I went to the University of North Carolina to study history in graduate school because I was a liberal and I wanted to study with the liberals who defined the term for me in my South. I wanted to be a Chapel Hill Liberal. My friends and family in South Carolina found all of this »
I was born August 27, 1960, in Saint Joseph’s Hospital, a diocesan Catholic institution in Aurora, Illinois, where my mother was employed as a nurse’s aide and therefore acquainted with most of the personnel, including a couple of dozen priests and nuns. This fact is noteworthy because it indicates that I was fussed and prayed »
Reading Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, with its account of the vicissitudes of the battlefield reenactments and reenactors of the long-ago war, causes me to confront the fact of my own Confederate past. Although I never affected authentic battle garb, dine on rancid bacon and parched corn, or »
These days most American teenagers have traveled in Europe, but I still haven’t crossed an ocean. I was already middle-aged before I got more than one or two states away from home. Then my family and I crossed the country so we could ride through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River in a rubber »
“‘No normal person could resist the gregarious contagion of this congenial event where merchants and farmers, visiting celebrities and natives met and mingled.’” For more than one hundred years, Mississippians have braved their long hot summer to head to the eastern part of the state for the Neshoba County Fair. For one week in late »
“The orchard was still hot, still rustling and green, still haunted by the terror of snake bodies writhing to life under your feet.” Each fall I receive an exact intimation of how far away I have become. Such signs are not always dramatic, the Old Testament notwithstanding. When God, or memory, or the past, or »
I was born in Yazoo City at the edge of the Mississippi Delta in 1956, the year Elvis Presley made his television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show but was shown only from the waist up. My father was in the service, and I moved from city to city as a “Navy brat.” But no »
“But nonetheless I have been lurking in the shadows, plotting and sulking like one of William Faulkner’s vindictive barn-burners.” I come from a family of preachers, teachers, and farmers, not academics, and most members of my extended clan don’t seem to have any clear sense of what a college professor actually does on, say, Tuesdays. »
“For a moment the world stopped turning while we, a great nation, felt ourselves suddenly headless, directionless.” I am not sure why the number eighty seems so weighty, compared with its predecessor or even with its successor. What are the landmark ages? Being old enough to drive? To vote? Or fifty? One young friend told »
“What I most recall is the sun slamming down, ricocheting off tin roofs of mud and plaster houses that duplicated one another endlessly down a thousand bicycle paths, splashes of puddles during the rains, and a hundred women on their way to market.” When I was a small girl in Nigeria, my father, after his »
“‘Yessir, pretty fine shootin’, especially as it appears these birds were flying upside down.’” I never know what to say when someone asks me where I am from. I was born in Memphis and the family moved before I was one. By the time I was six we had managed to live in four different »
“I’m with the British writer Zadie Smith, who writes, ‘The Book of Revelation is the last stop on the nutso express.’” It’s not well known that I was once an actual salaried art critic, for a very large newspaper—for a very short run. But I’m here today, I’m sure, due to my reputation as a »