What I had seen of the rural South, with few exceptions, were level landscapes, deforested and flattened farmland, tufty, snow-like expanses of cotton fields, low hills at best, thin parched woods, their dead leaves crackling under the strutting claws of wild turkeys, meadows blinded by rows of hickories and black gums at the margin of stony roads that looked as if they led all the way to the nineteenth century, and many did: an exhausted countryside, circumscribed and spoken for. But in the great hot sadness of a land that looked gnawed and hacked at and dug out and trampled, the river
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