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In his memoirUS Your browser does not support the element. Jimmy Carter recalls trying to copy the habits of black boys. In his poor peanut-farming community his closest confidants did not share his skin colour, and he wanted to fit in. But Mr Carter lived in the big house; his friends in tenant shacks. In Plains, Georgia, it still seems a wonder that the white child who was always out of place in the Jim Crow South became America’s 39th president. On December 29th he died, at 100, a mile from where he was born.As Mr Carter rose in politics the people of Plains began to take pride in their quiet town. Locals started to “keep their yards clean”, says Boze Godwin, the former mayor and Mr Carter’s pharmacist. Before the 1976 Democratic primary, 98 Georgians went to New Hampshire to knock on doors for him. Town records claim it was the first time that so many volunteers from a candidate’s home state travelled the country to campaign. Mr Godwin remembers his parents taking the train north with the “Peanut Brigade”.Local lore says that once you get the red Georgia clay caked between your toes, you can’t get it out. So when Mr Carter left Washington after one term as president he returned to his boyhood town. At Maranatha Baptist Church, where a dozen rows of pews are lined with raspberry-coloured velvet, he led Bible study. His lessons lured tourists who then ate and shopped downtown. It was his “Sunday school economy” that kept Plains viable while other country towns withered, says Philip Kurland, a businessman who talked politics with Mr Carter for decades.Mr Carter shaped Plains in other ways, too. In fact, he made it as much of an anomaly in the Deep South as he was. By inviting black people home for supper and helping women become deacons at the church he “let people know that new things were acceptable”, says one resident. But standing at the pulpit each week, year after year, the former president never talked politics, says Nelle Ariail, a friend who keeps a collection of his handwritten poems in a drawer.This week a motorcade will take Mr Carter’s coffin north to Atlanta, following the highway past the peanut fields that still nourish the region. Although the county just barely voted for Kamala Harris—Mr Carter’s family says he hung on in hospice care to cast his ballot for her—locals say that Donald Trump carried the town. Today the road to the big city is dotted with placards for the incoming Republican president. To some people in Plains it is a sign of how much has changed; to others a reminder of how little.
