IT'S JUNE. It’s south Arkansas. The humidity is so high even the horseflies have prickly heat. I am sitting on a scorching metal bench outside Burge’s diner in Lewisville waiting on a catfish po’boy. A black Lincoln hearse rolls up. The doors swing open, pumping out chilled air. Two women from the local funeral home approach the counter. They order Tiger’s Blood snow cones, to go.
I’m headed to Magnolia, another 20 miles east. My mom’s family settled there in the early 1800s. Beginning in the 1920s, my great-grandfather scooped up as much land as he could. He bought and sold timber, then mineral rights. The Magnolia Oil Field was discovered in 1938. For a while it was the largest producing field (by volume) in the United States. When oil decreased, companies shifted to bromine extraction. All sucked up from the Smackover Formation, a Jurassic-era limestone aquifer that stretches from Texas to Florida full of oil, natural gas, and mineral-heavy water. Albemarle, the largest producer of bromine in the world, is headquartered in Magnolia — a town of 10,000 with a 25 percent poverty rate.
My great-grandfather was what novelist Wallace Stegner called a “boomer” — motivated by “the deal,” a desire for property, upwardly mobile, ambitious, with a craving to get as much as he could take.
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