Mill Daddy: The Life & Times of Roy Davis

by Bill Lightle

"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."So begins the first chapter of Mill The Life & Times of Roy Davis. 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. Roy's life reflects that of many southern mill hands whose labor was never honored by greedy mill owners. As Lightle writes, Roy Davis "was an authentic American hero." The book also describes the adventures that Lightle and some of his teenage friends had working under Roy 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 - Bobby Dews, author of Unpublished Poets and Legends, Demons and Dreams. Mill Daddy is about the hard-working life of Roy Davis, a sharecropper from Baker County, Georgia, born in the early 1900s. He picked cotton as a boy and sometimes was beaten by his grandfather using a bullwhip. Roy left the fields and and the sting of the whip and worked for more than 40 years in a cotton mill in Albany, Georgia. Bill unabashedly wrote himself into characterhood, more so toward the latter part of the story, during which the crew of "lint heads," perhaps delirious from the summer heat and humidity, displaced their frustrations onto a colony of vermin inhabiting poorly hidden crannies of the mill. Ironically, it was not a rare thing for them to do some hiding themselves! - Amazon reviewer

118 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2009

About the author

I was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1957 but moved to Albany, Georgia, in 1966. I've spent most of my life in the Southeast where I wrote for newspapers and taught history and government. I few years ago, I began a thriller series - Maynard & Sinclair - set in Albany. The series is based on my experiences as a newspaper reporter for the Albany Herald in the early 1980s.

The most recent book (2019) in the series is Aucilla Bones.

Today I live and write in Fayetteville, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. My wife Phyllis is a published poet. You can find her work on Amazon as well as mine.

Thank you for considering my work.