In his novel “Separate Pasts,” McLaurin recalls the memories and interactions of his early years with the black community he grew up with as a white man. This book illuminates the realities of segregation in the United States by showing the real discrimination and separation of races in the 1950s in the town of Wade. The first person to truly influence the narrator's racial interpretations was an old friend, Bobo. Throughout the beginning of the novel, McLaurin emphasizes the frequency of interracial encounters and how the narrator reacted to them. In "Separate Passes", the narrator describes an event in which he licked a needle that his playmate Bobo, the black boy who lived behind the narrator's grandfather's store, had licked before. “A split second after placing the needle in [his] mouth, [he] was shaken by one of the most overwhelming emotional experiences of [his] young life. Instantly, an awareness of the racial prejudices shared by generations of white society coursed through every nerve in [his] body” (37). Once he realizes this, the cheerful narrator...