In 1965, more than five decades after a forced estrangement from his black boyhood friend Bisco, Erskine Caldwell set out across the South find him. On the journey, which took him from South Carolina to Arkansas, Caldwell spoke to many people on the pretense of asking Bisco's whereabouts: a black college professor in Atlanta, Georgia; a white real estate salesman in Demopolis, Alabama; a black sharecropper in the Yazoo Basin of the Mississippi Delta; a transplanted white New England housewife in Bastrop, Louisiana, and others. Eighteen of those conversations, with Caldwell's commentary make up this book.