38 pages • 1-hour read
Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The Prologue opens with a description of McLaurin going to work at his Granddaddy Lonnie Mac’s store, where he becomes fascinated by the “unknown, mysterious” African American customers. Separate Pasts opens with a memory of a September day in 1953 when McLaurin is in seventh grade. McLaurin takes a bus from school to Lonnie’s store. He watches the kids from the school next door playing outside. The students are just like him and his friends. However, the students are African American, and McLaurin is white.
From seventh grade until he leaves for college, he works every weekday afternoon after school and Saturday. In the summers, he works every day except Sunday. McLaurin establishes himself as an outsider who has little contact with African American people. This dynamic changes when he begins working at the store: He writes that he “walked through the door into the store, and into their lives” (2).
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Village”
Chapter 1 describes of the town of Wade, North Carolina, in the 1940s and 1950s. McLaurin was born in Wade and comes of age in the segregated South. A plain town spanning one square mile, Wade was rural, poor, and traditional. The Wade of 1953 shows little signs of change from 1933 or even 1893. Segregation structured social life within the community, and racial attitudes did not change in this period. McLaurin argues that the white inhabitants believed that the “South had always been, and would remain, a white man’s country” (3).
Wade is typical of the cotton and tobacco country across southeastern North Carolina. The community was surrounded by farms. People found work in the sawmill, while the cotton gin provided seasonal work. McLaurin encounters a wide variety of people at the store, including “owners of small farms, masons, carpenters, preachers, bootleggers, and con men,” while women found work as “schoolteachers, housewives, farm women, maids, cooks, and practical nurses” (24).
McLaurin recounts his family history. His family is well-off and respected. His grandfather, Lonnie Mac, owns a store, and his father, Merrill, is a successful insurance salesman and active in local politics. His good breeding gives him status within the community. Like many families in the South, his parents and grandparents believe in white superiority and support segregation. However, African American labor supported the lifestyles of many white families like his own.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
McLaurin vividly situates the reader within the town of Wade before turning to a series of personal encounters that slowly transform his understanding of race. This structure establishes the narrative style of the book, which deals heavily in personal anecdotes. The book takes place in the past, as McLaurin reconstructs the memories of his youth in a deeply personal way. At times, his voice from the present intrudes, foreshadowing social changes or making corrections to the beliefs described.
The opening of Separate Pasts describes life in Wade, North Carolina. At first glance, Wade seems timeless and impervious to change. The close-knit community is more interested in local matters than national events. It seems that nothing will ever change in the small village. The structures of family and the church form strong social bonds. We see McLaurin’s growing awareness of the divisions of class and race in the small town. He begins to locate inconsistencies and fractures in the seeming inevitably of the social and racial order.
The book introduces some of the broader social and political context of the period. McLaurin introduces key markers of change: the 1954 Supreme Court judgment in the Brown school case that desegregated schools, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Across America, the rumblings of racial change were emerging in the two decades before the civil rights movement. In towns like Wade, people “chose to ignore it and by an act of will, suspend the course of history” (4). McLaurin describes a community in which everyone is afraid to question anything in fear that the whole structure of white supremacy will come down, pointing to the fragility of segregation as a belief.
McLaurin uses Chapter 1 to flesh out the setting of the memoir and to establish the history of the town. However, he doesn’t dwell on these external factors. Instead, he goes on to emphasize the personal encounters that shaped his beliefs as a young person. He describes his own general acceptance of segregation being undermined by his exposures to African American people.
Unlock all 38 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs