“Maybe firecrackers don’t mean anything but a hell of a good time.” We all know that hunting is a major theme in American literature. Think about Melville and his whale, Faulkner and his bear, Hemingway and his lions. For these writers, like the ancient heroes of mythology, hunting is more of a spiritual quest than »

“I love B. B. because he loves women. They can be mean, they can be bitchy, they can be carrying on, but you can tell he really loves them. He’s full of love. I would like to be the literary B.B. King.” My friendship with Alice Walker began in the fall of 1970 when I »

“We often had dates for the revival, since there wasn’t anything else to do in that town, or anyplace else to go, and that oftentimes your date would be holding your hand while you both got all wrought up together. So there was a sexual thing going on there, too.” Whether preaching the Gospel though »

“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 »

“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 »

“I am myself a history / Flanked always by A.D., B.C.” I.  THE FRONT PORCH GLIDER Back and forth the glider heaves our strange bodies,eighty-eight and twenty-four,your head swaying on its stem like a balding dandelion:eyes almost frosted over,throat whiskers roothair-white, you smellof mildew and ammonia—Is this the God-haired evangelist whose supper prayerwas as big »

“‘Lord, Lord, you ought to take a ride, get in a Ford with a donnie by your side.'” One Saturday evening in 1927, George D. Hay, the program director of Nashville radio station WSM, was preparing to introduce the evening’s local program, the WSM Barn Dance. Not really a barn dance at all, the program’s »

“I was only seventeen, a girl / who still could trust a suit and smile.” Mill Village Mill houses lined both sides of every roadlike boxcars on a track. They were so closea man could piss off of his own front porch,hit four houses if he had the wind.

“‘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 »

Public Affairs, 2002 Henry Clay Anderson photographed the African Americans of Greenville, a majority-black town on the banks of the Mississippi River and at the edge of the Mississippi Delta, for close to forty years. His life’s work is presented for the first time in Separate, But Equal. Greenville was thoroughly segregated throughout most of »

Louisiana State University Press, 2001

University Press of Florida, 2003 Many young southerners today may never have heard of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). If they have, they probably did so when Congress refused to renew a patent on its insignia or when the Daughters defended the flying of the Confederate flag. A century ago, however, most southerners »

University of North Carolina Press, 2002 Every now and then my good friend Rodney and I will launch into “Jubilee (jubilee), Jubilee (jubilee). You’re invited to this gospel jubilee” in two-part harmony and wind up in a fit of laughter at the memory. If you grew up in the South, you’re probably like us and »

Belknap Press, 2002; Princeton University Press, 2002 Election 2002 was kind to southern Republicans. When the votes were counted, the GOP controlled 13 of the South’s 22 seats in the U.S. Senate and 76 of the region’s 131 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. This development is remarkable given the Democratic Party’s historical dominance »