Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent

summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six

thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My

mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr.,

one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was

seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew

up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital

in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I

was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage.

He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was

working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out

of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend’s ring and

asked her if she was married. She stammered “no”—she was single. The next day he sent the

other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he

always sent flowers when he ended a relationship...