Chesnutt's final novel tells the story of Colonel Henry French, a successful New York businessman who has returned to his southern birthplace of Clarendon with his young son, Phil. While intending only a three-month vacation (as ordered by his northern doctor), the nostalgic Colonel French, persuaded by his fond boyhood memories of southern life, decides to remain indefinitely in Clarendon. Yet he encounters a town beset by rigid social divisions,...