Poetry
What shadows my happiness? The boy and calf so linked by a rope seem to forget all else. Grass recedes to the horizonand chickens roam free. Hay stacked richly as memory bulges mountainously on the sky.
“In such heat, this mission sickened him. The killing had been simple, it felt country-necessary, country-right.” And, verily, the head did weigh twenty-seven pounds. And to hold it before him—as you would lift a lantern—costs the young David much strength. Was not his day’s strength already well used by killing so great a warrior? Trumpets »
Its title borrowed from a Sir Walter Raleigh poem, The Store of Joys is a lively anthology of previously unpublished poetry, fiction, and nonfiction written in response to paintings and sculpture in the North Carolina Museum of Art collection. The forty-five contributors to the book are among North Carolina’s most distinguished writers and include these »
“What can the autobiographies of black and white southerners coming of age in the segregated South tell us about race?” In Lillian Smith’s Our Faces, Our Words, a young northern-born and -educated African American come south to join the civil rights movement reflects upon his experiences in the field with southern youths, Black and white. »
What happens when one person looks at the art of another? James Henry Hammond, an ambitious planter-politician of antebellum South Carolina, got one very depressing answer in 1841 when he threw open his dazzling new house to a select circle of Columbia’s most cultivated gentlemen. Hammond later gained immortality by coining the phrase “Cotton is »
“Though their relationship with the South has often been ambiguous, Jews have made a home for themselves in the region.” As quintessential outsiders, Jews have developed a sixth sense in taking cues on public behavior from the host society. Over the centuries, their successful assimilation and at times even their survival have often depended on »
“The soldiers unloaded from the train like a colony of ants and invaded the watermelon patch like soldiers in battle.” Everyone was talking about a troop train coming, and that bothered me. I knew it should be a secret. After all, a German spy might be lurking nearby. I knew this train was important because »
Southern studies are at a critical juncture. Old interests and paradigms are losing their hold; new ones are emerging but have yet to dominate. Novel forms of academic communication and publication are multiplying. Never before have southernists had the intensity and number of interactions now proliferating on the Internet. As a result, the field is »
“Ducloux was in ecstasy as he devoured the next five biscuits.” Last summer I had the good fortune to audit a course on the sociology of the South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Actually, it was a bit of an intellectual breather from five-years work on an increasingly ponderous tome concerning »
One form of “race-mixing” that both Black and white southerners have long viewed with unconcern or even with pride has been intermarriage (perhaps preferably in the remote past) with the South’s Native American population. Southern families from the First Families of Virginia to the Presleys of Tupelo, Mississippi, have believed themselves descended from Indian ancestors, »
“Over two centuries ago the Moravians made their way into North Carolina on the Great Wagon Road. Their pathway has shaped personal and regional histories ever since.” This is the place you’re looking for,” Darrell Lester shouts, standing in the middle of a small cow pasture. Behind him flows the south branch of the Mayo »
“The author uses two legendary figures to explore sex, culture, and power in the conquest of the South.” As icons of the European colonization of the Americas, Columbus and Pocahontas represent opposite sides of the experience—European and Native, invader and defender, man and woman. Biographies and other scholarly writings document their lives and deeds, but »