" Almost twenty years into living in the States, she had no illusions of moving home and starting over again like the other women she knew who went home every year, packed barrels and kept up with phone calls, went to the meetings of the old boys' and old girls' clubs of their high schools where fattened, impoverished versions of themselves showed up in the harsh lights of church basements of Brooklyn, picking over the grains of famous stories from the old days and new stories about who had done well or not well at all in what they liked to call "this man country. "

― Naomi Jackson , The Star Side of Bird Hill