek the next day.

The story he recounted was incredible. But was it true? His brother, Randy, told the same story. His Aunt Goldie. His Uncle Bill. His mother's best friends. Her neighbors.

But for the story to be credible, I needed documentation. The clerks of court in Winston-Salem, where Cheek grew up, had told him repeatedly that there was no record of his case. They told me that, too.

I picked Cheek up early one morning and we rode to Winston-Salem. Cheek and I combed through the same ledgers that the clerks had, looking for any notation in his name. We found his parents' divorce papers decree. We found child support documents. But, as the clerks predicted, we didn't locate his custody case in any of the ledgers where it should have been. We had all day. We decided to look through every other ledger on the shelves and 30 minutes later, halfway down one page, we stumbled over a hand-written notation: "In the matter of Jesse Eugene Cheek."

Cheek sat beside me without saying a word as I threaded the microfilm machine. He was nervous about confronting his past. I was nervous about reading the judge's order. Surely, the judge took Cheek away from his mother for another reason. If so, I wouldn't have a story.

But the judge's order validated everything Cheek had said. Now it was a matter of filling in the details. The order was the first of dozens of documents and interviews that provided the foundation for my story.

I opened the narrative in the courtroom, the point at which Cheek's life changed forever. The courtroom now houses social service offices and is divided into a maze of cubicles. But the judge's bench still sits at one end under 30-foot ceilings, and as we stood before it, memories and emotion poured from Cheek.

What happened was such a major upheaval in the lives of everyone involved that they remembered incidents clearly from those days so long ago. I tried to have at least two people—or one person and a written document—to confirm each anecdote.

The story flowed chronologically. But when I finished writing, I realized it left unsaid the legacy of the case. I wanted readers to understand the lifelong effect of this tragedy on the people involved, and that's why I included the epilogue titled "The Legacy of the Gene Cheek Case."

The reaction was overwhelming—not only for Cheek, who learned much about his life he never knew, but also for readers, some old enough to share the wounds of segregation, some so young they never realized things like this happened in our country. (Leland's series won first place for news features in the North Carolina press Association competition.)