unedited excerpt
Founded shortly after the Revolutionary War, Pleasanton, North Carolina was the kind of town that was stereotypically southern. In Pleasanton, you were a farmer, a farmer’s wife, a preacher, a preacher’s wife, a small business owner, or retired. You could also be dead, but then you weren’t really adding to the GDP so dead didn’t count.
An hour outside of the port
city of Wilmington, Pleasanton had one main street, three traffic lights, a
barbeque joint, a chicken restaurant, a garage, and four churches (two of them
Baptist) packed in its ten square miles.
Nine thousand residents and fifteen hundred dogs (half of them hunting)
called the town home. Almost every house
had a front porch, a pickup truck on the gravel driveway, a Bible in the
sitting room, sweet tea in the fridge, and at least two rifles somewhere on the
premises. Of the 9,000 residents, 33
percent were Caucasian; 30 percent were African-American; 20 percent were
Native-American; the rest were a mix of all of the above; and a full 23 percent
of them were certifiable, meaning if you dragged them to an asylum someone
would give you a sack of potatoes and a fifty dollar check for bringing them.
All rights reserved. Copyright by Jeanie Johnson and Jayha Leigh
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