A fifth-grade bully, a blossoming romance, a late-night crash
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Jon Sealy’s family worked in the cotton mills of Chester County, South Carolina, and he grew up listening to stories about life there during the Depression. He has an MFA from Purdue University and works as a copywriter in Richmond, Virginia. His novel-in-progress is about a mill-town whiskey baron in the 1930s.
In the spring of 1932, when I was twelve years old — the last year of my childhood, as I understood it — my grandfather left the farm and came to live with us. His wife, my mother’s mother, had just died, and he could no longer get loans to keep the farm going. My father had already given up farming a few years earlier, and we were living in the village outside the Bell cotton mill.