The first four chapters of The Road to Memphis take place mostly in rural Great Faith, Mississippi, near the Logan farmhouse during October 1941.

Cassie, who now attends school in Jackson, still has a fondness for the country, especially the land that has been in the Logan family for forty years. She and her family, however, are still subject to verbal and physical abuse, especially when they visit the nearby store owned by the Wallaces, their white neighbors. Cassie and her friends also encounter racial hatred when they go hunting in the woods near a river called the Rosa Lee.

The nearest town, Strawberry, where Moe Turner is provoked into attacking Statler Ames in chapter five, is in Cassie's mind "a sad, desolate place" that has not changed much over the years.

The old men who sit on the veranda of the Barnett Mercantile "seem like gray sentinels from...