Memoir
Each year our elementary school class took a field trip to the North Carolina Museum of Art. To prepare us for our visit, the board of education sent us a roving arts ambassador, a trained cultural cheerleader. To our fifth-grade class this person arrived in the form of one Mrs. Kingman. This was a woman »
“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 »
“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 »
To most, the “Greatest Show on Earth” means the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus. To me it meant the Dixie Classic, indisputably the greatest holiday basketball tournament ever played. For three days in late December in those long-ago 1950s—always the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday after Christmas—12,400 fans piled into N.C. State’s William Neal Reynolds »
I went to the University of North Carolina to study history in graduate school because I was a liberal and I wanted to study with the liberals who defined the term for me in my South. I wanted to be a Chapel Hill Liberal. My friends and family in South Carolina found all of this »
I was born August 27, 1960, in Saint Joseph’s Hospital, a diocesan Catholic institution in Aurora, Illinois, where my mother was employed as a nurse’s aide and therefore acquainted with most of the personnel, including a couple of dozen priests and nuns. This fact is noteworthy because it indicates that I was fussed and prayed »
Reading Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, with its account of the vicissitudes of the battlefield reenactments and reenactors of the long-ago war, causes me to confront the fact of my own Confederate past. Although I never affected authentic battle garb, dine on rancid bacon and parched corn, or »
These days most American teenagers have traveled in Europe, but I still haven’t crossed an ocean. I was already middle-aged before I got more than one or two states away from home. Then my family and I crossed the country so we could ride through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River in a rubber »
“‘No normal person could resist the gregarious contagion of this congenial event where merchants and farmers, visiting celebrities and natives met and mingled.’” For more than one hundred years, Mississippians have braved their long hot summer to head to the eastern part of the state for the Neshoba County Fair. For one week in late »
“The orchard was still hot, still rustling and green, still haunted by the terror of snake bodies writhing to life under your feet.” Each fall I receive an exact intimation of how far away I have become. Such signs are not always dramatic, the Old Testament notwithstanding. When God, or memory, or the past, or »