"It may seem odd that a very short book should have incurred such a long list of people to whom I am endebted, but most of these debts were acquired long before this project was even conceived. Some are owed to my maternal grandmother Carrie for the stories she shared during idle moments on our back porch about the history of the place we inhabited and in other more emotionally charged moments when she silently modeled for a preadolescent boy how one might negotiate its hostile terrain with dignity. Others are owed to my father, whose stories about how our family's history evolved in that hostile place and about the different worlds he had seen far beyond its confining and sometimes confounding boundaries somehow enabled me to think differently about my own place in the world. Growing up in a hostile world can make one self-destructive, but somehow these stories delegitimized its rule and suggested that building a very different world was possible"--