Make a right turn at Shepherd Avenue, and you are confronted by a residential district. The houses are large and gray, all in their separate tree-shaded squares. They do not suggest prosperity, but neither do they bear any hint of poverty. Everything is neat and clean and orderly. Three- or four-year-old automobiles sit parked in the driveways, and these are mostly black; seldom do you encounter a gaudy new model.

It is very quiet, at any time of day or night, here. You will hear the hum of a television set perhaps, or the sound of a vacuum cleaner, but it is never so noisy that you cannot hear distinctly the crickets in the grass.

You continue past these houses, and suddenly the houses stop, and you face a steep hill. It seems to mark the end of civilization. The paving ceases to be; it is replaced by a rutted, chuckholed path of gravel and dirt. The forest and the fields close in. But you go on anyway, up the hill.

An incredible change occurs. You begin to see homes, but they are hardly worth the name. You look over your shoulder and see the green new cup of the town, then you look at the dark shacks that begin to surround you: the ancient, rusted haymows, useless for decades; the piled cordwood; the numerous automobile shells, turned over on their sides or simply sitting, like mechanical cadavers, waiting for the final rot; the square, toothless cages and the serene chickens, searching; and the shacks, the shacks, built of cast-off boards and cast-off nails, all appearing to teeter on the brink of collapse, of certain self-demolition.

You expect to see bowed Negro women in faded dresses, naked Negro children running in happy ignorance, brain-fogged Negro grandfathers sitting statue-still on the decaying porches.

But there are no Negroes here.

The people are white. They are the Poor Whites, the landless, jobless people, who live because they do not die.

Over the hill and down another lane and up another rise is Simon’s Hill, marked by the big, square Baptist church which occupies the promontory above the country ground. This is Reverend Finley Mead’s church, built by himself and his congregation early in 1932, maintained with solemn purpose ever since. Like the courthouse, this church has a bell; but it is a quieter bell. It disturbs no one.

Simon’s Hill is a small section; a group of houses and apartments dotting the rocky landscape, hanging from the steep hillocks. It is almost, but not quite, a community. There is a restaurant—The Huddle—and a tailor shop and several groceries, a barbershop, and a sort of department and general store.