Much of the time Fields also sounds sanguine about his pioneering life representing Cullman County. “I enjoy serving,” he says. “I think that is one of the most rewarding positions a person can be in. I see it in both the political and the Christian world. Love, hope, grace, mercy, God gives us a choice. You choose each day who you’re gonna serve. As a politician we choose. Every day we choose who to give grant money to, who you’re gonna vote with, talk to. Personally, I’m thinking, How will this help the people I represent? How will this affect the people I serve? How will this make a better community? I know there are people out there rather spit on the ground than spit on me and put a fire out. For every one of them full of hatred, there are 10 who’ve made it worthwhile.”

But along with this optimistic self-possession, another side to Fields operates in watchful counterpoint. Wherever he goes he is exercising a probing intuition, always seeing himself as others may be seeing him, taking pains never to make people feel he wants anything from them. It bothers Fields that there are no black employees in the Cullman court, schools, on the police force or in any of the city’s banks, that the Cullman custom of hanging a photograph of the president in the county commission’s office at the courthouse ended the day Obama took office. Fields hasn’t complained because he says he can’t think of a way to persuade people that he would be doing so for the greater good. In his attempts to make white people see beyond his race, every day he is making many of the same calculations black men were making a hundred years ago in the South, rising above the men who still call him “boy,” the elderly women who return his greeting by staring hard at the floor. “If you’re gonna survive in this world, you chew the cheese,” he says. “I learned a long time ago, a lot of stuff you have to sit there and take and hope something good’ll come of it. Smile and grin when they make a racial joke or say, ‘You know them niggers,’ and laugh.”

In these moments, I had some sense of how precarious and vulnerable it could feel to be Fields, driving alone every day into Cullman, where he is an outsider at the center of things. Cullman can seem like a very remote place. During the day pickups, flatbed trailers stacked with chicken crates and logging trucks crowd streets like Second Avenue SW. After dark, these broad, silent boulevards increase the potent sense of isolation that comes on at night in a farming community. “You feel,” Fields says, “what can you feel — you go on. So many houses, you know you’re the first black in the house. You’re in Cullman. I listen to them talking and I feel out of place. I never feel unwelcome, but I do feel strange. I think, God almighty, are we still living in this society?” During another conversation he said, “I find myself, a lot of times, I’m living what other people perceive me to be. That is what makes my life so miserable. I can’t get away. I can’t really be who I am.” Shifting between Cullman, Colony and Irondale means, he says, “I have to live, like, two frigging lives.”

All politicians feel the anxiety of audience, the strain of meeting competing public expectations. Few, however, live multiple personal narratives. Persevering under such circumstances, Fields emanates the quality that makes him so good at his job — his enormous capacity for putting aside his own problems so as to understand those of others. It’s the rare person in a position of power who never forgets that life is hard for most people.

Every voter I met in Cullman predicts that Fields will be easily re-elected in November. Politicians from both parties praise him as a skilled, nonideological representative. He has worked to decrease overcrowding in the state’s public schools and prisons, to deflect taxes from small business owners and to prevent spouses of the deceased from losing their health insurance. He and Jeremy Oden, the ebullient Republican who represents the east side of Cullman County, are known around Montgomery to function in such effective tandem for Cullman that they have won an admiring, off-color nickname — the Panda. Only Fields himself seems to have any doubts about his political future. “The Republicans smell blood,” he told me in December. Like all Democrats in Alabama, he will be “tied,” he says, to Obama — “the supposed debacle.” At first I thought this was a savvy politician’s standard caution about the future. Then I began to think of how Fields has spent his life skillfully assessing who among those nearby might bring him misfortune. Among the first things he told me is, “I’m running for re-election, but I’m not going to deny who I am.” Careful as he is, he must have known that this kind of candor would expose him to political risk.

ON AN OCTOBER Sunday, Fields opened his Cullman Times and read some news he found troubling. Mac Buttram had decided to run as a Republican for Fields’s seat. The next morning, when the prayer group met, the other three members were livid. “I can’t tell you how mad I am at you,” Werner told Buttram. “You’re saying the group means nothing to you.” Buttram replied, “I never thought about the group.” He told the others this was what God was guiding him to do. To me, Buttram, who has led churches in several Alabama counties, explained that wherever he now lived, he would run, “because I could do a better job as state representative.” The retired pastor also said, “The people of Cullman County and their principles are better represented by a Republican.” How, I asked him, was Fields failing Cullman? “I honestly can’t say there’s a specific thing James has not represented well,” he replied. Werner, Burgess and Lyrene have all vowed to support Fields. “James is a compassionate, caring, balanced person who struggles to do the right thing whether it’s politically popular or not,” Lyrene says. “His political strength is he gets involved with people at every level.”

One such person is an African-American mechanic named Eugene Wilson. Fields watched Wilson, who is 34, grow up in Colony and describes him as someone who “was never a troublemaker. He just didn’t take any mess.” As a teenager, Wilson would come into Cullman, where, Wilson says, “guys in trucks with big rebel flags would try to run you out of town. They’d chase us. They were calling us niggers. ‘Y’all need to get out of town. This town’s supposed to be white.’ We were like, ‘This is the ’90s! This stuff is not supposed to happen in the United States.’ ” When Wilson stayed at his white girlfriend’s house out in the county, in 1998, the couple received a visit from the Klan. “They were dressed up in their suits,” Wilson says. “They were saying they’d kill me if I didn’t leave.” He left.

Wilson took a job in Cullman, and soon, weary of the Colony commute, he moved into town, where he remains, one of the only blacks living in the city. Since 2005, he has been married to a woman named Melody, who is white. “We still get dirty looks,” he says, “but a lot has changed. I’ve grown to feel comfortable here. Now I’m just trying to be an upstanding person in the community.” For inspiration, he says, he looks to Fields. “He was always in church, always did things for his family. If he can do it, I can do it. This is what they’ve been preaching on, teaching us. The biggest dreams in Colony were to own a store or a small business. To have a state representative? Our voice has been heard.”