 I think that the interaction with history when I set out to write this book is very much like that final image, that it is intimate, that in many ways you lie down with it and you come up knowing a lot more than you did before. So my journey back to Mississippi was about both finding out things that I did know and reckoning with some things that I didn't quite know. Now one of the things that I do know about Mississippi, and perhaps many of you know this about Mississippi and many other states in the Union, but in the 60s when I was born there were over 20 states that still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books. And most of them have removed them at this point now, including Mississippi now finally ratifying the 13th Amendment. They've removed those anti-miscegenation laws from the books. But in Alabama, for example, only about 15 years ago did they vote to remove the anti-miscegenation laws from the books. Forty-some percent of the population voted, however, to keep them so that it could be said that symbolically parents like mine couldn't be married legally and people like me born legally in the state. Miscegenation. In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi. They went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi. They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong, miss in Mississippi. A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi. Faulkner's Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi. My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name. I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi. When I turned 33 my father said, it's your Jesus year, you're the same age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi. I know more than Joe Christmas did, Natasha is a Russian name, though I'm not. It means Christmas child, even in Mississippi. This program has been brought to you by Kinex.