Mill Daddy: The Life & Times of Roy Davis

"Roy Davis was hanging out with some tough poor boys at the mill village when he saw the girl with brown hair and eyes like diamonds in the faraway Georgia sky. He was in his 20s and not long out of the unforgiving piney woods and hard, red fields of Baker County, and into the mill. Anna Carnes was 14. By 15 everybody in the mill village knew she was Roy's girl." And so begins the first chapter of Mill Daddy. It is both an enduring love story and a tribute to Roy Davis' indomitable spirit that sustained him and his poor family through sharecropping, the suffering of the Great Depression, and the hard, hard life in a Georgia cotton mill. As Lightle writes, Roy Davis "was an authentic American hero." Mill Daddy also describes the often funny adventures that Lightle and some of his teenage friends had working under Roy Davis in the Flint River Cotton Mill in the 1970s. "Bill Lightle has given us an enjoyable read...move over (John) Steinbeck and (Erskine) Caldwell." - Bobby Dews, author of Unpublished Poets and Legends, Demons, and Dreams.