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"Yeah... I guess you would," Tennessee said with a weak smile and hoped Wisconsin would never be forced into the same position he'd been in so many years ago. If things like "loyalty" became subjective and the only way to protect one half of his people was to kill the other Tennessee wondered what Wisconsin might have done. Maybe the older state would have been able to handle it better, but Tennessee didn't think it was something he could talk about to anyone outside of the South except for Missouri. It just wasn't something that could be explained to someone who hadn't felt it.

"Uh, thanks," Tennessee said although he felt a little unnerved by the smile. "I'm not really sure what you mean though."

"That so..." Tennessee said more than asked. He frowned at the head rubbing and wondered if all this talk was upsetting Wisconsin's migraine. But he just couldn't help asking... "What's your goal?"

Tennessee blinked and stared at Wisconsin for a moment. He thoughtfully tilted his head to the side as he tried to understand why that unsettled him so much.

"I guess it's nice you want to be a good role model for all of us," he said after a moment, "but don't you think that's askin' an awful lot of yourself? Sounds exhaustin' to me."

"Oh...I guess that explains some things..." Tennessee muttered as he recalled Wisconsin's statehood. Now that had been a day he never thought South Carolina and Georgia would stop hissing and spitting about. When the radical made himself known on equal footing as the other states there had been more than a little complaining among the southerners.

"I don't think I had a goal other than to be a state," Tennessee mused as he recalled his own rise to statehood. "Well, I was hoping America might actually be forced to protect my people if I was a state... That might have been part of it, but nothin' as fancy as what you're talkin' about."

"Pretty sure," Tennessee said even as he wondered what on earth Wisconsin meant. "I mean... I'd been fightin' with Cherokee for about 20 years at that point. I'd never had the time to think about somethin' big like that. I just wanted things to be stable." He smiled a bit as he recalled the first time he'd known what real peace felt like even though it had taken the frontiersman a while to recognize it as peace. "Back then the best feelin' in the world was knowin' I could go to sleep without my riffle in the bed."

"Hm..." Tennessee was thoughtful for a few moments. "Well, there was the whole Manifest Destiny thing. Me and Kentucky wanted to find the end of the world... Er, well, it felt like the end of the world to us." He gave Wisconsin a sheepish grin and couldn't help feeling embarrassed by the childhood goal. "When we saw the Pacific Ocean we really thought we'd conquered the whole wide world. I guess back then neither of us realized how big it was... Ohio always told us we should actually look at a real world map, but we wanted to chart it ourselves."

"I seem to recall," Tennessee said as he did his best to keep a straight face. He could think of more than a few people who would have blown up into ancient and out-dated arguments just from that simple statement.

"After that... Let's see..." Tennessee muttered as he tried to recall before blushing again. "Oh, I guess after World War I was when I started it... playin' music for people, I mean. There were still a lot of hurt feelings and that drought was gettin' bad. I'd heard some people say my music made them feel better so I started gettin' on the radio. I didn't realize at the time it would take off like it did, but I guess that was sort of a goal."

Even though Wisconsin wasn't totally making sense to him, Tennessee smiled at that bit of logic. He couldn't say he always agreed with Wisconsin but the other state did honestly seem to care about people's happiness.

"You're a good person," Tennessee determined. "It's good you're always tryin' to do the right thing. I don't know if I'm that good..." He shifted a little and wasn't sure why he was saying this, but after talking so much about the past it just seemed kind of natural even if they weren't close friends. No, perhaps it was because they weren't close and had once been enemies that he could say this. "I've done some things I'm not too proud of even when I didn't think it was right... I... I knew slavery was bad long before the Civil War," he admitted uncomfortably. "I recognized it was evil but... it was so ingrained in everything back then I didn't know how to let it go. The North always acted like abolition was easy, and I guess it was because their slave populations had always been pretty low, but it seemed so complicated when I tried to figure it out... I didn't know where to put them or how to compensate all those slave holders so I wound up doin' nothin'."

The former slave state looked over at Wisconsin. His normally absent minded, calm brown eyes were filled with an unnatural amount of guilt and shame. "The KKK was my fault... I coulda stopped them if I'd tried harder," he said, "but they were my people and I believed them when they said they wanted to help me. I was scared of the radicals and I thought they'd just get rid of the bad Republicans and people who voted for them. But then... even after they were gone... even when Forrest told them to stop... my black population..."

Tennessee's grip tightened on the steering wheel. "I'm sorry," he blurted out as he dropped eye contact. "Because I didn't do anything back then the KKK even spread to your place, didn't it? Even though you try so hard to be good, something terrible like the KKK got into your home because of me..."

He forced himself to look back up at Wisconsin and his breath almost caught in his throat when he got glimpse of something behind that veil of hair. States normally healed completely from wounds, didn't they? What on earth could have happened to Wisconsin that had left him permanently scared? When did Wisconsin start wearing his hair like that, anyway? The Volunteer State's head buzzed with questions and wondered how he could have missed one of the other states getting hurt so badly.