I used to believe I came from a place without art. My Alabama had been cotton fields that stretched so far, and so long, you wondered if there was anything at all on the other side, or if the world just ended there, like some map from the Middle Ages. Don’t try to tell us, Bubba, that the world ain’t flat.   If it ain’t, how come nobody who leaves this place ever comes back? Surely, beyond the pine barrens, the red dirt, the pipe shops and cotton mills and the hard-eyed preachers, there was a ledge that you would step right off of, and vanish.