The world that circumscribed the people I come from,” Crews writes, “had so little margin for error, for bad luck, that when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it.

Crews does not use the word “poverty” to describe the conditions of his upbringing, perhaps because it is a word generally understood in relation to the prosperity of others—that is, as deprivation. … Little as his family had, their community was hardly better off. They did not see themselves as particularly disadvantaged.

I’ve always thought that because my daddy died before I could ever know him, he became a more formidable memory, a greater influence, and a more palpable presence than he would ever have been had he lived.

But whatever I am has its source back there in Bacon County, from which I left when I was seventeen years old to join the Marine Corps, and to which I never returned to live.

Bacon County is my home place, and I’ve had to make do with it.

It would have to be done naked, without the disguising distance of the third person pronoun. … Only the use of I, lovely and terrifying word, would get me to the place where I needed to go.

If the house were still standing today, it would still go by his name. … A farm in Bacon County took a man’s name, not always the first man who owned it, but some man’s name, and once the name was taken, it held the name as long as it stood, no matter who lived there.

The world that circumscribed the people I come from had so little margin for error, for bad luck, that when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it. … It was a world in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.

He was one of my daddy’s friends. … It was a hard time in that land, and a lot of men did things for which they were ashamed and suffered for the rest of their lives.

I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. … But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts.

Auntie made me believe we live in a discoverable world, but that most of what we discover is an unfathomable mystery that we can name—even defend against—but never understand.

They do not see me. It is broad daylight and many of the children are looking right at me. But they don’t—they can’t—see me.

I felt how lonely and savage it was to be a freak.

No matter how awful the stories were that the men told they were always funny.

But it was the women whose stories were unrelieved by humor and filled with apocalyptic vision.

While that was going on, it occurred to me for the first time that being alive was like being awake in a nightmare.

The same day Hollis Toomey came, too. He walked into the house without knocking or speaking to anyone. Nobody had sent for him. But whenever anybody in the county was burned, he showed up as if by magic, because he could talk the fire out of you. He did not call himself a faith healer, never spoke of God, didn’t even go to church, although his family did. His was a gift that was real, and everybody in the county knew it was real.

He did not call himself a faith healer, never spoke of God, didn’t even go to church, although his family did.

When the cups are entirely gone, the mule starts to get a noticeable overbite—buck-toothed.

Any mule, no matter how old he is, that is not worked for a couple of weeks gets as frisky as a colt, his ears are always up, and he farts a lot.

He must have been fifty, but with his body still ropy with muscle, carrying almost no fat, so reticent that he rarely spoke unless spoken to, and never in a hurry.

I always knew he thought about her a lot. Thought. A deliberate word.

I had touched his blood because Uncle Alton had treated me like a son he trusted. Just knowing Uncle Alton was in the world helped me deal with what was ahead of me that year.

God an girls is just like farmin. You cain’t ever git finished. Take sumpin out of the ground and it’s time to put sumpin in again. Soon’s you find out you ain’t never gone git finished, you don’t have to hurry or worry.

I had cursed the sun. And in Bacon County you don’t curse the sun or the rain or the land or God. They are all the same thing. To curse any of them is an ultimate blasphemy.