Essay
Charlie Thompson will launch GOING OVER HOME at Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill, NC) on Tuesday, November 11, in conversation with SOUTHERN CULTURES art director & deputy editor Emily Wallace. Details below. Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. As he came of age he witnessed the »
Poetry
1. On Your Deathbed The flame still arced inside your brain, a severing announcement of you to you— whatever part remained. It was the first news you missed, and as the state assembled in a room that wasn’t yours you groaned. Your mind withdrew. You lived all night, all flesh, inflamed, your voice a vent. Too long to fit the borrowed bed you limbs hung off at odd »
Memoir
“Unsurprisingly, there was no conversation around my dinner table as a child about the racist politics and actions of the Kitchin brothers.” Let me lay all of my cards on the table: my ancestors were not just bystanders but prominent figures in the ironfisted white supremacist tyranny over the black citizens of Halifax County, North »
Essay
Mark Twain hated Sir Walter Scott. He blamed Scott for the Civil War, accusing him of infecting the South with the “Sir Walter disease,” brought on by the “sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” Before the war and beyond the South’s defeat into the heyday of the »
Photo Essay
“We have to figure out how we go around [the mountain] or, like Hannibal, how we just run the troops up.” Kiese Laymon: Yo, man. It’s so good to talk to you, fam. I don’t even know how to ask somebody as busy as you how you doing. Are you less busy in the summer, »
Photo Essay
In the short story “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” Barry Hannah describes a gay Confederate soldier’s infatuation with Jeb Stuart, under whom he serves. It’s a hopeless and doomed predicament. To my mind, it’s a kind of peculiar faith in an unachievable outcome—much like the faith in political solutions to the »
Inteview
“Open your eyes, talk to us. We’ll tell you what we did wrong. We’ll tell you what we did right.” Jan Rader: There’s probably not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t come up to me and tell me a story. They come up and they say, “Thank you.” But what they really want is »
Interview
“At first, I thought three months was forever. I counted ninety-six days; “Oh God, that’s insane!” But imagine, now, I’ve already been here for more than four hundred days.” I have been living in this church for more than a year now, and it hasn’t been easy at all. It is exhausting, for me and »
Memoir
The Talk is a one-person performance that draws on the voices of ancestors, elders, youths, and intellectuals to engage in the difficult conversations that we must have with our children as we prepare them to survive and thrive in a divided America. In this original, seventy-five-minute performance, I evoke over twenty characters who draw audiences »
Interview
AMY WRIGHT: Do you consider yourself a radical, meaning that you favor drastic political, economic, or social reform? JANISSE RAY: There’s no denying that I am a radical and that I favor far-reaching and extreme reform on many levels. We are at a place globally that requires drastic action. We need immediate action to mitigate »
Memoir
“Though race is not present in biblical depictions of slavery, white southerners’ reading of scripture presupposed a natural social hierarchy in which Christianity, whiteness, and masculinity stood at the top.” The black smears of paint on my face and hands were smelly, and they itched. It was the mid-1980s, and I was seven, maybe, or »
Essay
Native people and topics appear infrequently in much conventional southern history—even that which takes race and ethnicity as its primary lens. When they do appear, they often do so spectrally, are set apart from other subjects, and are presumed to have played only minor roles in the development of the field’s big-ticket topics: slavery, the »