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has permanent damage in her lungs. To breathe, she uses a nebulizer four times a day and inhalers charged with medicine. “I still have bad days,” she said. “My lungs will never get any better. It limits the things you can do. You can’t run with your grandkids like you should. I used to mop the whole floor.”
    She sings, still, but it is different now. In December of 2004, Theresa and her father sang at a small concert outside Jacksonville. . Her father is blind now, but still plays guitar, “can still whup the fire out of it,” she said. About fifty people gathered, eating hot dogs, chili, and hand-scooped ice cream. The Garmons sang their standard, the one the people always asked for.
    If you hasten off to glory
Linger near the Eastern Gate
For I’m coming in the morning
So you’ll not have long to wait
    The high notes died in her chest.
    ___
    Sonny and a crew of overhaulers were working on a stalled machine in March, 2001, when they saw their boss moving toward them across the floor.
    “He was running,” Sonny said.
    “Well,” the boss said, “it’s true.”
    It happened every day, these rumors.
    It peeled the skin off a man.
    Sonny just went back to work.
    “Get out of here,” he said. “We’re trying to do our job.”

chapter two
    floria’s dollar
    She does not talk a lot. When she does, her stories are plain and small. Her story, for sixty years, was written in books that had no words, only numbers, of the miles of yarn she spun. It is rich people, usually, who live on in biographies, in the pages of the social register. Working people live on in ledgers. The idea that anyone would want to know about that, about such a life, puzzles her. “It was all there was,” said Floria Fortenberry. “I’d do it again, if it was all there was.”
    Yet there is, deep in her past, a small legend, not from the mill, but the cotton itself. When she was in her thirties, standing at the start of an endless row of cotton, she told a boss man she could do a thing he said could not be done, and raced the hands of his watch for a single dollar bill.
    Floria never called it a legend.
    It was just something that happened one day, in the red dirt.
    Like a lot of people here in the foothills, her life was bound to cotton from the start. She was born just before the Great Depression, as men in suits flung themselves from windows on Wall Street, and picked her first cotton before she could see over the stalks. “I was six, that first time,” she said. She was Floria Wright then, and picked beside her mother and father, Minnie and Jim, on their small farm.
    She married Clayton Fortenberry on December 27, 1944, when she was seventeen, and they had three children. Clayton worked construction and factory jobs, and Floria worked in the mills in Blue Mountain and Jacksonville, to help out.
    She did not pick cotton for a living then, in the 1960s. She did it to make a few extra dollars for school clothes or baby clothes or little luxuries. “I wanted my kids to go as nice as anybody,” she said. “Once, I made enough to cover a couch.”
    The people who know her, members of her church, say she is a fine person who reads her Bible and lives it. She does not need a legend, even a small one, to mark her time on this earth, any more than she needs a big car, or a gaudy hat.
    “We were tough, I guess,” is about the most she will say. Then, for just a second or two, a disease in her lungs—caused by asbestos—takes her breath away. People who know her say a bad cold can almost kill her.
    “I am smothering, I believe,” she said. “Sometimes I need prayer.”
    But she hates to complain.
    “Just don’t put nothin’ in there,” she said, “that’ll make my children ashamed of me. We’ve come a long way since then.”
    It happened in the middle 1960s, at the end of an era—an era not fading into antiquity so much as it was being gnawed away. The big, mechanical pickers, like giant, chewing pests, had arrived in the