John Bentley Mays left his ancestral region because, like many members of his generation, he believed a larger, more interesting life awaited him beyond the American South. The distance he put between himself and his Southern homeland widened until he eventually settled in Canada and into modern metropolitan life.

Decades later, on a spring morning in 1990, the death of Mays' Aunt Vandalia summons him back to the South. As a result of his fateful return, Mays experiences an awakening of feelings and attitudes linked to his early life and family heritage, and he begins an exploration of his past.

The secrets he uncovers in Vandalia's home motivate him to search for answers through the Virginia tidewater forests his ancestors cleared, the colonial plantations of his distant antebellum relatives, and the towns in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana where they lived through almost four hundred years of American history. Along the route of his journey he encounters echoes of Faulkner, remnants of civil war, and the spirits of colonial-era roads now laden with strip malls.

And like many before him whose ties to their homelands have been broken, Mays struggles with the facts, stereotypes, and contradictions that exist today and color his native cultural landscape.