After twenty-three years, Adam was finally returning to the state of
his birth. He drove across the flat plain of the Mississippi, following
the traffic south. He was on Highway 61, which for decades had
served as the principal route for hundreds of thousands of poor
blacks journeying north to Memphis and Chicago and Detroit in
search of jobs and decent housing. The fields of beans and cotton
grew vast and ran to the horizon. Though it was not yet nine
o’clock, the weather was already hot and sticky.