Opening paragraphs................

"I'm just a Clay County hillbilly,"  Hugo Black liked to say.  It usually got a chuckle.  But those who had been there smiled knowingly.   Clay County, Alabama, lies sixty miles east of Birmingham and thirty miles west of the Georgia state line.  On one side is the Tallapoosa River, on the other the Talladega National Forest, alongside a range of mountains.  The lush, verdant countryside contrasts with the unyielding red clay soil in the small coves of cleared land.  Isolation has always been the dominant impression.  Early settlers earned a scant living, existing on their own resources, as frontier people always did.  Survival was precarious.

-Roger K. Newman,  Hugo Black:  A Biography