“The photographs and items my mother brought back with her from Texas tell her migration story, connecting me to the people, places, and events that shaped her life and echo in mine.” In the summer of 2015, my parents rented an RV and traveled from the Bay Area to Fort Worth, Texas, just south of »
Music
This Bike is a Pipe Bomb rattled the basement windows of our rental house. High frequencies slipped through masonry cracks into the Athens, Georgia night, as amps fritzed from shorting wires. Guitar strings curled from frontman Rymodee’s tuning pegs like rooster sickle feathers. He stood stiff when he sang, a slight figure whose mutton chops »
Art
In the middle of a childhood marred by hard labor and an abusive father, Eddie Owens Martin got out. While Eddie had already been sharecropping cotton with his family for years, he was only fourteen years old when he took up sex work to support his travel from Glen Alta, Georgia, to New York City »
Interview
From an old wooden swing, Zulayka Santiago heard the over-revving of another truck speeding down the main road in front of her house. It was a not-too-warm day in May 2020, and we were at the tail end of our nearly hour-long interview. We tried to escape the noise by sitting near the treehouse where »
Photo Essay
The city of Baytown, Texas, home to the sprawling ExxonMobil refinery and across the ship channel from the San Jacinto Monument, sits on a peninsula jutting southwest into the upper reaches of Galveston Bay. It once housed the picturesque Brownwood subdivision, where, beginning in the 1950s, executives of Humble Oil lived midcentury dreams of postwar »
Essay
In November 2016, the New Orleans Zephyrs announced a name change after fans of the minor league baseball team submitted over three thousand suggestions to a rebranding contest. “Our goal was to give the baseball fans of New Orleans a team and identity they can call their own,” said Zephyrs President Lou Schwechheimer. “New Orleans »
Essay
This condensed excerpt first appeared in Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 2006). Access the full article via Project MUSE. A door slammed shut, startling me from a sleep too light and too brief. Struggling to get my bearings, I raised up on my elbows and peeked out the passenger side window of my pickup truck. »
Photo Essay
It may seem impossible, given climate change and ISIS, mass shootings and growing inequality and disregard for Black life, sexual assault and Russian hacking and the opioid epidemic, to worry about any other single thing, but history too is in trouble. I do not mean history as content. Beloved television shows and films take place »
Food
“As a national dish, the melting pot narrative of feijoada bolsters the image of Brazil as a racial democracy.” At a Brazilian restaurant in Astoria, Queens, a steam table simmered with collard greens, stewed okra, cornbread, and a meat-specked stew. “The seats were packed with Brazilians speaking Portuguese,” Francis Lam wrote in the New York »
Roundtable
“When people talked about ‘Katrina,’” a New Orleanian told a New Orleans Gambit reporter in 2008, “they are not just talking about the storm anymore. It’s the insurance crisis, the mental health crisis, the crime, the homeless under the bridge—the whole ball of wax.” What is Katrina now? A storm, a flood, or an engineering failure? A »
Essay
“In Atlanta, nothing else seemed to matter with the champ in town. He owned the city. It was a powerful scene—’sheer Black, street-corner ebullience out for a Sunday evening promenade.” The wait was over. On October 25, 1970, on the eve of Muhammad Ali’s first professional boxing match in forty-three months, African Americans flooded the »
In the summer of 2015, we filmed a short interview with Dorothy Allison, discussing the idea of southern mothers in conjunction with Keira V. Williams’s essay, “‘Between Creation and Devouring’: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood.” Today, in collaboration with our 21c Fiction Issue, we bring you excerpts of our conversation. “Life constructs or mitigates »