Chapter 15 Summary

Reverend Hickman wakes and tries to stay awake in the event that Bliss will wake up and want to talk again. The minister muses about why things have turned out the way they have. He remembers the events that brought Bliss to him in the first place. Hickman thinks that Bliss "wasn't always ours and yet he first was mine." Hickman goes thinks back in time to a night he was sitting in a lamp-lit room with a rifle and guns, waiting for a lynch mob to come after him. The people in town had lynched Hickman's brother, Robert, for raping a white girl, and their mother died from the grief. Hickman is told to leave town, but refuses. Now, he waits for the mob to come take him, as well. A knock at the door brings not a mob, but a woman...