“My mother used to call it GETTING ALL WROUGHT UP and viewed it as a kind of sickness, like the flu.” Back when I was a very dramatic and religious girl, I often spoke at Christian youth groups and camp meetings. As my minister once said in introducing me, “This here is Lee Smith, and »
“Thank you, heart lady.” I was about five years old—and being dragged along on another of a series of errands that generally didn’t hold much interest for me. But this trip held promise. We were going to one of my favorite places . . . the bookstore. And for some reason my mom seemed to »
“A dark secret hid itself under my overt appreciation for barbecue and bluegrass: I know next to nothing about NASCAR.” I loved sweet tea, fried chicken, and pulled pork sandwiches. I drove an American-made car and enjoyed old country music. I had a fishing license and drank domestic beer, preferably cheap, on a regular basis. »
“The dooway to Number Five suddenly opened directly onto an ocean writhing in fury. The front rooms no longer existed. The floor of the hallway had been sucked into the surf.” Editor’s Note: Positioned just east of the eye of the storm, Bay St. Louis and Waveland, Mississippi, suffered the brunt of Katrina’s wrath. Winds »
“I stood on the back porch and gazed across the fresh spring grass toward the squat little outhouse nestled at the edge of the meadow, behind the old chicken coop. All outdoor toilets are not the same, and ours has some unusually fine qualities.” I flushed with excitement. After generations of anticipation, the house finally »
“‘Your cookbook,’ she related with obvious pride, ‘was published in 1897.’” After a hiatus of many years, it’s my turn to host the family Thanksgiving—a perfect opportunity to introduce my new daughter-in-law and several grown-up nieces and nephews to Great Aunt Adele.
“I would stand outside the mill fence mesmerized by the shadows of pumping Jacquard loom arms on the opaque windowpanes. I had found where I wanted to go. It looked like fun to me. It looked like magic. It didn’t take long for that silly notion to be knocked out of my head. But, I »
“It was not until 1946 when my grandmother received a copy of the revised birth certificate in the mail from my father and blurted out to me, ‘That ain’t your name,’ that I really became aware of the problems. She quickly added, ‘Your mother, she never got it right neither.’” The family saga as a »
“There’s a silence in snowy dawn that forces you to look anew at what has been transformed from the customary landscape of your day-to-day life. Dogwoods glisten in their silver finery; bowing fir limbs form a secret cathedral.” My daughters were born in Tampa, Florida, which meant they had never seen snow. This deprivation changed »
“This was an anxious time for American Jews, stung by the anti-Semitic quotas and discrimination of the interwar years and the growing horror regarding the fate of European Jewry as the Holocaust came to light in the 1940s.” My first experience at a southern Jewish summer camp was not easy. I felt out of place. »
“That archaic system of child labor that often sent me home bleeding at thirteen or saw me faint from heat exhaustion at sixteen seems terribly oppressive and immoral to one who never lived it. Ask tobacco kids how they remember it, and they will paint a radically different picture.” I keep a real tobacco leaf »
“Crossing the Mississippi River, putting my head out of the window to stare at its broad muddy width—the last boundary of my well-known southern world—I left Tennessee.” In 1946, a year after World War II was over and just before school started, my ten-year-old brother and I (twelve then), and my father and his new »