Set in North Carolina, this chapter reconnects readers with Kathy Fentress at the beginning of the spring semester of her sophomore year at Duke University. Her college experience to this point has been dispiriting: very hard academically and socially uncomfortable. The one aspect of her life that has felt consistently rewarding has been her involvement with civil rights.

She traces her journey here to the unique circumstances of her birth. She was born in mid-June 1944 on the very day that her father died in the South Pacific, fighting for freedom. Her experience in the summer of 1963—first supporting teenage activists in St. Augustine, and then attending the March on Washington—galvanized her interests. In the 1963-64 school year, she befriends Harry Boyte, Jr., a Duke student whose father is on the SCLC staff. Boyte sets up a CORE chapter on campus and begins spearheading protests in nearby Chapel Hill. These protests are met with increasingly virulent resistance. On February 1, the fourth anniversary of the famed Greensboro sit-in, Fentress is arrested for the first time and spends her first night in jail.