I was raised in the little South Georgia town of Statenville, named after my family. Statenville is the county seat of Echols, smack-dab on the Georgia/Florida line. We bear the distinction of being number 159 on car tags, symbol of the smallest county in Georgia, population-wise. We are known too for our vast pine forests, almost 300, 000 acres in Echols alone. Which is probably how we came to be a last resort for incorrigible petty criminals in the Atlanta area—all these woods, who’s gonna notice another drifter or two? Almost a half-century ago, some frustrated judges in Atlanta came up with the notion to send their bad-check writers and trouble makers to us, being as it is unconstitutional to bar misfits from the State. There was no point in sending them back to prison where they would just get out again and practice the new tricks they’d learned inside on city people weakened by political correctness.

At first, I doubted that a single one of these exiles would have come to Echols County: we wouldn’t sell them any land, for one thing, so they wouldn’t have anywhere to live; there are no motels or campgrounds, and few houses for rent. This is land that nobody but us wanted fifty years ago—too much woods to be cleared; too much swamp to swallow you up, and if the heat didn’t get you, the mosquitoes would. Another reason these nuisance criminals from Atlanta wouldn’t come to this out-of-the-way place is, some of the locals here are so rough themselves that they would scare the living daylights out of Hannibal the Cannibal. Few people here have money, and those with land can vouch that it is often more drain then gain, taxes being what they are and timber prices down to nothing. So, a flimflam artist would have trouble finding anybody to flimflam in Echols County. He would have to work like everybody else, either harvesting cucumbers and squash in hot open fields, logging, or hacking down and stripping scrub trees to be adorned with fake leaves and lights for decorating doctors’ offices. He would lose heart for flimflamming, and maybe that’s what those judges had in mind sending them here in the first place.

Anyway, a few years ago, a smart young reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got wind of this information. So, he drove down in a shiny red sports car to seek out one of these petty criminals exiled to the far reaches of Georgia. His head was shaved and he wore sunglasses miraculously perched atop his slick dome of skull. He was dressed in what I can only describe as cool downtown Atlanta attire—blue jeans and tasseled loafers, oxford shirt unbuttoned to reveal the gold logging chain around his neck. His eyes were so pale blue they looked blank. Having read about me in the newspaper he worked for, and not knowing anybody else in these parts, he came to my house first. Had I ever met one of these exiles? No. Who could he talk to who might know? I put together a list of old-family types with directions to their homes, not offering to go with him.

I’m not that stupid.

Later, that evening, he reported in again, telling me that the people I sent him to didn’t have much to say. Seemed sort of suspicious of him, he said.

I fed him, then had a heart to heart talk with him. “You’ve got to get a cap and a pickup truck. And drop that Atlanta articulation. More contractions might help. For instance: ‘How’re y’all doing thi’smorning?’”

I offered to put him up for the night in our old remote farmhouse. He gave it the once-over with those blank eyes and said he would stay in a hotel in nearby Valdosta.

Next morning, he returned in a rented pickup truck, taupe with gold trim. He was wearing an Atlanta Braves cap—better than before, but the cap really needed a Dixie flag emblem on it. The truck needed a Dixie tag, and really those aviator sunglasses perched atop the cap now had to go.

Again, he came back that evening, with a yellow legal pad, blank as his eyes. He said everybody he’d spoken to at the courthouse ten miles south of my place seemed to know everybody in Echols County but claimed never to have even heard about those criminals sent down by the judges in Atlanta. One woman had actually accused him of being with the IRS, and another at the Holiday Market refused to speak to him. Everybody scattered when he raised his camera as if it were a gun.

Is it possible, I asked, that this story is only apocryphal? He took off his cap and scratched his glistening head; no, he had actually read the Fulton County courthouse records concerning such cases. He showed freshly FAXed copies to me, along with pictures of the purported criminals. Some resembled a lot of the Atlanta homeless I’d seen hanging around the library downtown. Shaggy-haired, scarred, so filthy they looked smoked over an open fire. Others looked oddly familiar, average, the kinds of people I saw everyday.

About as down as a fellow can get, and ready to head on back to Atlanta empty-handed, he took his camera out of the pickup, and photographed me and my husband walking across the pine patch north of our house. From a calculated distance, in the picture that came out later in the AJC, we could have been anybody, we could have been two of those repeat petty offenders slipping through the woods.

That’s when I began to suspect my own ancestors, as well as those of my neighbors, of coming from Atlanta criminal stock, of having established and settled in Echols County by force and not choice.