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black people in the town, about thirty per cent of the population, are descended from slaves who had worked the plantations in the Black Belt, only a few miles to the north. Many of them bear the peculiar last names that facetious white masters had bestowed upon them at the time of their emancipation: Shakespeare and Hiawatha, and Canteloupe. Some of the black women are employed as maids, and some of the black men work at the plant. Other men and women are hired for seasonal work in the fields and some businesses are operated by blacks specifically for their own community, for there is still rigid segregation in many areas of commerce in the deepest portions of the South. The blacks live their own lives on the other side of Burnt Corn Creek.
    The white people of Pine Cone are for the most part the great-grandsons and -daughters of the sharecroppers and petty landowners who tried, with no more success than their descendants, to work the soil of this region. The white inhabitants of Pine Cone are not overly educated, they are not overly refined, and they are not overly civil to one another. The community is so homogeneous it seems like an extended family, but it is a family that feuds with itself constantly. The Wiregrass is not a region that breeds tolerance or friendliness, and the more genial of human attributes seem to exist in that place by chance and neglect rather than by cultivation. Neighbours distrust one another as a matter of course, and a brother is very careful when he turns his back on his sister. 'To give the benefit of the doubt' is a phrase that is not even understood, much less put into practice, in Pine Cone.
    Religion is a great occupation in this part of the country, and there are many factions among the Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, Congregationalists, and Church of Christ-ers. And many of these denominations are further split up: the Baptists, for instance, come in both the hard-shell and soft-shell variety. Hard-shell Baptists sing their hymns a capella, for they consider bringing a piano or an organ into a sanctuary is no better than turning it into a dance hall. They do not cross their legs, for that is thought to be a form of dancing, and dancing is a sinful abomination. Soft-shell Baptist women cross their legs, but leave the dancing to the Presbyterians and the Methodists and cheerfully damn them to hell for it. Three families of Catholics live in Pine Cone, all of them employed at the factory. Two of the families go every week for services in Andalusia; the third is apostate. There are no Jews in Pine Cone, and no one could be found who would admit to atheism.
    Religion is often hard in Pine Cone but life is not particularly easy itself, and it gets appreciably sterner once you cross the city limits out into the countryside. Many people can see the cotton and peanut fields from their houses, and some plots are never situated within the boundaries of the town. People in the country live in unpainted wooden houses, still without indoor plumbing, with only fireplaces to heat them through the few bitter months of the southern winter. They haven't a dollar to spare for any luxury. The school board had to rescind its order that no student come to school barefoot, when too many children from the country were being kept home because no shoes could be afforded.
    Country people think that the inhabitants of Pine Cone are all rich and wicked, and perhaps by comparison, they are; but people in Pine Cone say that country people are meaner - and they may be right. In any case, the people who live in the country don't like to go into town any more than is necessary, probably once a week for most of them. They have their own little establishments on the highways which serve their midweek needs admirably - Morris Emmons' store, for instance, about five miles to the west of town. It is no bigger than the auto supply store in Pine Cone, but Morris Emmons sellsgas and diesel fuel (at