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FOURTH OF JULY:JOSEPH O'CONNORfamously visited all the Dublins in the US – there are 11 in all – and it was near a Dublin in the Deep South that he had a conversation he has never forgotten. In honour of the Fourth of July, this extract from his new book reflects on that simple conversation and the changes that have since occurred

ALL IN ALL, I’d say I have spent a month in the American South, just roaming around and looking at things and talking to people and being late for everything and making notes and collecting facts for my book. I never once saw anything we might call “racism” and I often found myself wondering why. For this had been the homeland of slavery and segregation. A place where human beings – plenty of them Irish – had sold one another, and owned one another, and branded one another like livestock, and gambled for one another at card tables, and left one another to their children in their will. A place where rape was considered an employer’s perk and where the truths of how life was lived until not all that long ago are so intensely disturbing that you wonder just how it is lived now. And then one night I found myself in a town not far from one of the Dublins, having one of those small, trivial, unimportant conversations you remember for the rest of your life.