These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.

In the Mountains, they cooked, too.
Joe Godwin made liquor in Muscadine. Moe Shealey made it in Mineral Springs. Junior McMahan had a still in ragland. Fred and Alton Dryden made liquor in Tallapoosa, and Eulis Parker made it on Terrapin Creek. Wayne Glass knew their faces because he drove it, and made more money hauling liquor than he ever made at the cotton mill. He loaded the gallon cans into his car in the deep woods and dodged sheriffs and federal men to get it to men like Robert Kilgore, the bootlegger who sold whiskey from a house in Weaver, about ten minutes south of Jacksonville. "I could haul a hundred and fifty gallons in a Flathead Ford, at thirty-five dollars a load," he said. Wayne lost the end of one finger in the mill, but he was bulletproof when he was running liquor, and only did time once, for conspiracy. "They couldn't catch me haulin' liquor," he said, "so they got me for thinkin' about it.

But I hope that I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books,
by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue,
such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of tears,
or just since the most recent Harry Potter.
I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth
and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them,
hope that I spend my last days on this Earth
arranging and rearranging them
on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany,
because they just feel good in my hands,
because I just like to look at their covers,
and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.