Laymon attends a sold-out Ohio reading and hugs attendees despite coronavirus fears, breaking his promise to protect his elders.

A Jewish teacher spray-paints 'spiritual genocide' on the largest Confederate monument at Ole Miss and is arrested for vandalism.

The Mississippi state legislature votes to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.

Laymon receives his first public school beating for refusing to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Laymon hears OutKast's ATLiens from a friend's dorm room and decides to write fiction rooted in his Southern identity.

Laymon stands for the national anthem at a University of Mississippi football game, breaking a childhood vow to himself.

Grandmama announces she will not visit Oxford for Christmas, questioning why anyone fought to integrate a morally inferior school.

Laymon and his mother exchange emails about Fannie Lou Hamer dying poor despite a lifetime of civil rights work.

Laymon writes to fellow Black men that any kind of love requiring deception is not love.

Laymon interviews D'Andre Brown about his professional basketball career and urges him to make backup plans.

Editor Brandon Farley sends Laymon a letter demanding the novel be revised to appeal to mainstream white readers.

Police stop Laymon's car after a Lilith Fair concert, accuse him of throwing crack out the window, and handcuff him.

Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma fraternity members confront Laymon and his girlfriend Nzola while wearing blackface and Confederate capes.

Laymon and David Rozier are suspended and spanked; Laymon's mother warns him that white people do not care if he dies.

Uncle Jimmy dies and his sister Sue delivers a eulogy declaring he was equally wicked and wonderful, like everyone in the church.

Laymon opens the collection during COVID-19, traveling to readings despite pandemic fears and watching American deaths mount alongside Mississippi's political failures. He moves through essays on identity and place, from standing in Ole Miss's stadium and breaking a childhood vow, to a charged email exchange with his mother about civil rights heroines who died poor. His struggles in New York publishing and on the road expose the machinery of racism in both high culture and daily life. Violence follows him from Pennsylvania to Mississippi, culminating in a fraternity confrontation at Millsaps College and his own moment of crisis in his mother's bathtub. The collection closes with the death of Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Sue's eulogy, which declares that Jimmy was no different from anyone else who has ever struggled to be human.

The headline events that drive the collection from beginning to end.

Laymon drives past two Confederate monuments guarded by Black police officers and fantasizes about blasting 'Fuck tha Police' from his car.

Civil rights activist Frankye Adams-Johnson tells Laymon that young white people are undergoing an awakening similar to the 1960s hippie movement.

Laymon notices a tattered, faded American flag hanging outside his Oxford house but is too afraid to take it down.

Catherine Coleman rises at 4:30am each day, bathes, dresses freshly, and prepares a full breakfast before leaving for the chicken factory.

John Grisham and other prominent Mississippians publish a letter in the Clarion-Ledger urging the state to change its Confederate-emblazoned flag.

A band at an Ole Miss tailgate plays a mash-up of 'Amazing Grace,' 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,' and the Confederate minstrel song 'Dixie.'

Laymon's mother tells him that if she could do it over, she would not choose Mississippi as a place to raise a child.

Mychal Denzel Smith writes to the group that his father has begun saying 'I love you' more after years of emotional distance.

Marlon Peterson writes to the group about moving out of his parents' home after spending a decade in prison.

D'Andre Brown finds his childhood best friend Stef Singleton shot dead in his SUV, sending Brown into a four-month depression.

Laymon finishes revising his novel using Black Southern artists as inspiration and sends the completed manuscript to Farley.

At Oberlin, Laymon's friend Rich Santiago suggests naming a new hip-hop magazine 'Tha Cypher,' which feels inauthentic to Laymon.

Millsaps president George Harmon shuts down the school newspaper in response to Laymon's satirical essay on communal masturbation.

Laymon reflects that half the boys from his seventh-grade class at Holy Family Catholic School died before turning 35.

Aunt Sue finds Uncle Jimmy's journal while cleaning out his house and discovers his hidden pain and private acts of kindness.

Laymon's collection is full of charged secondary moments that reveal how systemic racism shapes everyday life from Oxford to Emmaus to Jackson. He observes Black police officers guarding Confederate monuments and speaks with activists who disagree about whether symbolic change means anything at all. His grandmother's daily ritual of dressing freshly for degrading labor becomes a lesson in dignity, while an Ole Miss band's mash-up of hymns and minstrel songs exposes the contradictions of Southern tradition. A chorus of Black male voices — from a newly released prisoner to a grieving basketball player — explores survival and self-care, and Laymon's own publishing battles reveal how deeply institutional racism runs even inside Black-owned spaces. The pool closes with Aunt Sue's discovery of her brother Jimmy's hidden journal, which opens a window onto pain and quiet kindness that Laymon never knew.

Significant moments across the collection that deepen and complicate the main narrative.

Laymon learns that his former student Kimarlee Nguyen has died from coronavirus after being pressured to abandon her Cambodian identity in her writing.

Young activist Theron Wilkerson tells Laymon that America's deepest sin is its unwavering commitment to remaining the same.

At a New Orleans family reunion, Uncle Billy argues that President Obama simply still being alive is itself a political win.

OutKast releases Aquemini while Laymon reads Octavia Butler's Kindred, and he writes the first notes for his novel Long Division in its margins.

Grandmama insists that Black people must stay in Mississippi because they worked too hard on the land to simply leave it.

Laymon's mother asks him during their email exchange whether he has avoided marriage and children because of his parents' mistakes.

Darnell Moore writes to the group that simply living is the most radical act that Black men can perform.

Kai Green writes to the group about being born a Black girl named Kiana and later undergoing a double mastectomy as part of his transition.

D'Andre Brown steals a cell phone from a cheerleader, gets arrested, and is kicked off his basketball team by his coach.

Someone close to Laymon tells him that his frustrations with publishing are turning him into a monster toward the people he loves.

B. Dazzle presides over a B-Boy hip-hop cipher in a Mississippi school restroom, excluding Black girls from the space while performing for them.

Trimp tells Laymon he is different from the rest of 'his kind'; Laymon turns the same accusation back on Trimp.

Laymon breaks into his mother's empty house, retrieves her gun, gets into the bathtub, and holds the gun to his own forehead.

Laymon's Chicago cousin Jermaine is sent to jail for manslaughter after his younger sister is killed in Chicago.

The last thing Uncle Jimmy says to Laymon is that white people always try to remind Black people they once owned them.

Laymon's collection is structured around a series of revelations that force him and others to see themselves and their country more honestly. The deaths of a former student and the words of a young activist crystallize a vision of America unwilling to change, while his grandmother's declaration that Black people must stay and claim Mississippi reframes endurance as ownership. In letters between Black men, Darnell Moore's claim that simply living is radical and Kai Green's account of physical and psychological transition push the conversation about Black manhood into new territory. Publishing betrayals and a diagnosis bring Laymon to the edge of self-destruction, echoing an earlier night in his mother's bathtub with a gun. The collection closes with Uncle Jimmy's final words to Laymon — a blunt summation of white supremacy's enduring logic — making the entire essay collection legible as the love letter Laymon says he wrote too late.

Key discoveries, decisions, and emotional shifts that define the collection's deeper arc.