Letter to William

Dear William,

I wanted to write to you to ask how you felt about finding the essence of America. It seemed to me like you were looking for much the same thing that Steinbeck was looking for when he set off, and had a similar sort of experience while you were out there. Maybe I'm not looking deeply enough into this, because I don't really want to say that you were copying Steinbeck, I just wanted to mention that your two journeys seemed similar to me.

I don't think there were any areas where this was particularly evident, and I don't even mean to say that you had similar experiences while you were traveling, but it was just a sense of similarity that I couldn't shake. Let's take for example the experiences that both of you had there in the South and what transpired. I'll focus on when you were in Selma and met those three gentlemen. You had a profound conversation with them about the effects of racism that they still carry in their lives, and also a mention of how the police officers who are black treat them worse than the white ones do out of some sense of fitting in. At least that's how I remember it being described. Steinbeck didn't really have any experience at all that's analogous to this. He had the situation where he talked to the man. I can't remember quite if it was the Monsieur Ci Git or not, but he talked about how blacks wouldn't be satisfied with gains. I guess his point was more that the blacks had to learn to look at the whites just about as much as the whites had to learn how to look at blacks both of them needed to see each other as people and he wasn't so sure that was going to happen. For some reason it just seemed to me that you two had a similar sort of experience there even though the content between the two is pretty much entirely different.

I also wanted to ask you how much you felt like you were in contact with your Native American heritage while on the trip. I noticed that you fairly often mention the tribes who are residents of an area, and kind of use them to get a sense of the place for us in the story. I was wondering if you felt like through the trip and going through all of these areas that you were able to get a better sense of your heritage or if it remained much the same?