Old man Thomas Cross was the second chairman of the deacon board of First Baptist of Tims Creek, and his father, Ezra, who got so much land from the old Cross family, so the saying goes, in the 1870s, once slavery was over, was the first—he even donated the land the church stands on. (Folks like to say how we got our land cause we belonged to the Cross family who was given almost half North Carolina in the eighteenth century. But truth is most of that land, which actually was a considerable piece, wont nothing to a man who owns thousands and thousands of acres of land, so much land he ain’t seen a fifth of it his ownself—course we lost almost three-thirds of that in the thirties. So what we got today, we built up out of sheer hard work. Ain’t nobody give us nothing.) But Grandpap couldn’t have been more than thirteen or so around Emancipation cause he use to tell us a tale about how he was a boy running around in the quarters the time Lincoln come down to Crosstown to meet with Geoffrey Cross who had been a senator from North Carolina before the Civil War. How he—and I suspect he added right much to the tale whether it was true or no—peeped through a window of the big house and saw Lincoln and old Geoffrey puffing cigars and playing poker. But Grandpap was a good taleteller. He could put together the best lie I ever heard come out of a man’s mouth, and not crack smile the first. He’d talk about sailing to Africa and Europe and all overseas, just as pretty, talking about them mountains and hills, so green, coconut trees against the shore and giraffe heads poking up over them, and wild cannibals with clothes made out of human hair, about sailing down the Mississippi, fighting wild Indians, about the time he went up to Canada tracking bear and had to kill one with a fishing knife . . . and we sitting there, with our mouths gaped open, believing every word of it, knowing at the same time full well that Grandpap hadn’t been no further south than Wilmington, not further west than Fayetteville, and no further north than Raleigh—and that when he was sixty at least . . .