Hartford, Alabama—a Future Farmers of America banquet. I am about to speak for a group of Minnesotans. These are rural people with Northern accents. Gentle people who know how to handle large animals, and how to milk them.

I’ve never performed before any Minnesotans before. In fact, I don’t know much about Minnesota, except that it’s somewhere below the Arctic Circle.

The truth is, I don’t know why anyone would ask me to speak over a microphone at all.

The first time I ever got on stage, I was seven. I sang at our church. It was a Wednesday night. I was so nervous I nearly puked. My father gave me some sound advice beforehand:

“Imagine the entire audience in their underpants,” he said.

“Do what?”

“That’s right,” he went on. “Pretend they’re all wearing underwear.”

This, he claimed, would take the sting out of my nervousness and help me remember that everyone is virtually the same beneath the surface.

It sounded like a good idea. And it

might have worked if the front pews hadn’t been filled with members of the women’s Bible study group. Because when I envisioned twenty-one elderly women of virtue in their tighty-whities, I choked.

My Aunt Eulah was in the front row, smiling. I couldn’t help but visualize her wearing a granny girdle, nylons, and a military-grade underwire.

I was supposed to sing “Rock of Ages” that Wednesday, but I ended up singing “Honky Tonk Woman.”

Anyway, this is a yearly thing here in Hartford. Every November, high-schoolers from Hartford’s sister city in Litchfield, Minnesota, visit this town to experience life in the South.

Tonight, I am seated at a table with some of these quiet Minnesotans. We are eating downhome cuisine, sipping sweet tea. My new friends do not know what sweet tea is.

They have also never eaten collards, hog head…

I watched a fifteen-year-old boy with cerebral palsy hit a baseball. It was something else. His father pitched full speed from the mound, just like a major-leaguer. The boy held the bat with unsteady hands.

Crack.

Base hit.

The kid smacked it so hard it made the fence. His mother cheered in the bleachers. So did I.

The fifteen-year-old didn’t even run. He started to cry. So did his daddy. They held each other in the batter’s box for awhile.

“You don’t understand,” said his mother. “They’ve been working on just HOLDING a bat for years. He NEVER gets a hit.”

He did today.

Tanya—I meet her in the Walmart. She has six children with her. The oldest is pushing the cart. Two are in the basket. Three follow.

These are not her biological children.

Tanya’s been fostering for a long time. She used to do it with her husband—he died several years ago.

Her husband had been raised in the foster system. He had been passionate about fostering.

“We used to spend every dime we made on these kids,” she says. “My

husband would say, ‘If you only knew how hard it is growing up feeling like nobody wants you. I know what it’s like.’”

After his death, she carried on his tradition. And even though she’s unmarried, she welcomes new kids by the handful.

Yolanda. She is from Ecuador. She was a victim of human-trafficking. She was saved. Since then, she’s made a new life for herself. She is about to become a certified personal fitness trainer.

As part of her rehabilitation, she started spending time in gyms. She enjoyed it so much that she decided to make it her profession.

“I LOVE working out,” says Yolanda. “I take out all my angry thoughts on these machines.”

Yolanda has a boyfriend. They just got engaged last month. He is from Mexico. He is a Pentecostal preacher.

“I’m always…

It’s National Redhead Day so I went to get my haircut. Because I am a committed redhead.

On the day I was born, the doctor who delivered me happened to be a redhead, too. The first thing the he saw when I exited the birth canal was my hair.

They tell me he high-fived my father—who was also a redhead. My mother says they shouted, “We redheads gotta stick together!”

And when nurses handed me to my mother, she was so overcome with maternal emotion that she touched my hair and her first words were: “Why is my son’s head shaped like a triangle?”

I’m not kidding about this. When I was a newborn, I had a pointy head and bore a striking resemblance to a sharpened No. 2 pencil. Because of this, my mother made me wear a stocking cap for the first three years of my life.

Anyway, I normally get haircuts by Miss Connie, who has been cutting my hair for a long time.

She’s a sweet lady, and I know she won’t mind me telling you that she has a wandering eye.

The first time I ever met Miss Connie, I was the only customer in the empty salon. She greeted me at the door. One eye was staring at me, the other was not.

She smiled and said, “Don’t freak out, I know I’m cross-eyed, but I cut good hair. Now, which one of you boys wants to go first?”

She laughed.

“Just kidding,” she said. “I can see fine, Sweetie. In fact, I have double vision, which means I see TWICE as good as you.”

She laughed again until she choked.

I considered throwing myself in front of a moving bus to avoid her scissors, but that woman ended up giving me the best haircut I ever had in my life. I’ve been going back…

My earliest memory is of my mother. She’s at a breakfast table. She sits alone in a gaudy brown kitchen, head bowed, hands folded.

She is speaking in a whisper, I don’t know who she’s talking to. I’m too young.

Her eyes are closed. The sun is rising in the window behind her. She’s dressed for work, sipping coffee.

“What’re you doing?” I ask.

“That’s between me and the Good Lord,” she says.

My teenage years. A few years after my father took his own life. These were hard years. She sat on an a burgundy sofa. She closed her eyes and whispered toward the ceiling.

I couldn’t make out her words.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“It’s between me and the Good Lord,” she says.

Over time, I grew into my big feet, and my large nose. I turned into a man—sort of.

My mother fell ill. Deathly ill. She moved to Atlanta so my aunt and uncle could care for her.

I drove to Clayton County to visit her. She greeted me in the driveway at 2 A.M. on a cold November morning.

In

the glow of my headlights stood the once-healthy woman who raised me. She was nothing but hickory sticks and muscle.

The next morning, I found her sitting cross-legged on an easy chair. Her eyes closed, whispering to the ceiling fan. The skin around her eyelids wrinkled like tissue paper.

Doctors told us the disease would kill her. The illness was eating blueberry-sized holes in her muscles. It would eventually reach her heart.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

Then, she touched my hair. “You know that when you were a toddler, I used to rub your hair like this, and it would make you go to sleep?”

She rubbed my hair. I leaned into her lap the way I did when I was a child.

The woman held a grown man the…

A little restaurant. The men in the booth behind me are old. They are telling jokes to one another. They are loud men. They have white hair, mugs of coffee, hearing aids.

One man wears overalls. Another wears suspenders with bass fish on them. Welcome to Rural America.

Whenever one man finishes a joke, the others slap their knees and say, “Hooooo boy!”

My waitress tries to take my order, but she can’t concentrate, we’re both eavesdropping on the old men.

An elderly man says:

“So a fella and wife go to Heaven. There’s a BIG CROWD, standing around. And Saint Pete says to everybody:

“‘Men, listen up! Whichever men wore the pants in their household, form a single-file line over HERE! And all men who were henpecked by their wives, stand over THERE!

“And almost every man went to the henpecked line. Except ONE guy, who stood alone in the other line. So Saint Pete shook the man’s hand and said, ‘Sir, I just wanna congratulate you.’

“‘For what?’ the

guy said. ‘I’m only here because my wife told me to stand here.’”

The punchline hits like an atom bomb. One man laughs so hard he almost ruptures his gallbladder.

“Hoooooo boy!”

When I was a boy, my father had hundreds of jokes like this. I would overhear him tell these anecdotes to his roughneck friends and I wished I were like him.

The men I come from speak the language of humor. They gathered on the courthouse steps, or at barbershops, not to discuss feelings or family issues, but to tell funny stories.

As a boy, I wanted to be my father. I wanted to know his stories and tell his jokes. Some kids did math homework, others went to football practice. I memorized the one about the farmer’s daughter and the preacher.

My father would place me on a…

Mobile, Alabama—a hotel. Early evening. I register at the front desk. Tonight, I am a pilgrim, looking for a room and a hot meal.

The hotel is overrun with folks in brightly colored West African attire. I’ve never seen so many ornate outfits in all my life—and I’ve been to Branson.

“What’s going on tonight?” I ask the clerk behind the desk.

“A Nigerian wedding,” he says. “Hotel’s almost completely booked.”

He hands me my room key and says: “Enjoy your stay.” He blows a bubble with his bubblegum.

I wait for the elevator beside three elegant black women wearing gold turbans. Their evening gowns are magnificent. Their heels are six inches tall.

I compliment their turbans.

They giggle. “These are not turbans,” one woman says. “We call them ‘geles.’”

My people do not go for elaborate headwear. I was raised evangelical. Our wedding attire consists of earth-tones, penny loafers, and SEC neckties.

I ride the elevator with my new friends. They fill the elevator with

laughter, exotic words, and unique perfume.

One young woman asks me, “You are a cowboy, sir? No?”

“No ma’am. Baptist.”

“But your boots. Americans who wear boots are cowboys, no?”

I glance at my ugly kicks. “No, these are just plain-old redneck shoes.”

When I reach the fifth floor, I pass more Nigerians in the hall. These are happy people with big personalities. Suddenly I feel very sorry that I did not grow up somewhere exotic.

Because the weddings of my childhood were not exotic. They were dry affairs in chapels full of people whose idea of a “good time” was watching Lawrence Welk and eating leftover pear salad. My cousin, Alberta, would sing, “Morning Has Broken,” and we would eat fried chicken in the fellowship hall. The end.

I arrive at my room, located at the end of the…

Montgomery, Alabama—my hotel breakfast tastes like reconstituted pulpwood. The biscuits are hockey pucks. But the coffee ain’t bad.

I stand in the food-line behind two teenage boys wearing soccer uniforms. They load their paper plates with enough food to last an entire winter.

They are laughing. Smiling. Youth is a potent drug.

One boy displays his phone to the other. “Did you see THIS video?” he says.

“Oh, DUDE!” says the other. “That’s the BEST.”

“I know, the BEST!”

“Totally.”

Also in the dining room with me: more kids who wear uniforms. Twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds, and their sleep-deprived parents. The kids are sipping dangerous amounts of orange juice and making lots of noise.

One kid listens to music on his phone—for the benefit of the entire dining room. This music sounds like a diesel engine warming up on a January morning.

More kids in uniforms exit the elevator. They walk through the dining room with loud voices, fixing their plates in a frenzy.

The hotel breakfast attendant,

Tamika, watches them move through the buffet-line like a pack of caffeinated golden retrievers.

So we can see, at this point, that there are more kids in this article than there were when I started. The lobby is full of them.

But the truth is, I like being around young people. They don’t talk about osteoporosis, gallbladders, goiters, arthritis, or the paramount importance of fiber. To them, everything is wonderful, new, exciting, and “the best.”

I overhear these kids using the word “best” at least fifty times per paragraph.

“Have you tried these eggs?” says one boy. “They’re the BEST.”

“I know, right?” says the other. “But did you try the cheese? It’s the BEST.”

“Totally!”

The alleged “cheese” he’s talking about is not the best. It is the kind of industrial cheese that can sit on a counter for…