On the wall behind Bender at the temporary town hall was an aerial photograph of the damage done to the town by Florence, and we chatted for a while about storms and the news. Bender watches cable news and reads the New Bern Sun Journal on occasion, though with diminishing expectations. In Bender’s view, physical newspapers and books are doomed. “Other than a John Grisham,” he told me, “I haven’t bought a hardcover book in ages.” I brought up the moment the night before when he told Alice Strayhorn that a notice had run in the paper—one that few residents receive. “I’ve been doing this for thirty-eight years,” he said. “I don’t care what you do, there’s always going to be someone that shows up saying, ‘I didn’t know about this.’ Because people want to be spoon-fed. And I’ve also learned over the years that no matter how much you publicize, how much you print, how much you provide, most people—not all, but most—don’t read it.” One of his expressions, he told me, is “Most people don’t want to be confused with the facts.”

Bender liked the idea of having a local newspaper in Jones County again somehow. He was less keen on the prospect of investigative journalism. “I don’t know that I necessarily agree that it’s a newspaper’s job to be an investigative agency,” he said. “Now, if the reporter gets an anonymous tip, or someone calls in, ‘You all need to check out Jay Bender, who’s not doing this, that, and the other,’ then, O.K. But my feeling is, if someone is not doing anything right, why do you ask a newspaper to do it?” He went on, “You’re not going to throw somebody out. You have to wait for an election, unless you’re going to take them to court.”

“Most people don’t want to be confused with the facts.” Jay Bender, mayor of Pollocksville, North Carolina

He added, “I’m an open book, and my records are an open book. But I find it very frustrating—and, quite frankly, somewhat insulting—to spend my time or my staff’s time providing information to citizens or people or whatever, and, when push comes to shove and decisions have to be made or questions have to be raised, nobody knows what you’re talking about. Now, could a newspaper or a news entity help that? Perhaps, perhaps. I don’t know.”

The week before my first visit to Pollocksville, there had been an election. Three spots were open on the town board, and three people ran. One of them was Maria Robles, who moved to town a few years ago, when she took a job at Lenoir Community College, in Trenton, after two decades in the Air Force. “There’s nothing out there that says, ‘Hey, go out there and vote,’ ” Robles told me, describing her experience running for office. Once upon a time, that might have been the paper; eventually, it might be the Internet. But, while the county high school and a few local businesses have broadband, most Jones County residents have slow dial-up access or none at all. Not many people check the town’s Web site, which is updated infrequently anyway. But word of Robles’s candidacy got to Darrell Bell, who runs Bell’s Corner, an auto-repair shop on Main Street that he inherited from his father.

“I went to Bell’s Corner to have my car worked on, and Darrell was, like, ‘Hey, I heard that you’re running.’ And I’m, like, ‘I haven’t even told my husband or my parents—and my parents live right down the road.’ And he goes, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll talk to people.’ ” Twenty-five people voted; all but one voted for Robles. Now, she said, “If I want information out, I send it to Bell’s Corner. I also send it to the Filling Station”—a food pantry and a center for gossip—“and my contact at the post office, Dwayne. But that’s only for Pollocksville. If I needed to get information to Maysville”—a larger town elsewhere in Jones County—“I don’t know how yet.”

“She’s gonna learn a lot,” Nancy Barbee told me, when I relayed the story. Barbee is also on the town board. Her maiden name is Bender, and she’s probably a distant relation of the mayor, she said. She grew up in Pollocksville, and taught in Jones County public schools for three decades. When we met, she wore red reading glasses tucked into short dirty-blonde hair, and jewelry from India, a country she first visited on behalf of the Rotary Club, which she has worked with for years. Barbee had agreed to drive me around Jones County, to visit, as she put it, “some local hangouts where we get our news.” Bell’s Corner was the first spot on our itinerary.

“It’s harder for public officials to ignore things when they’re in the news,” Nancy Barbee, a town commissioner in Pollocksville, said. Photograph by Kennedi Carter for The New Yorker

Pollocksville was “a booming little place” in the fifties and sixties, when Barbee was growing up, she said. “Times change,” she added, driving through the barely beating heart of town. It’s still an agricultural area, but farming there is not as lucrative as it used to be. I asked Barbee to name the county’s biggest business. She thought for a minute. “Well, it used to be the school-supply company, but it closed down. There is a marine—what was it called? Like, a metal place that was sort of stuck back in the middle of nowhere.” Even Mayor Bender’s family business, a grocery store, had moved to a neighboring county.

When Florence hit, Barbee said, members of the media came from elsewhere to cover the storm. “We had CBS, NBC, BBC, all those major channels.” This helped with the initial recovery. “It certainly let people know all over the country and all over the world, ‘My God, look what happened here in this small little town,’ ” Barbee said, adding, “It’s harder for public officials to ignore things when they’re in the news.” Now, she went on, “we don’t have news reporting on a regular basis here to tell the ongoing story of the recovery, or to hold elected officials in check, or anything else.” Barbee praised the mayor for procuring grants to rebuild after Florence, but she had concerns about his use of some of these funds. “He took sixty-seven thousand dollars to clean that building out,” she said, referring to the old town hall, “without any board approval.” The mayor’s office was also in the former train depot. “That really perturbed us. A thousand dollars is one thing. But sixty-seven thousand is another. We may have used it for something different.” She added, “I’m not saying he’s doing anything illegal. But he tells you part of the story—the part he wants us to know.”

At Bell’s Corner, Darrell Bell, a man in his sixties with a mustache and a mischievous smile, sat behind a cluttered desk, feeding a piece of bread to an area dog. I took a seat under a mounted deer and a sign that read “IT IS WHAT IT IS.” Bell told me that he’d begun working there in 1973, fixing cars, selling junk food, and providing information. “We have quite a few folks gathered around here,” he told me. “They’ll be ganging up here shortly. You can’t get in here sometimes. Customers, acquaintances, yadda yadda. Some of the board hangs out in here. The mayor. Town employees. They meet here. Everything is unofficial. Just local folks.”

Bell started telling stories about the old days. His father used to sell “liquor by the drink in the back room, illegally,” he said. “The sheriff would come by—he’d give him a drink. Then the sheriff would continue on to Trenton,” the county seat. “That’s just the way it was. Everybody was O.K. with it. You can’t do that now.” During Hurricane Florence, Bell said, he gave away all his snacks, drinks, and useful supplies. “Even to a neighbor lady who don’t like me for some reason,” he said.