Ticket to Exile: A Memoir

At age nineteen, A.D. Miller sat in a jail cell. His crime? He passed a white girl a note that read, ''I would like to get to know you better.'' For this he was accused of attempted rape. Ticket to Exile recounts Miller's coming-of-age in Depression-era Orangeburg, South Carolina. Miller reconstructs the sights, sounds and social complexities of the pre-civil rights South, and his youth as a closet rebel who successfully evaded the worst strictures of a racially segregated small town. By the time he is forced into exile, we realize that this fate was inevitable for a young man too intelligent and aware of the limitations of his society to remain there without disastrous consequences.