Summary

This section takes us back to 1968. Faye is in high school. She lives at home with her parents and, at night, she sits outside and listens to men like her father working away at the nearby ChemStar factory. It is the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Faye is thinking about this and she is also thinking about her impending start to college at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in four months. On the news, rioters are fighting in reaction to the assassination, and Faye’s mother tells Faye how dangerous it is to be in Chicago right now. Faye knows there are riots happening in Chicago right now, but she also knows that her mother wants her to, “. . . stay home and go to the nice little two-year school the next town over” (218). Faye had applied...