I am a southerner by birth. For the first twenty years of my life I lived in about every corner of the state of Georgia. Most of my childhood was spent in Columbus, the town where John Pemberton, a former Confederate officer, came up with his first formula for Coca-Cola. It’s the hometown of the southern gothic author Carson McCullers who penned The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. In my teens I lived in Cuthbert, a steamy town tucked twenty five miles from the Alabama border. Cuthbert was founded in the 1830s after the Muscogee were forced west on the Trail of Tears. In my time it was a sleepy town with little industry save for the small Methodist junior college where my father worked as the baseball coach and dean of students. I left Cuthbert for the foothills of the Appalachians and Piedmont College. There I was introduced to...