Reflections, prose, and poems remembering Randall Kenan by Black former students and friends, old and new.

In an essay published in our pages in 2000, our friend Jerry Leath Mills surveyed around 30 prominent twentieth-century southern authors, which led him "to conclude, without fear or refutation, that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked of any literary text and whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting, and final. The test is: Is there a dead mule in it?" For our forthcoming special issue on 21st-Century Fiction, we were curious if Mills's hypothesis held up so we brought the question to some of our favorite authors. Is there a "quality of southernness" in 21st-century southern fiction? Is Mills's mule now truly dead?