“Like The Help, Can’t Quit You, Baby focuses on the layers of habit, antipathy, resentment, suspicion, attachment, and silence linking white employer and black employee—but in ways that are far more unsettling.” In the afterword to the bestselling 2009 novel The Help, titled “Too Little, Too Late,” author Kathryn Stockett voices a certain trepidation about »
“Perhaps because the modern Civil Rights Movement and television news came of age together, the younger medium was destined to become an iconographic feature of the civil rights genre.” Midway through the 2011 film adaptation of The Help, Charlotte Phelan storms into the “relaxing room” of her plantation home and turns off the television set »
“Lauded for her endless gifts and selfless generosity, Mammy is summoned from the kitchen to refute the critics of southern race relations; cruelly circumscribed and taken for granted, she silently confirms them all.” “Mammy” is one of the most vivid characters on the southern cultural landscape. Immortalized in songs, stories, and films, Mammy is the »
University of South Carolina Press, 2012 For the most part, existing studies of the environmental movement in the United States overlook the South. The Environmental History and the American South book series published by the University of Georgia Press addresses the temporal dimensions of this omission, but there is still much to learn about the »
“Joe cackled fiendishly, addressing Vernon through the closed lid. ‘Who’s got the last laugh now, big boy?’” When young men of my generation were asked to be pallbearers at a funeral, they knew they had been accepted into the ranks of southern manhood. An even higher masculine honor was an invitation to “sit-up with the »
“…flavored of tin from the lip of the cup of a dented thermos passed between us—” Apple Slices—eaten rightoff the jackknife inmoons, half moons,quarter moons andcrescents—stillsummon commonsummer afternoonsI spent as my dad’sjobsite grunt
Berkley Books, 2013 After writing a well-received memoir, Gods of Noonday, about growing up the daughter of Baptist missionaries in Nigeria, Elaine Orr has produced a well-wrought novel about another missionary, this one a century earlier, in West Africa. A Different Sun was “inspired,” Orr writes, by the diary of Lurana Davis Bowen, who served »
Harvard University Press, 2010 In Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature, Jennifer Greeson is not concerned with southern identity or what the South is; rather, she explores what role the South has played in the broader culture of the United States. Employing a comparative, transnational approach, Greeson looks to answer the »
“‘Feet commenced to pat. A moment later there was dancing on the sidewalks below. Hands went into the air, bodies swayed like the reeds on the bands of the Congo.’” In 1909, three white politicians—Edward H. Crump, Joseph J. Williams, and Walter W. Talbert—vied to become the next mayor of Memphis. Each of the candidates »
“Some devout Baptists complained that there was too much booze in a mini bottle for one drink; the rest of us complained that there wasn’t enough.” William Faulkner must have smiled down from heaven back in 2010 when his birthplace, New Albany, Mississippi, went wet—or at least damp—by making the sale of beer and “light »
“At mid-century, the South had no Republican senators and only two Republicans in the 105-person southern House delegation. By 2000 [both] delegations were majority Republican.” You don’t have to be a historian, a political scientist, or even a particularly astute political observer to know that the South has moved from one-party Democratic control to a »
“Maggie’s neighbor-women saw a young woman just like themselves, with no children to feed, trying to build a life, and so they helped her, unquestioning in recognition that she would help them in return. This was so.” She was the only child born to parents with children from earlier marriages. America Lewis and James Henry »
