This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay.

Please listen with care. Weigh, Land. Campside Media. Mecracken Poston, maybe the best lawyer in Northwest Georgia, grew up in the 1960s

in the tiny town of Grazville, with a cemetery next to his house.

There were graves there for Confederate soldiers and for old friends of McCracken's

family.

It was our playground when we were kids. We would lay down on the graves and when

Halloween kids would come by, we would jump up from the graves. We was never afraid of the

place. And one tombstone was shaped like a lectern. So we would play, you know, politician or a preacher there and have everybody else sit out and listen to the preaching.

One day when he was five years old, McCracken went missing.

The whole family was searching for him and they found him at the cemetery attending a funeral he dressed

himself up and everything for the better part of a decade he'd attend every

funeral whether he knew the person or not. And graceful, you have to understand,

there was not a lot going on.

An event like a funeral, that was big in the town.

That in the Easter Sunrise Service. And my job became, after an embarrassing

incident when one of the neighborhood dogs was in heat, my job became to put up all the dogs before the Easter Sunrise Service.

And then that extended to put up all the dogs before the funerals because you didn't want

a bunch of dogs lining up and

making out while you're trying to eulogize somebody.

Graysville was in the segregated south, sitting just below the Tennessee border. It was a small and isolated place, a place

where if you never leave, you might have a distorted view of what the world is like.

Maybe 90% of the families in the county were white. In McCracken's

...