A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.

He had one of those good country voices: part drunk, part hound dog, part angel.

Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all-the good and the bad-carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.

Things git easy when it’s nothing else to do. I known that when I weren’t no biggern you are, boy.

I had already learned—without knowing I’d learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power. And it was only by right ways of doing things—ritual ways—that kept any of us safe. Making stories about them was not so that we could understand them but so that we could live with them.

the biography of a childhood which necessarily is the biography of a place, a way of life gone forever out of the world.

I went out the side door, and Sam fell into step behind me as we walked out beyond the mule barn where four mules stood in the lot and on past the cotton house and then down the dim road past a little leaning shack where our tenant farmers lived, a black family in which there was a boy just a year older than I was. His name was Willalee Bookatee. I went on past their house because I knew they would be in the field, too, so there was no use to stop

An oak stump might cost a man a week of his life.

A beating will loosen a child’s hide and let him grow.

We all of us are made out of dirt. God took him up some dirt and put it in his hands and rolled it around and then he spit in the dirt and rolled it some more and out of that dirt and God spit, he made you and me, all of us.