Interview
The air inside my red and white cooler was still warm from the car and the sun when I opened it on the kitchen counter. I stuck my face inside and inhaled fresh-picked figs from Virginia’s Eastern Shore. They smelled grassy and sweet, of caramel with just a touch of sour. The fruit—grape-sized to large »
Food is the door through which Bernard L. Herman brings readers to deep human ecologies of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. From large, dark drum fish to little shimmery spot to eels, oysters, and corn, from “marsh to field to table,” Herman listens carefully, partakes heartily, and responds poetically to the sense of belonging food »
The following is a list of frequently read Southern Cultures essays in the classroom from 2016–2017. Why did our readers choose to consult these essays again and again throughout the year? We can’t know for sure. They do point to preoccupations of the present moment—a society grappling with racism and its symbols; political turns of »
Essay
Material culture is best understood as the history and philosophy of objects. It proceeds from the idea that objects, tangible and imagined, locate the entirety of human experience and understanding. We are simply creatures that know and make sense of the world and our places within it through things. Southern things superintend the vast and »
“Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial.” Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial, citizens in a remarkable graphic menagerie that speak, sometimes forcefully, sometimes joyfully, to what he termed “hard truths.” Tigers, signifying the artist as well as »
“There’s only one piece of white meat in him, and that’s his neck. The rest of the meat is dark meat. If you fry it, it’s still like a white piece of meat, like a chicken breast. The rest of it looks like a chicken leg.” Two events mark the fall social season on the »
Food
Our foraging friends on Occohannock Neck, Malcolm and Carol, assured us that there was a summer moment in which field corn achieved perfection for the plate—and then as quickly reverted to the unpalatable starches desired for animal feed. To prove their assertion, they invited us for a supper anchored with cold smoked venison, grilled fish, »
The art works represented here are housed in the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. William Arnett, the Foundation’s founder, assembled the collection over a thirty-year period, during which he travelled throughout the South and interviewed the artists. Arnett selected the artworks illustrated here, offering a commentary on each one in a recorded conversation in 2013. In »
“Images of a deflated inner tube dropped by the road, a wallet mired, its contents spilling into the mud, footsteps revealed in soft earth, and river-wet clothes wrung, wadded, and cast aside document ordinary things possessed with extraordinary associations of flight, hope, panic, determination, and fear.” Susan Harbage Page’s portfolio, Longing: Personal Effects from the »
Oh Violet, keep the head on the fish, because I want my eyeballs. The Eastern Shore of Virginia, a long narrow peninsula, projects roughly seventy miles southward from the Maryland state line to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The Atlantic Ocean bounds the two counties (Northampton and Accomack) on the east and the Chesapeake »
Food
“‘I would say the average age of most people that buy spot now is probably sixty. Nobody young comes in this door and buys a box of fish.’” Late summer the phone rings in the Bayford Oyster House on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. “Bayford,” H. M. Arnold answers. “Yes ma’am,” he says a few »
Food
Sweet potatoes flourish in sandy soil. Strawberries announce the advent of spring. Figs sweeten the landscape in August. Canada geese flock to harvest cornfields in winter. Oysters, drum fish, mullet, clams, and spot add a signature dimension to coastal tables, but so, too, do local preparations for stewed pork and pumpkin, black duck and dumplings, »