I have been reading Reed Wolcott’s book Rose Hill for the first time in ages. It is an oral history of Rose Hill, a small farm town in Eastern North Carolina, that was written in the early 1970s.

Published by G.P. Putnam & Sons in New York City, Rose Hill was widely reviewed across the United States when it first appeared nearly 50 years ago. Now however, it has been out of print for decades and has largely been forgotten.

I remember that Rose Hill made a great impression on me when I was young. I grew up in Eastern North Carolina, but I had rarely seen depictions of my home that rang true. Rose Hill was different.

I remember thinking, when it came out, that Reed Wolcott was an unlikely writer to have much insight into a small farm town in Eastern North Carolina. She had never lived in the South up to that time. I’m not sure that she had even visited the South before.

She was a young freelance writer, probably 28 or 30 years old, when she first came to Rose Hill in 1972. She was from somewhere up north, New York, I think, and she had gone to school at Bennington College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont.

And she was a McGovernite. During the presidential election of 1972, she had worked for George McGovern, the liberal senator from South Dakota best known for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Wolcott had helped to run his campaign in Upstate New York, where political life could not be much more different than in Rose Hill.

On the other hand, Wolcott fit into Rose Hill life in a lot of ways. She went to prayer meetings. She relished telling stories and shelling butterbeans with other women on the back porch of a farmhouse. She was hard-nosed, and she had a taste for bourbon.

I don’t know how or why she picked Rose Hill, but she did not go to the little town with the idea of writing a book.

Instead, Wolcott had been assigned to write a story for The New York Times Magazine about how small-town people in America were feeling about the country during the Watergate Scandal. She somehow chose to focus the story on Rose Hill.

Wolcott ended up staying in Rose Hill for two years, getting to know the town’s people and interviewing many of them. In a town of roughly 1,700 residents, she interviewed 97 of them.

Her book is a compilation of interviews with Rose Hill’s residents, or really excerpts of those interviews. Some of the excerpts are lengthy. Others, just a few paragraphs. Together they make for a memorable snapshot of a small town in Eastern North Carolina in the 1970s.

Wolcott asked Rose Hill’s citizens about their families, schools, and churches. She asked them about their working lives. She talked politics with them. They told her about their hopes for the future, and they told her about forsaken dreams.

She interviewed most of them in their kitchens and living rooms. She did some interviews at a Baptist prayer meeting. She interviewed a union organizer in a graveyard. She did another interview, with a Ku Klux Klansman, in a cornfield at 2 AM in the morning.

The interviews could not be more different. She talked with old and young, black and white, rich and poor: doctors, bankers, housewives, shopkeepers, domestic workers, farmers, teachers, chicken catchers, and poultry slaughterhouse workers, among others.

No one interview can possibly represent the richness or complexity of small-town life that Wolcott discovered in Rose Hill.

But I first picked up Rose Hill again just after New Year’s and I have one interview above all others that I have not been able to get out of my mind. It is one of book’s shortest vignettes and perhaps one of the hardest to make a case that it speaks to any one time or place.

Yet I can’t get it out of my mind. It is a housewife’s story about her marriage and her family’s financial struggles and the way things sometimes turn out different than we thought they would when we were young.

Sometimes Wolcott gave the interviewee’s name, but in this case the woman apparently asked to remain anonymous.

I always keep tellin’ him the money doesn’t matter. He won’t listen to me. He just keeps right on doin’ the same thing. Ev’ry morning’, up at the cracka dawn, checkin’ on this, checkin’ on that, doin’ his business. Maybe he’ll be around at dinner time, but by summer he’s so exhausted that it doesn’t matter what I fix. He can’t taste it anyway.

So nothin’ matters. I usedta try out all sorsa diff’rent recipes an’ stuff like that, put on a new dress, or at least some lipstick. Now I don’t bother. He’s so tired he wouldn’t notice. He’s so tired he wouldn’t care.

I feel guilty when I watch him workin’ hisself to death. I try the best I can. I freeze a lotta corn an’ butter beans, an’ we get our poultry from the plant, an’ I remember all my home economics classes from school, so I can make a lotta things most people hafta buy.

But the bills keep getting’ bigger an’ bigger. An’ clothes. Not for us, just for the kids. You can’t send your children out in the world lookin’ like poor white trash. An’ we hate to say no to them. How are they supposed to understand? But you hafta. That’s why I never ask for anything’. So he never hasta say no to me.

I have known a lot of women like her, and men too, who never asked for anything. Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. Sometimes they did not ask for anything out of love, sometimes out of hopelessness, sometimes out of love and hopelessness.

They see how brittle a loved one can be, and how much they are up against, and how frail the lives we build are.

So they put away their dreams. They tamp down their desires. They decide it is enough just to get by, enough, one hopes, to lie next to the one they love at night and hear a heartbeat in the darkness.