“Home may include the earth, may include the space around it, but it is far more expansive thanthat.”

ON JULY 4, TWO LONGTIME FRIENDS and former colleagues in the department of English at Duke University sat down to dialogue about visions of home in African American cultural life and imagination. Prompted by guest editors Blair LM Kelley and LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Professors Karla FC Holloway and Maurice O. Wallace mused on the nonplace of home, touching on race, class, history, environment, spirituality, and Indigeneity along the way. Though unattended by other human participants, their seventy-minute conversazione included the quiet witness of several elder trees, mixed shrubs, annuals, and not a few colorful perennials. Holloway and Wallace’s unscripted exchange was inspired by a verdant garden bed nearby as they sat patio-side just off the kitchen of the craftsman-style dwelling that Wallace and his wife, a hospital executive at Yale, enjoy together in Trumbull, Connecticut. Odd as it may seem to some Southern Cultures readers that the conversation should take place outside the South proper, it is not “where you are or what you have,” as the great Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James once said, “but where you have come from, where you are going, and the rate at which you are getting there.” The South is memory and prophecy. Home is there. And nowhere all at once.