Praying for Sheetrock

“With daylight, Sheriff Poppell knew, and the firefighters knew, and the deputies knew, and the people in the cabins in the surrounding woods knew—and if the truck drivers had realized their trucks had crashed in McIntosh County, Georgia […] they would have known—that it was nearing time for a little redistribution of wealth. It was one of the things for which Tom Poppell was famous across the South. It was one of the things that invariably put the sheriff in an excellent mood.” 

This quote establishes Poppell’s corrupt, kingly status in McIntosh County. He curries favor with the black community by pretending to be a “Robin Hood” figure who allows the poor residents to pilfer from trucks and rich Yankees as a means of redistributing wealth. However, it is Poppell who is stealing from the poor black people in McIntosh and giving to himself: the wealthiest man in McIntosh. 

“ […] the Sheriff cared less about the colors black and white than he did about the color green and the sound it made shuffled, dealt out and redealt, folded and pocketed beside the wrecked trucks and inside the local truckstop, prostitution houses, clip joints and warehouse sheds after hours.”

Poppell helps maintain an uneasy racial equilibrium—if not harmony—in McIntosh by prioritizing monetary gain above racial strife. Although he is a bigot who keeps black people in poverty and dependent on his help, Poppell does not overtly antagonize the black community out of personal malice. This is due less to any benevolent feelings and more because Poppell only cares about accumulating money, which he acquires partly through illegal ventures, such as prostitution and gambling joints. 

“A funeral was a thing they understood; dissent was something they did not.”

Following the assassination Martin Luther King Jr., the black community mourns the departed civil rights leader and holds gatherings to remember him in the wake of his death. They see his fight for civil rights almost as something mythical happening in a far-off land. Here in McIntosh County, where civil rights are barely a concept and people shudder at the idea of protests, the black residents don’t have a leader who can help them agitate for change on a local level as Martin Luther King Jr.