North Heights Amarillo may have been one of the models for Toni Morrison’s Paradise. In this work, Morrison understands the tension of setting up a new community in the Anglo-dominated Plains:

"From the beginning when the town was founded, they knew isolation did not guarantee safety...Ten generations had known what lay out there: space, once beckoning and free, becomes unmonitored and seething. Out there where your children have sport, your woman quarry, where congregations carried arms to church..."