Summary

The novel opens with a single line specifying the place and date of the action: “Wichita Falls, Texas, Winter 1870” (1). Its first paragraph introduces Captain Kidd, who is reading aloud from an article in The Boston Journal on the Fifteenth Amendment. Rather than identifying Captain Kidd’s audience, the novel adopts the third person perspective and gives a brief overview of his life from the time he was born in 1798. After participating in three wars and running a print shop, Captain Kidd now makes his living by traveling through towns in North Texas and reading “the news of the world” (1), which he gathers from newspapers and journals.

Back in the present, Captain Kidd is explaining the meaning of the Fifteenth Amendment. When he mentions “colored people” (2), the audience starts to mutter. Captain Kidd hushes them and begins reading an article from The New York Tribune...