Allendale, which has no shop that sells fruits or vegetables, no grocery store, and no hospital, does have two funeral homes, where business is booming. “All you gotta do in life is stay black and die,” as my great-grandmother used to say. Those are two things you can never get away from. Down here in the South, there’s a lot of blackness and death, something that’s clear even to a genealogy tourist like me.
