COY, ALA. — The modest Japanese sedan made its way down the gravel drive between the cow pasture and the dirt basketball court, kicking up a cloud of dust before coming to rest beside Roy Saulsberry Jr.'s ancient gas pumps.
A passenger stepped out, clutching an old antifreeze jug. Outside Roy's Grocery & Package store, the regulars were hemming and hawing on a wooden bench, under the spell of the afternoon's slow rhythm.
Norman Finklea filled his jug just past a gallon, letting the analog meter come to rest at $3.88. Then he walked into Roy's with his four crumpled bills and a litany of anxieties, which were rising with the price of gas.
He didn't need to tell them to Saulsberry. As the proprietor of this little country store in one of the poorest counties in Alabama, Saulsberry has already heard them all. It doesn't matter what kind of cars pull up to pumps these days -- stretchy old hooptie sedans, scuffed econo-boxes, king-cab pickups -- anxiety is their common cargo.
With the high price of gas, Saulsberry said, "people just can't go as much."
Finklea, a freelance construction worker, had paid a friend $5 to pick him up at his house a few miles down the road and drive him here. His own car was back at home with its pin on empty, he said. He needed it to drive to work in the morning.
Finklea said high gas prices were the reason he paid only half his light bill last month, the reason he and his wife were trying to get by with less food, the reason he is turning down jobs that are more than 30 miles away.
Those jobs, he said, are not worth driving to anymore.
Cheap gas, and cars to put it in, have long given Americans the freedom to roam. For the people of Coy -- a largely African American community of about 900, two hours southwest of Montgomery -- that freedom has been particularly vital, delivering them out of rural isolation and into decent, if far-flung, employment.
A generation ago, black laborers sharecropped cotton on white-owned land here. Others worked in nearby sawmills. By the 1960s, the mills were thriving, but small-scale farming was fading away, and the civil rights era had opened new job possibilities.
Those jobs, however, tended to be spread around the state. The people of Coy gassed up their cars and drove to them. They drove 13 miles on the two-lane highway to Camden, the county seat, or they ventured farther afield, to the bigger cities of Selma and Montgomery. They took manufacturing jobs and teaching jobs, handyman gigs and government desk work.
