Doing the Possible

Doing the Possible tells the life-story of an early Primitive Baptist church in the wildness of northeast Alabama, a late-blooming area of the state that was a sanctuary for Cherokee Indians being pushed toward extinction. White settlers--prominent among them the family of William (Billy) Edwards who gave his name and a tract of land to the new county seat--established in the inhospitable hills and hollows a thriving church and community. They built a warm fellowship that was often disrupted by theological controversy as they set a course quite different from the "mainstream" church--and once the community was shocked by an act of physical violence, murder in the churchyard. And there are glimpses of the backwoods enterprise on which a few members depended heavily, the profitable conversion of corn into the moonshine for which the area is noted. But mostly it is a story of plain, hardy people living and loving together.