Interview
A few years ago, my mother suggested we go see an exhibition of cloth paintings at the Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts at Wofford College, the small liberal arts college in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where my late father had worked from the early 1980s to 2007. The exhibition was entitled Scraps from My »
Essay
Winter 2021. It is bitter cold on the edges of the holler where we live in central North Carolina. A polar vortex moves through the Piedmont and extends itself into Charlotte. The voices of loved ones ring in my ears. We need more solidarity pledges. We need a lawyer. We need more fair housing. We »
Memoir
“He listened ravenously to our every answer, listened as if his life depended on it. And that, it turns out, is precisely the thing: it does.” Like so many reckonings, mine began with a seemingly innocent question. “Mama,” he asked, “where are we from?”
Art
“I use paint, ink and canvas, paper and other surfaces to visualize that which remains after my body moves to the sound of the music and of praise, to more fully consider residue—lingering—that escapes capture.” Learning about Life and love in the spiritual space of Blackpentecostalism, I was able to sense the world by paying »
Photo Essay
In 1942, Ms. Ella Watson of Washington, DC, spent her summer nights in the halls of the nation’s capital, where she had been working for twenty-six years. The government charwoman went to work at 5:30 p.m. in federal buildings, cleaning floors, toilets, and such, then heading home by 2:30 a.m. On one of these nights, »
Essay
My grandparents’ house on Hardup Road in Albany, Georgia, was my first understanding of sanctuary. Our house was not in Albany proper; we lived past the city limits in Dougherty County. Planting and grazing fields flanked us on three sides of our yard. And each trip “in town” was a mini-quest: my Paw Paw Eugene’s »
Essay
In Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and writer Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Trethewey writes poignantly of her reaction to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain album cover while remembering the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of an ex-husband. “So this stays with me: a woman with an afro like the one my mother wore »
Poetry
I’ll eat when I’m hungry,…..I’ll drink when I’m dry;If the hard times don’t kill me,…..I’ll lay down and die. Those four forthright lines begin “Rye Whisky,” poem number 276 in The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938), chosen and edited by W. H. Auden. But that can’t be how I first encountered them, on page »
Interview
In the mid-1970s, Sorrell Hays, a composer of electronic music, took her synthesizers, sound equipment, and contact mics to Dougherty County, Georgia. She was there to introduce children in newly desegregated classrooms to experimental forms of music-making. For Hays (1941–2020), it was a return to the South after almost two decades away and a confrontation »
Poetry
In a dream, you could do that. Hug someone you haven’t seen in years without crying.You could feel like you still lived in your old bedroom. You could go back to before likenothing, like magic, like the reverse of water down the drain. I wish I could have said what I wanted to then, but »
Essay
I grew up in a house full of books, three of which belonged to my dad. They were his wellworn Bible; How I Made a Million Dollars in Mail Order, and You Can Too; and The Foxfire Book. Published in 1972, The Foxfire Book carried the reader into the mountains of North Georgia, near the »
Essay
I recently visited Dublin, Ireland, and there were several restaurants serving Central Texas–style barbecue. Whether or not they were doing it well is another matter, but the point is that people around the world can’t seem to get enough of the cuisine. Barbecue is an ancient and now global method of food preparation whose history »