The year: 1970. Deep rural North Carolina. At his dying mother's request, Arlis Morrow, a white newspaper reporter, returns to his small isolated hometown to seek a black man he had known 30 years earlier as a five-year-old playmate and not seen since. With his mother's motivation strangely veiled, Arlis begins seeking clues to the man's whereabouts, encountering subtle resistance from both black and white townspeople - a courtly undertaker, a glad-handing politician, a secretively obsessed Pentecostalist, a sheriff with a shrouded past. Despite their resistance, Arlis gradually unearths...