ABSTRACT
The reader may recall that why Panola County seemed different was the query initiating this entire study. I am not fully certain of the answer even after lengthy interviews, reading and thinking. There is always the possibility that the "true" explanation fell through the mesh of the investigator's net. But if that possibility is permitted to dominate, we are trapped in intellectual anarchy. At some point, one must judge —fully aware of his limited vision, of the lie he may have missed, of the speciousness of facts. No one can "understand" a community, even one as small as this; stand too close to it and he misses the contours, but from too far he misses the feel of the soil. Ponder the problem too long and one becomes either frozen into inaction or content with only the totally verifiable, which can be the totally trivial. I offer, then, some informed speculation about the likely contours of the county's recent history.
