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A tractor road muddied by autumn rain in Lee County
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1970: I photographed the Landers sisters on the steps of Mount Calver Baptist Church of Christ, the makeshift chapel built by their preacher father in a shack in Rawlinson.
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1970: A young marine home on leave stood at attention in front of a sharecropper shack where a field worker lived with his blind wife and two blind sons.
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1971: On a freezing Saturday morning the Valentine children watched TV, though the plastic and cardboard on the windows barely kept out the wind and cold.
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1969: I drove out past the town of Marion beneath a quiet sky, as beautiful as anything I’d seen, to the house of a woman who lived by herself.
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Early one morning I was driving past a row of abandoned workers' houses north of Lehi when I spotted a pair of women's shoes on a porch. In a Lucite box, covered in ruby red glitter, they glowed like broken glass.
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2010: I was driving away from the cotton gin in Widener when I caught sight of an elderly woman sitting on her porch. Her name was Viola Perkins, and when I asked if I could take her picture, she smiled, either happy to have a visitor or too polite to refuse. The photograph captures her reflection in the dusty window of her house.
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2010: Jeannette Kern gently smoothed back the hair of her niece, Kequsha, who looked to be in her own private world yet aware of everything going on in her aunt’s tiny house in Crawfordsville.
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The rural delta is almost emptied of people as farmworkers have been replaced by machines. Few old houses remain, most having collapsed or been torn down. I encountered one, hidden by trees.
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A tractor created an explosion of dirt and stones as a farmer south of Marianna dug shallow trenches to ready a field for growing rice.
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I met Billy D. Harris just before dawn at the country store in Aubrey, then followed him out to cotton fields that were soon so hot everyone dripped with sweat. Billy pulled off his shirt before continuing to “chop,” or thin the growing plants.
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Close to sunset, I followed the Kern children as they walked home, stopping to pet their dogs, seeming to dance in the shimmering heat.
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On a steamy Sunday evening at the PM & A auto body shop in Brinkley, people wandered in, one by one, to shoot pool. Zenoria Palmer paced back and forth in her gold boots, bumming cigarettes, razzing everyone till it was her turn at the table.
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2010: The Peter’s Rock Church in Marianna is no everlasting monument; it has been left to rot, its windows broken, its steeple fallen over. Still, I found it beautiful. Kneeling in the cemetery, listening to the insects hissing, watching as a dog wandered past, I felt history coming at me from all sides.
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