Chapters 5 through 9 Summary and Analysis

Bryson continues his trip, cutting across the southern edge of Kentucky so that he was out of the state just forty minutes after entering. He stops in Jackson, Tennessee, for a burger, cites the fact that it's twenty degrees hotter than when he left Carbondale that morning, and that he's in the Bible Belt. When a young girl says, "kin I help yew," Bryson is certain he's now in another country.

When he reaches Mississippi, he recites the movies he's seen set in the south and says that they all depict southerners as "murderous, incestuous, shitty-shoed rednecks." He mentions the three young men - Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and a black man named James Chaney - who were killed during the tumultuous race riots of the region. A police officer who pulls up beside him says, "Hah doo lack...