Suttree — James H. Robinson's Road Without Turning

Just finished reading the first 75 pages of the Rev. James H. Robinson’s autobiography Road Without Turning, the first 75 pages telling Robinson’s story of what it was like growing up poor and black in Knoxville, Tenn., from 1907 to about 1917. I bought the book after reading about an area of Knoxville called “the Bottoms” and which are omnipresent and referred to often in Suttree (I think?), but not by that name. I think there is a reference to this slummy area by the Tennessee River in the Prologue but McCarthy chooses not to call it by its commonly known name, or I should say the name Robinson uses: “Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox.” (Suttree 4) McCarthy’s use of “the flats” here raises the question of why he didn’t call it “the Bottoms.” Maybe it is/was called both the Bottoms and the Flats? But I digress. The main reason I am writing this post is to ask if other McCarthy scholars and enthusiasts have read Robinson’s autobiography and, if so, have you found it to be something you think McCarthy probably read and may have borrowed from? I know Agee’s A Death in the Family comes up in McCarthy criticism, but I wonder if Robinson’s book might also have something to offer.