North Alabama, in the middle years of the twentieth century. Towns with names like Sheffield and Florence and Tuscumbia. Muscle Shoals and Elkmont and Tanner, Aberdeen and Dunleith and Wheeler. The Tennessee River flows through this country, flowing southward to meet its eastern half at Guntersville Lake. This is the Appalachian Valley, the Appalachian Highlands, and the Piedmont Plateau. This is where my father’s people came when they left Scotland. They are cold laughing people, with beautiful faces and unshakable wills. They are powerful and hot-tempered. They never forget a slight, never forgive a wrongdoing. They seldom get sick. They get what they want because they believe they are supposed to have it. They believe in God as long as he is on their side. If he wavers, they fire the preacher. I had never been comfortable with them. Never liked to visit long in Aberdeen, their stronghold in the middle of their cotton fields. They had settled the land on Spanish land grants and cleared it with slave labor. They loved to read the old wills in which their ancestors left slaves to each other. It made them sad to think they couldn’t keep slaves anymore but had to let the black people do anything they liked, might soon even have to let them vote.

I came due south from Nashville and drove into the sleepy little town of Dunleith in the afternoon of the last day in May. I found the main street, using a map my father had drawn for me, and followed it to Wheeler. I turned onto Wheeler and immediately began to be seduced. Huge elm trees lined the street on either side. Behind the elms were magnificent houses, each one bigger and more elaborately Victorian than the last. I began to want to live in one of these huge painted houses. I do not know what I thought such a house might do for me, but I wanted the biggest one of all. Three blocks from the corner there it was. A huge chocolate-colored palace with turrets and balconies and porches. I parked the car and got out and looked up at the door. My mother came running down from a screened-in porch. She was wearing the black Mexican wedding skirt she had bought the year before when my father was having his love affair and she had run away to New Orleans for her nervous breakdown. She came flying down the steps with her hair all in ringlets and began to hug me. “My goodness, honey,” she said. “You’ve gained so much weight. I thought you were on the swimming team.”

“I won the freshman writing contest, Momma. I didn’t even enter it. I won first place.”

“We’ll take you to a doctor tomorrow and get you some of the new pills. We’ll go in the morning. Well, come on in and see the house. Isn’t it beautiful? Don’t you like it?”