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 »
“He was forced into retirement after Hurricane Katrina, but ‘The Professor,’ as he’s known, is still a walking encyclopedia of New Orleans cocktail history.” As the oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance, I collect the stories behind the food. I travel the region to document everything from barbecue to boudin, catfish to caramel cake. »
“We parted in a warm, brotherly agreement about the ambrosial qualities of great down-home cooking, and I drove off shaking my head over people who could share so much around the table yet struggle so bitterly over other things.” Some years ago, I participated in a frank and comradely exchange of views on the late »
“Even as southern populations (and landscapes) have evolved, food and place remain indelibly linked in the southern imagination.” My mother-in-law, Shelby Flowers Ferris, has kept a daily journal for over forty years. These are not personal diaries in which she shares her “feelings”—which I imagine seem self-indulgent to such a practical woman—but rather carefully recorded »
“What you have in your hands isn’t just a list of memories and tastes. It’s an act of bravery akin to holding a lit stick of TNT.” You might want to handle these pages carefully. What you have in your hands isn’t just a list of memories and tastes. It’s an act of bravery akin »
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009 Books are not to be judged by their covers, we are warned; but a blurb for this valuable political profile of the Reverend Billy Graham is provocative enough to warrant consideration. Has he been “the most important American religious figure of the twentieth century”? Such a claim would, almost by »
University of Illinois Press, 2008 Midway through Harlan County, USA, the 1976 Academy Award-winning documentary about a coal miners’ strike in eastern Kentucky, an old miner sits in a lawn chair panting for breath. The camera cuts to a doctor who patiently delivers the diagnosis: pneumoconiosis, the gradual destruction of the lungs caused by long-term »
“The warden says fill and you fill it.” Photograph, 1983for Lola Bell When you and my grandmother both got old,and she could not bearthe empty house, and all your childrenwere gone as well, some nights the two of you crawled into her brass bed“like a pair of old spinsters,” your sistersays.
“Over on Roanoke Island, any number of homes in Manteo now stand on foundations they were not built upon, thanks to this man’s work. There was nothing he couldn’t move—why, I believe he once moved a small hotel!” Fifty or sixty years ago, my second cousin once-removed’s uncle by marriage, Uncle John Ferebee, was a »
“Civil War News, as the series came to be known, after its gazette-like report on the back of each card, offered images of brutality and mayhem sufficient to satisfy the most demanding boy’s bloodlust.” In New York in the early 1960s, when I was still not quite school age, I first learned what it means »
“‘I’m just here for the beer.’” It was in 1978 that “Redneck Riviera” first appeared in print. Probably. And in the New York Times no less. That was when Times reporter Howell Raines published a piece that told of how former University of Alabama and then pro-football quarterbacks Richard Todd and Kenny Stabler spent the »
“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 »