Summary

Part Two, “Gusimbura,” Chapter Ten: Boston, 2003. For the first few paragraphs of this chapter, narration shifts into first person as author Tracy Kidder tells the story of his relationship with Deo. Kidder writes of how a friend said he and his wife should meet Deo, and of realizing immediately that he was not American – not from any accent or behavior, but because his face lacked “the protective opaqueness that many Americans, maybe especially black Americans, learn to put on for strangers, certainly by the time they are thirty” (149). He also describes hearing details of Deo’s story repeatedly over the next two years; hearing both consistencies and inconsistencies that confirmed its accuracy; and how he seemed to have come to a degree of peace with the horrors he remembered. Part of this, Kidder says, was the result of his (Deo’s) having found “a...