 You have to remember that in this era of the early 1900s, places like Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas were places where black folks had very few rights. You know, in the book I write about this family, the Goodwin family, who were living in rural Mississippi in the early 1900s in a town called Water Valley. Now, Water Valley was a place where if a black man was walking on the sidewalk and a white man approached him, the black man was expected to scurry into the gutter.