Morag Fraser

She's talking about what goodness is and what grace might be, but even that's too theoretical.

She just gives you these characters.

Even in that cemetery scene, as she goes out, and Jack is waiting to go out, so he went...

He won't be caught with her.

And the guard at the gate says, what are you doing bringing a black gal in here?

There's dead people in here.

It's breathtaking.

And you begin to realize that one of the reasons that Jack is such an agonized character is that he can never satisfy his father.

And one of the things he can't tell his father, who's a good, God-fearing, Presbyterian preaching man, is that he's married, in common law sense, to a black woman.

And this is Iowa, where there never were laws against miscegenation, but of course in practice, horrible.

There's another scene where she starts dreaming about Wyoming, and she meets an old man who says, why do you not want to go to Wyoming?

It's just full of half-crazed white people.

And she says, but it's part of America.

And this old black man says to her, it is.

You ain't.

Scenes like that, and you think, oh, gosh.

Absolutely.

Absolutely, in different ways, although you move forward and then you move back.

You have an Obama presidency and you have the current presidency.

There's a wonderful little tiny passage, do you remember this one, where it just drops in.