These characters include a runaway slave, a young married couple traveling toward opportunity in the golden state of California, and a young progressive chased out of town by a racist lynch mob. As Scott wrote in a letter to her friend Lola Ridge, explaining Migrations's subtitle, "it really is an arabesque--a scroll with the whirly gig line of one long journey accented with several minor whirly gigs" (qtd. in White 104). Interestingly, in the sparse critical discussion of this novel that exists, the central strand of this arabesque, the long narrative of Thomas and Melinda George's travel from Tennessee to California via Panama, has received less attention than the "minor whirly gigs," especially the book's treatment of black and mixed-raced characters. In neglecting the central "whirly gig" in the novel, Scott's critics have missed the primary focus of Migrations, its depiction of the cultural and identity crisis facing Southerners taken out of the South. Scott's account of the journey of Doctor Thomas George and his young wife, Melinda, is based on her own family history, the story of her great aunt and uncle, whose actual journey becomes the model for the central plot. Having failed to establish a successful practice in Mimms, Thomas decides to try his fortune as a physician in California. The couple departs by ship from Virginia and stops briefly in Jamaica before landing in Panama. In Panama, they travel by mule over land to Panama City and board another ship which takes them to San Francisco. This trip is difficult for the couple for a number of reasons--neither has traveled outside of the country before, Melinda is in the early stages of pregnancy and is often sick on the trip, and, perhaps most importantly, outside of the South both feel very alienated from the world they find around them.