It is the beginning of 1971 and Alan McLaurin, dreaming of solitude and longing for the wintry smell of cedar and pine he knew growing up in rural Mississippi, has left Boston behind to return to what remains of his family's ancestral homeplace in Chickasaw Ridge. He finds the small closed community still haunted by memories of 1964, when civil rights activists fought for integration while the Ku Klux Klan roamed the back roads. It was during that summer that a local black church was destroyed by arsonists.

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