Summary

Chapter 1. The first-person narrator begins his story by referring to his years-long unhappiness, and how he has been seeing, in the faces of young people, reminders of people who died when he was young himself. He goes on to say that “the period in my life of which I am about to tell involves a late night in the winter of 1989, when I was fifteen years old and [Rosemary Blackwell] died in front of me” (1). He then describes how he ended up in the foster home where he and Rosemary both lived – first, how he and his mother had to leave their home in Cherokee County after his father disappeared and a succession of men became abusive towards his frequently drunk mother. “… like our ancestors,” Sequoyah, the narrator, says, “my mother and I traveled out of the land with our clothes and food...