In his novel “Separate Pasts,” McLaurin recalls memories and interactions from his early years with the black community with which, as a white male, he grew up. This book highlights the reality of segregation in the United States by showing the real discrimination and separation of races in the 1950s in the city 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 highlights how frequently interracial encounters occurred and how the narrator reacted to them. In “Separated Pasts,” 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 already licked before. “A split second after placing the needle in [his] mouth, [he] was jolted by one of the most shocking emotional experiences of [his] young life. Immediately an awareness of the racial prejudices shared by generations of white society ran through every nerve in [his] body” (37). Once this is realized, the narrator gai...