TERRY WILLIAMS OPENS HIS BOOK with a primal scene:
My lifelong fascination with the alienated … the lost and forgotten, wherever they may be—probably started when I was a kid in Mississippi. One fall day, while playing outside, I saw two strange-looking white men with dirty faces and torn trousers walking in our backyard. We watched silently as our mother handed the men a paper bag and some apples; the men then withdrew into the woods. I asked her who they were, and she said “hobos,” a term I’d never heard before.
These wandering souls disappeared into the woods but remained sedimented in Williams’s psyche, serving as a powerful but ambivalent symbol. His father, he recalls, dismissed them as “tramps,” but, as Williams is quick to point out, others have detected in their “ascetic lives,” born of a willful renunciation of the subordination attached to conventional work, “opportunities for spiritual richness.” Williams counts himself among the latter. As an epigraph, he chooses a sentence from Sherwood Anders…
