Leadbelly (film) and a drunken friend are playing around with a gun, and Leadbelly accidentally shoots him. He is thrown in prison where he is forced to work in a chain gang. When he tries to escape, he is caught and put in a box. His father arrives and tries to bail Leadbelly out, but fails. Before leaving, he manages to convince the warden to get Leadbelly a twelve-string acoustic guitar. After getting the new guitar, he plays a song for Governor Pat Neff who reassures Leadbelly he will be set free. After he leaves prison, he returns to Fannin Street, sees
Where I Was From [...] misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely." "Where I Was From" is also in parts a retrospective on Didion's work, examining how these "confusions" affected books such as "Run, River". Diane Johnson summarizes the apparent hypocrisies of California culture that Didion discusses in the book: "Like all California children, Didion had been fed the old stories of California history, but when she eventually came to think about them, she could see they didn’t 'add up.' The disjunction between myth and reality was too large,