Essay
“I just want to let you know,” the older white man told me at a late-summer fish fry, “that my family owned slaves, and those slaves were happy.” This was mid-September of 2014, my second year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The event was held at »
Essay
My great-grandfather was murdered by a white man in 1926, the night before New Year’s Eve. He was thirty-five years old—my grandmother Sara’s father. I call her Nana Boo. She doesn’t have any memories of him because he was killed when she was a baby. His wife, Nana Boo’s mama, Mary Jones Barkley, was the »
Essay
For almost thirty years, my parents ran an antique shop in an old two-story house in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. When I was little, stuff arrived and departed by way of my mother’s van, a matte-green 1970s camper, stripped of its bunk and golden burlap curtains. It had no air conditioning and smelled of cigarettes »
Memoir
After the eighth chicken and dumpling bowl was stacked back in the cupboard and the rest of our extended family had departed for home or a nap, Mema and I took long walks on Sunday afternoons through endless pine and oak in the backcountry of southeastern North Carolina. Out of my Sunday dress and into »
Memoir
Pearl, I’m sorry. I’m not feeling it anymore. I tried. For years, I tried. You know I did. I served on the board of your Birthplace in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I read the biographies. I wrote grants and hired volunteers and emailed leaders across the state and researched themed tours for your museum. I »
Memoir
“I am in Jamaica because Frank wanted his ashes scattered here; he wanted to come home.” I have been in Jamaica for four days and cannot find a place that makes ox-tail stew. I ask one of my aunts, but she says that it’s not something you typically find on a restaurant menu. She’s not »
Memoir
“Let’s go around the room and say where we’re from.” It was my first day in a class called “Experiencing Appalachia” during my first year of college. “Raleigh,” someone said. “Just outside of Charlotte,” said another. “High Point.” The professor continually nodded as the circle made its way to me. “Haywood County,” I said. Her »
“‘No shirt, no sleeves, no service. . . . No guns.’” My buddy Floyd is a native of Wisconsin. He’s half Minnesotan and half Wisconsinite, which makes him half German and half Norwegian and about six-feet nine-inches of Aryan genetics. It’s impossible not to attract attention when traveling with Floyd. I’m going to have a »
I have recently been reflecting on the significance of the porch in the South, on what that space allows and what it means. I have been thinking about the history of sharing and interaction that characterizes porch space in southern culture, about the voices that bring the space to life, about what this space meant »
“Can a prominent Mississippi liberal love the Battle Flag? The answer may surprise you.” When I went to work for Jimmy Carter, I left the South I had known. It’s now been nineteen years since I came to perch here on the outer rim of northern Virginia, and no one is more aware than I »
“Freezing time is a tricky science.” “Death suffuses all these pictures.” So says former fashion photographer Charlie Curtis, who has been working late on his time machine again. Readers of Southern Cultures will remember his “Signs of the South” photographic essay, which we published in our Summer 2000 issue. But unlike “Signs of the South,” »
Every year I make at least two trips to visit my parents in Ste. Genevieve (pop. 4,411), a predominantly Catholic, mining and farming town in southeastern Missouri. Until it recently closed, my favorite place to hang out while I was home was at the O.K. Corral, a local watering hole where proprietor Wally Bauman served »