He was a “liberated Mississippian” who had just joined New York’s burgeoning and implacable Southern expatriate community; he was the first of many Mississippi ‘exiles’ I would see in the Big Cave – for, in truth, as I would come to understand, Mississippi may have been the only state in the Union (or certainly one of a half dozen in the South) which had produced a genuine set of exiles, almost in the European sense: alienated from home yet forever drawn back to it, seeking some form of personal liberty elsewhere yet obsessed with the texture and the complexity of the place from which they had departed as few Americans from other states could ever be.”