[Awaking in this gleaming grim-visaged city is a more fantastic, more violent version of finding himself thrust into Cambridge, he who until then had rarely left Jefferson and even then never strayed farther north than southern Indiana, weeks and months after which his classmates would still ask, Tell us about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. He feels again that strange skin of otherness, composed of whatever it was that pervaded the air and soil of the South, the dust and sediment of all those governors and generals his family boasted.]

When I'm from, ma'am? [He balks only a moment at the peculiar question.] It was 1910. June 2nd, to be precise.

[The day he told his buddies that he would see them tomorrow, and he left from his dormitory with no intention to ever walk through that door again. The day he had meant to escape time.]

And I'm from Mississippi - Jefferson, Mississippi, although I came up to Boston for school.