“Rivers take us back into history, sometimes literally, as the mighty Colorado has laid out the past in the rocky strata of the Grand Canyon. But elsewhere, that time-travel is sparked in the imagination.” One hundred and thirty years ago, Huckleberry Finn’s wild adventures on the Mississippi River first entered our imaginations, made all the »
Politics
“He had acted so precipitously so often in affairs of honor, and it had won him only paternal disapproval and a cane, a limp, and ignominy in Mexico. Now he had righted the ship; he had become a man of greater moderation and restraint.” Looking out across the scorched strand from atop one of the »
“Pies and cakes, pies and cakes. If I merely baked cookies, well, that was slumming.” In the beginning, he acted like a man who hadn’t eaten a home-cooked meal in twenty years. His first wife had been too unhappy to cook and the second one, too angry. He couldn’t get over my cooking. He didn’t »
“darkness lends its seasoningto every cast-iron skillet . . .” My mouth won’t ever forget her skill with a skillet,my father’s mother, cookingwith her mother’s skillet.
Food
“‘My husband likes to say . . . ‘We’re not just another hot sauce, we’re 400 years of history.’” Datil peppers sun on five bushes by the pool in Mary Ellen Masters’s backyard next to Faver Dykes State Park—a wild, scrubby preserve in south St. Johns County, Florida. Masters, whose family has lived in the »
“In recent years, food journalists, scholars, chefs, and devotees have scoured the corners, real and metaphorical, of the U.S. South in search of heritage, artisan, and rare but representative food cultures and practices. Lard has been rehabilitated; Brunswick stew fought over; early bean, pig, and fruit lines have been debated; almost everything has been pickled, »
“Lumbees are not a stereotype. We’re Indians, southerners, and Americans, all at once and without doubt . . . We don’t forget, even though others have largely forgotten, the role of Indian people in creating what we now know as ‘southern’ food.” In the 1990s I made a short documentary film about Lumbee Indian gospel »
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 »
“Pearl spiked her drink. And then I made a painting about it.” Pearl spiked her drink. And then I made a painting about it. I like to think of my paintings as portraits, each one a document of a specific moment in someone’s life. But the people are strangers, and their stories are told in »
Food
“‘That’s all I wants to do . . . to find something to can. I can stay in the kitchen from morning ’til night canning—’if I can find something to can, and have the jars, and the tops—’good tops, and lids. I loves to can.’” In a 2008 ethnographic celebration of American county fairs, Drake »
Photo Essay
I was in second grade in Kentucky when my friend Bobby invited me to spend Friday night with him and go fish a farm pond the next morning. His father, a long haul truck driver, was off work for the weekend and drove us some thirty miles out of town where we baited simple bream »
“[Y]ou can’t cheat time; age brings its changes, large and small, and we are no exception.” Faithful readers will remember that we celebrated Southern Cultures’s twentieth birthday last year. It was a banner year, full of exciting programs, special issues, and happy memories. But you can’t cheat time; age brings its changes, large and small, »