Unnamed Outlanders

Both Chick and Gavin at different points in the novel imagine a group they identify as "outlanders" (149, 199). In the second instance Gavin describes them to Chick as the people of "the North and East and West" who are currently seeking to "force on us [the South] laws based on the idea that man's injustice to man can be abolished overnight" (199). Chick's sense of this group as "the North" is more visceral: "countless row on row of faces which resemble his face and spoke the same language he spoke" but who have an "almost helpless capacity and eagerness to believe anything about the South" as long as it is "bizarre enough" (149-50). Much of the novel's second half seems to be written directly for - or perhaps more accurately at - these "people in the North" (151) who need to let the white South "expiate and abolish" the injustices of racism themselves, "alone and without help or even (with thanks) advice" (199).