See, when I was a boy,
Sears Roebuck Catalogue,
a great thick thing, like that,
came to everybody’s mailbox in the South.
I mean everybody’s.

First thing that struck us was
everybody in the Sears Roebuck catalogue
was perfect.

Wasn’t any bald heads.
Everybody had all the fingers
that was comin’ to ‘em.
Nobody had any open and running sores
on their bodies.

But everybody we knew
had a finger missin’
or one eye put out from a staple
glancin’ off a post.

In other words,
in our world
everybody was maimed
and mutilated.
Whereas everybody
in the Sears, Roebuck world
was perfect.

And so we just started to tell stories about…
We’d give ‘em names.
Said where they was from.
We’d turn over there
and see this young girl
standin’ pretty in a spring frock and say
See this girl here?
She is the daughter of him,
standing right here
(but turn about 40 pages back)
See him standin’ here
in front of these shotguns?
That’s her daddy.

Yeah, that’s her daddy.
You know how come he’s lookin’
kinda stern and mean-lookin like that?
It’s cause this feller over here
in this green suit
with the sharp creases in the pants,
he’s seein’ that girl
his daughter
and he’s doin’ her wrong,
Bein’ nasty.
And he’s gonna fix that feller.
He’s goin’ fix him good.
Probably what he was goin to do
was kill him.

And you know, before it was over,
we had everybody related
fightin’, feudin’
and the rest of it.

Truth of the matter was
stories was everything
and everything was stories.
Everybody told stories.
It was a way of saying
who they were in the world.
It was their understanding of themselves.
It was lettin’ themselves know
how they believed the world worked,
the right way
and the way that was not so right.