Mississippi Trial, 1955

Throughout the text, father-son relationships are presented as complicated things that do not have clearly-defining rules or regulations. These relationships ebb and flow throughout the text and become a point of concern for Hiram as he navigates his own relationship with his father and with his grandpa. That you can love someone but dislike what they believe or how they act is an emotionally-complex dynamic. Hiram does not really begin to understand this until he returns to Greenwood and sees that his relationship with his own father is dangerously on the path that his father has with Grampa, a fate he wants to avoid. His experience that summer in Greenwood allows him to go back to Arizona and renew a healthy relationship with his father. R.C. and Naomi Rydell are another example of a negative father-child dynamic, but in a more extreme way, insofar as having to deal with a physically- and emotionally-abusive father. This is something R.C. chooses to escape by moving to Jackson, and Hiram continually wants to save Naomi from this situation. 

Grampa and many other inhabitants of Greenwood and the surrounding area work under the rallying cry that the South will remain exactly as it is.