The Prologue opens with a description of McLaurin going to work at his Granddaddy Lonnie Mac’s store, where he becomes fascinated by the “unknown, mysterious” African American customers. Separate Pasts opens with a memory of a September day in 1953 when McLaurin is in seventh grade. McLaurin takes a bus from school to Lonnie’s store. He watches the kids from the school next door playing outside. The students are just like him and his friends. However, the students are African American, and McLaurin is white.

From seventh grade until he leaves for college, he works every weekday afternoon after school and Saturday. In the summers, he works every day except Sunday. McLaurin establishes himself as an outsider who has little contact with African American people. This dynamic changes when he begins working at the store: He writes that he “walked through the door into the store, and into their lives” (2).

Chapter 1 describes of the town of Wade, North Carolina, in the 1940s and 1950s. McLaurin was born in Wade and comes of age in the segregated South. A plain town spanning one square mile, Wade was rural, poor, and traditional. The Wade of 1953 shows little signs of change from 1933 or even 1893.