QUOTE : In this frozen moment, Birchville split in two around me. No, more than that. It wasn’t Birchville only. I saw there was a second South. My whole life I’d only seen one. I loved my South, though I could see how it was broken, plagued still with the legacies of slavery and war and segregation. History and a thousand unseen walls divided up the territory, so that we had a black Baptist church and a white one, and the narrow aisle between the color-coded lunch tables at the high school was invisibly a chasm filled with dragons. Still, I always thought my homeland was a single place. I was wrong.