Photo by John Rosenthal

Elizabeth Spencer on Eudora Welty

I had a long friendship (fifty years) with Eudora and don’t think I could do better now than to quote from my memoir, Landscapes of the Heart.

“For Eudora life is lived close to the everyday detail of it, but it isn’t boring.  Nothing is too small to be noticed, and once noticed, there is nothing that can’t also be extraordinary. The best way to catch her quality is to be in her company, but next best is to read her . . . Are many writers like what they write? I don’t think so, but she is.” (p. 202)

“An amazing aspect of Eudora’s life is how personal, despite her fame, she is able to keep all her relationships. It never seems to enter her mind to be anything but her own Jackson, Mississippi, self.  This intimate quality enters into her writing and gives it much of its appeal; when we compare it with the work of others of considerable note, it seems all the more singular, a gift.” (p. 168)

Photo by Bryan Regan Photography

Lee Smith on Elizabeth Spencer

I first met Elizabeth Spencer on the page, introduced to her fiction by my professor Louis D. Rubin in his Southern Literature class at Hollins College. I ended up writing my senior thesis on her work. I admired both her artistry and her bravery, for even back in 1956, Elizabeth had not been afraid to deal with the forbidden theme of racism in her compelling novel, The Voice at the Back Door, which caused her to become estranged from her family and ostracized in Mississippi, sending her into exile. But my own reaction to her work was not a political, ethical, or literary response. Instead it was very personal, that kind of thud you get in your gut when something really important happens. In those early years when I was struggling so hard to find a way to be a writer (without killing myself and my whole family in the process) it seemed to me that Elizabeth Spencer articulated my own feelings (often dark, inchoate, and scary—surely no one had ever felt this way before!). If I read her fiction enough, maybe I could make it work. Maybe I could get my unruly self pinned down on a page; I never once kidded myself that I would ever write stories so filled with order and grace. But maybe I could be some kind of a writer after all.

Amazingly, this happened. And even more amazingly, many years later, Elizabeth Spencer moved with her husband, John Rusher, to Chapel Hill, where I live. I couldn’t believe it! She actually became my friend, always good for a glass of wine and a giggly, gossipy “girl” lunch. At first, the more I saw of Elizabeth, the more I stood in awe of her. A great beauty, always impeccable, dressed to the nines, she proved to be every inch a lady in the grand tradition: a great hostess who effortlessly puts everyone else at ease, a brilliant conversationalist on just about any topic, a faithful community volunteer, an active parishioner at the Chapel of the Cross, an avid and experienced traveler. And yet she kept on working, always working, writing those daring and serious stories which dive below consciousness, drawing us out of our comfortable selves and down into strange places; we come back different, changed. We know more. This is the very purpose of fiction, I believe: to take us someplace else, to open up the world for us to other possibilities, to make us acknowledge our dark selves as well as our dutiful ones. It is not easy to be such a traveler, or such a writer, and yet live with grace in the world. Elizabeth Spencer has served as a peerless example, and a fearless guide. I am so lucky—and grateful—to know her.

Photo by Tom Rankin

Jill McCorkle on Lee Smith

I first met Lee Smith in 1978 when I was in her intermediate-level fiction workshop at UNC–Chapel Hill. My earlier teacher and then director of the program, Max Steele, had told me that he had put me in the class of the new teacher—a young, wonderful writer they were all thrilled to have join the department. On the first day of class, twelve of us sat around a big conference table talking about other classes and ballgames and bars and stifling hot dorm rooms; after a while, we started looking at our watches and wondering where the teacher was. We were used to slightly older English grad students sitting in on these workshops, so it never occurred to us that our teacher had been there the whole time, actively participating in all of the discussions. There she was, blue jeans and wild blonde hair springing from under a kerchief she had tied at the back of her neck. “The teacher?!” she screamed. “Well, I’m the teacher!” And what a teacher she was.

That was the beginning of a fun and thriving semester for all of us. I still have all of my pieces returned to me with her loose, generous script filling the margins. I learned so much about writing just listening to her talk about other writers and about her own work when questioned. Her novel Black Mountain Breakdown came out that year, and so we all felt privy to the whole publishing experience and great excitement around it. Lee’s generosity went way beyond anyone’s expectations and has continued for me to this day. I left that class having learned a lot and also gained a lifetime mentor and friend. Lee still reads my work in its early stages, and she still will scream with enthusiasm or shock or disbelief like no one else I know. I thanked Max Steele many times after for placing me in that class, and I have tried as a teacher to give back all that I witnessed that term.

Photo by KPO Photo

Sarah Dessen on Jill McCorkle

Jill McCorkle was the second writing teacher I had at UNC-Chapel Hill, after Doris Betts. While they could not have been more different, I learned so much from each of them. With Jill, it was always about giving yourself time to get into the swing of the story. She often told us that we should consider cutting the first full page of anything we wrote, as it often consisted of nothing but trying to get the nerve up to start. This was especially true for me (I overwrite, always, thank goodness for great editors), and I still think of her each time I am starting a draft and find myself spinning my wheels for a few paragraphs. I love how Jill always let us know writing wasn’t always easy or perfect for her, either. That was a great gift to get when I was just starting out.

I grew up in a home in which guns were as familiar as Franklin Roosevelt—and considered by my father as indispensable as FDR to our welfare and security. I grew up in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, hundreds of thousands of acres of unbroken flood plain stretching from Memphis to Vicksburg. It was protected from the Mississippi River’s annual rising tide by a fragile levee system that had given way in 1927 to a flood that covered the land for five months.

It was the South’s South, as the novelist Richard Ford has phrased it, and its white minority held passionately to the creed of white supremacy. Affecting the planter’s mantle, most of its white farmers had but recently wrestled the land from swamp and thick forest and yellow fever. Affluence for whites was rare; abject poverty for the blacks who toiled the land as serfs was endemic.

My father was as loyal a son of the South as the South ever produced, save for two qualities. He never stopped growing, and he would not march in lockstep in a white society that valued—no, demanded—conformity behind the segregationist creed.

Let me very clear here. My father was no liberal, as that term is and was understood on the upper West Side of Manhattan or in Harvard Yard. The title of a well-researched biography of his life was The Reconstruction of a Racist. It was a marketing ploy, that title, one that I resent to this day, but it embodied a home truth. The grandson of one of the founders of the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan—or so family legend had it—he held to all the tenets of white supremacy throughout his high school and college years.

But he was afflicted with intelligence and nurtured in the democratic creed and the Christian faith, strictly Southern Presbyterian though it was. He could not square either one with the raw, brutal repression of the black man. No integrationist, he could not understand why the education and employment of black Mississippians was a threat to white civilization—or why those who were qualified to vote should not be allowed to vote.

Which is what he wrote, practically from the moment he founded his second daily newspaper in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1936, squarely nestled against the levee which had been ripped apart just nine years earlier. It is what he practiced in what chose to cover and how he covered it.

And it provoked rage and threats, advancing and retreating in response to what his tiny daily offered up to its readers from week to week. Thus the guns—an implicit bulwark against incessant midnight phone calls and direct encounters, frontier fashion, with men who loved to brawl and hated “nigger lovers”—that despicable label for the white nonconformist.

Dad went off to war, his National Guard unit called into service by Roosevelt thirteen months before Pearl Harbor. What he later experienced of the world’s nonwhite majority during the North African campaign and the conclusions he drew from the war against fascism focused his general unease into clearer distinctions about what was acceptable and unacceptable here at home. In a white-hot six months as he was leaving the service in 1945, he wrote a series of editorials that won him the Pulitzer Prize and earned the undying, unremitting enmity of the racist majority.

Which is where I came in. Back from a sprawling apartment complex built in suburban Maryland to house the huge wartime influx, I was reintroduced to my white grammar school peers as a boy with a Yankee accent, a weird name, and a communist, Jew-bought (Pulitzer was Jewish), “nigger lover” father.

It was an introduction I tried desperately to evade. Call me Will, I begged of my folks. Cool it with the editorials—please? Let me blend into the background. All to no avail. While most of my classmates eventually saw me in more complicated ways, there would always be the sneering bully boys who, learning at their parents’ knees and from their mouths, tried their best to drive me out of the schoolyard and then out of all the community haunts so dear to teenagers.

It didn’t work on Dad and, thanks to his example, it didn’t work on me. Not in the 1940s and not in the 1950s and 1960s, after the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and his editorial endorsement of its inevitability. Not ever during the sixteen-year segregationist boycott of the newspaper that only ended in 1969, when it had become inescapably clear that a lone newspaper editor in a smallish Delta town was not responsible for the black revolution and federal intervention.

Despite all those nights sitting outside with guns, waiting for the night riders to come, none ever did. A stray burning cross here, some smashed windows there, garbage on the lawn after my brother accidentally killed himself in 1964—these were the sum and substance of physical assault.

As for the attempt to destroy us economically, it failed. It did not succeed because Dad knew implicitly and I learned by osmosis that being out of step need not be fatal if you were simultaneously working and advocating for the common good. They couldn’t destroy him, they couldn’t destroy the paper, and they could not, later, destroy me because we always were of community, deeply involved in community, concerned about the community’s future. As the old joke went, we might be SOBs, but we were their SOBs, and we wrapped that town around us like a blanket against the storm. And they could not destroy his or, later, my will because of the other great lesson he taught and I learned. Unless you were a psychopath or a fool, being afraid in the face of unremitting threats and pressure was inevitable. But being afraid was not the end of the story. It was the beginning.

Bravery does not arise from ignorance of the consequences or reckless disregard of them. It is the definition of action taken in the wake of fear and in full awareness of the possible consequences. Seeking fearless heroes is a feckless enterprise. Mastering fear and soldiering on: That is bravery.

What of faith in all this? At core, it was and is everything. Dad was a fallen Presbyterian, grandson of a stern Calvinist who had presided over her huge brood’s table with rigorous rules and stern moral pronouncements. He was lured away to the spiritual lassitude (that’s a joke from a practicing Episcopalian) of the Episcopal Church by his young New Orleans bride. But whatever the sign on the church door, what he derived from faith was encapsulated in the two great commandments. For Dad, that was Christianity’s eternal guidance. The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.

But the organized church was and remained in cultural captivity for generations across the South. Preachers quoted scripture to defend segregation no less than they had defended slavery. Men stood at the church door not to welcome all to worship our common God but to repel those whose skin color was closer to that of the biblical Jesus than of theirs. The Social Gospel was reviled as Marxist. It was a shameful, sordid chapter in church history.

For those Christians, the sad joke applied. “But Daddy, you know what Jesus would say about segregation,” said the young woman home from college. “Yes,” Daddy replied, “but He would be wrong.”

The following will not be a long recital of war stories. I came back to our Delta newspaper from the Marines in 1959. I took over editorial control in 1962 and became editor in 1966. My father went through a long, tragic decline for the last ten years of his life, dying at age sixty-five in 1972. He never saw the total collapse of “our way of life,” of the braying jackasses of racist demagoguery. But he saw enough to know that while he had been out of step with his region for so long, it had finally been brought more nearly into step with the demands of America’s democratic creed and religious heritage. He may not have won, but his enemies—the enemies of human decency, of Christianity, of our democratic imperatives—had lost.

Thus my first enduring lesson as my father’s son and a Southerner of a certain time: If you really care about a place, a region, a nation, you refuse to accept its dark side or succumb to its conformist blandishments. At the same time, you never fall into the error of believing that it is somehow uniquely sinful in an otherwise sin-free land. To believe that is to ignore history.

Which leads to my second lesson as my father’s son. No political position or ideological game plan is entitled to unblinking acceptance. Truth is not the monopoly of any one people or person or region or nation. All of mankind being fallen, none can demand tribute as unassailable.

I have pretty much been an unblinking Democrat all my life—insofar as how I usually vote. But no Democratic president or Congress has deserved or received a free pass from Hodding Carter the journalist, younger or older, and in the early days of building a two-party system in the South, a number of Republican candidates received our editorial endorsement. Support for a two-party system arose from familiar roots. If the abuse of power in the name of revealed truth is unacceptable, it is equally true that political power unchecked by vigorous competition and regular defeat will be abused. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Always.

The magnificent political principles embodied in the founding documents and the moral imperatives embedded in the two great Testaments deserve our unblinking allegiance. But to march in lockstep behind any single person or faction, to confuse the nation with an individual or party, is to commit cardinal error. When we put on team jackets, we give up free will and individual conscience. Each of us has an inner drummer. Each of us must pay heed to its beat, even when it means marching counter to the great parades of the moment.

There were other derivative lessons I drew from my dad’s example—no matter how belatedly or reluctantly. Passionate belief is no guarantee of truth. Good intentions can mask vile behavior. There is more than one way to reach a desired objective.

Over the course of my career as a journalist, I wrote some 5,500 editorials. I wrote perhaps 500 columns, dozens of magazine articles of one kind or another, and a handful of books. When I wrote each of them, I thought I was right. When I wrote many of them, I was passionately certain that I was doing God’s work. I was no less passionately sure that those who disagreed were in fundamental error. I even thought that some of them represented, as the President George W. Bush once described our international enemy, nothing less than evil incarnate.

I have tried to apologize for that mindset repeatedly over the past decade or so. In retrospect and almost inevitably, many of those editorials were written in haste and published in error. Much of my moral fervor was so much hot air. Some of the positions against which I railed I later came to embrace—whether about the war in Vietnam or the war on poverty. And some of those I hailed as champions of the good and right were later revealed to be corrupt or weak or downright villainous. Error turned out to be a commodity that did not respect party labels.

It would have been far better for my readers and my sense of self if I had heeded my inner voice more closely, if in the grip of certainty I had not stampeded with a temporary majority or saluted a false banner.

Christian faith and democratic precept: Both are clear on this subject. No one has a monopoly on truth or virtue. Gott mit us is blasphemy. The point of democratic politics is to curb the inevitable reign of error that comes with fallible human judgment and power too long in the saddle, no matter whom it professes to serve.

It requires a different kind of bravery to acknowledge your own error and that of your ideological or political comrades in arms, and it is a bravery often no less difficult to muster than the physical kind. At end of day, after all, it means you are out of step—and being out of step is always painful.

That great chronicler of Southern politics and mores V. O. Key once wrote directly to the larger point: “Ruling groups have so inveterate a habit of being wrong that the health of a democratic order demands that they be challenged and constantly compelled to prove their case.” That is a precept that should hang in every newsroom, in every classroom, and in every home.

Talking about a seemingly distant past, about old preceptors and precepts, can be a way to avoid encountering the perplexing controversies of the present. Preachers in the pulpit and on the editorial page can thunder eloquently about sin, but miss the sinful realities of contemporary public life and of national policy. Old stories can substitute for hard choices in the here and now.

There are such choices aplenty for each of us to make today, but the glory of our current scene is that the fear that accompanied dissent in times gone by has itself gone with the wind. Editors in this country do not have to carry weapons as they go about their rounds, if anyone even bothers to notice what they are writing. I emptied the last pistol and put up the last rifle in my house in 1965.

There is no excuse today for any of us to turn away from speaking truth to power—or at least, we cannot legitimately claim to fear for our lives if we do so. That is a situation reserved for the incredibly brave men and women who continue to speak out in those dozens of countries where the state is God, where religious fascism calls down fatwahs against dissenters or corrupt, market-eager communist cadres silence freedom of speech wherever it shows above the Internet horizon.

There is no excuse in this land except the human one—I want to be accepted, to be loved, to be included, to be embraced by the many.

Which takes me back to Dad. I said he loved the South, and he did so, passionately. He loved this country, losing an eye in its service. He loved approbation.

But he put all at risk, repeatedly, because he loved something else even more. He loved what his country held out as its central promise and premise. He loved what his region could be if it would but pay heed to the core elements of the religion it embraced with such religiosity. And he taught his sons to try to feel the same way, and to try to act accordingly.

The fact of the matter is that our history, our common Father, demands no less. Ours is a living faith, or it is nothing. Ours must prove itself to be a democratic nation in the way it acts in the here and now, rather than through its monuments and little-noticed holidays, or it is a hollow husk.

To get it right almost invariably means breaking step with current fashion, current power, current certainties. It means marching to your own drummer. It means facing down the crowd.

And doing all that does not actually guarantee it will come right. Being sure you are right is not the same as being right. Bravery entails risking error in the pursuit of truth.

Nevertheless, the one guarantee that history offers and that I learned from Dad’s example is that if men and women give up on the effort, it will never come right. Never. Happily, we of the South in particular know that seemingly intractable situations can be redeemed. Saved by the grace and courage of the oppressed, we were given a chance to rise above our past and we have done so. We owe it to ourselves and them to confront our present age with the same prophetic judgment and the same fearful audacity. It takes bravery and faith, but it makes for a better world.

And that is what we were put on Earth to do.

Letters from My Father

These photographs of my father, the late Willie Morris, and the letters he wrote to me are not, by themselves, related directly to one another. They came into being during the same twenty-five-year period, yet they do not necessarily occupy the same space. They do, however, represent an emotional roadmap of sorts. And when you put them together, they provide a new perspective on our lives and illuminate the complexities and dynamics of father–son relationships. It is an account of how a family communicates—or in some instances, does not communicate—with one another.

As with most of my father’s letters to me, there is nothing sensational here: there are no surprises, no dark secrets, no hidden family tragedies or secret affairs. A muckraking student journalist at the University of Texas, he had spent four years in Oxford, England, as a Rhodes scholar. Returning to the United States with a family in 1960, he became a crusading editor at the Texas Observer. Several years later, we moved to New York City and he became the youngest editor of Harper’s magazine, the oldest and most prestigious literary magazine in the country. His four-year tenure at the magazine is still looked upon by many as one of the richest and most productive in its history. After my parents divorced and he left Harper’s, he moved to the eastern end of Long Island. Within a few years, he began to write me letters.

In contemporary American society, the art of letter writing has been largely replaced by email and text messaging. No one seems to write very much for pleasure or for the simple purpose of staying connected. My father not only enjoyed writing letters, he was more comfortable communicating through them. He was from a generation of American men who were not quite yet able to openly express emotions. Born in 1934, he came of age during World War II and the 1950s, and grew up in an environment that certainly did not encourage men to be vulnerable. Emotions were seen as a weakness. And while my father developed the remarkable ability to express himself as a writer, like many men of his generation, he had great difficulties throughout his life expressing his emotions directly, especially when it came to love, affection, and anger.

But his letters to me are gentle and kind and offered a love that he might have found difficult to express otherwise. The letters were mostly handwritten in a simple, appealing script. They usually contain some advice, some form of humor, and always conclude by telling me how many friends I had, how much he missed me, and how much he loved me. These are emotions he was rarely able to articulate to me directly until much later in his life. In retrospect they were tender and nonthreatening, but at the time, I did not always see them this way. The man of the letters was not always the same I knew in person. The different sides of his personality often confused me.

My father took great pleasure in social interaction, and his habits occasionally came at the expense of those closest to him. Though he was by no means a bad parent, he was not always a very good role model. For most of his life, he kept very peculiar hours, didn’t cook or clean, and never answered the phone unless the phone’s number of rings matched a secret code. When I was in college he encouraged me to call him late at night at his favorite bars; I knew all the bartenders, so even if he wasn’t there, they might have seen him earlier in the evening and had an idea where he was heading. At least I could leave a message. When I would visit him in Oxford, Mississippi, in the early 1980s, we would go out to dinner every night, stay out until the bars closed, and often return to his house on Faculty Row with an assortment of students, poets, and barflies.

Perhaps by complete coincidence, I began to photograph my father at the same time he began to write me letters. As an aspiring photographer, I often responded to his idiosyncrasies by using the camera as a visual journal, but also as a form of protection—a buffer through which I could capture what I was feeling. As a young man in my early twenties, I was trying to establish my own independence and the camera became a way of setting new boundaries. Sometimes, I photographed him during his late-night sessions with friends, however, more often than not, I photographed him simply because I had my camera with me and he made for a good subject. He would take his beloved black Lab Pete and me for long drives in the country or for walks through woods behind William Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak. Or he would watch Ole Miss football with his buddies down at Shine Morgan’s on the courthouse square. Looking back through old rolls of black-and-white film I might find a whole roll of badly overexposed cemetery-scapes with one frame of my father. That one frame would be a gem, but often I had no idea why I took it.

As I reread these letters today, I feel grateful that he took the time to write them. As I edit through hundreds of images I made of him over a thirty-year period, I can still hear his voice and feel his passion for life and his love for humanity. This project, then, represents the growth and evolution of a lifelong relationship between a father and a son. The letters are more than mere correspondence in the same way that the photographs are more than just snapshots. No spoken dialogue survives, no recordings of disagreements or lofty praise. Instead, these separate elements become windows into the heart of our own separate realities. They span the vast spectrum of emotions and generational differences and are at the same time conscious of the undeniable affection, love, and mutual respect we always held for one another.

Select Letters

[Washington Star stationery]

[Washington, D.C.]

Saturday [early 1976]

Dear Dave,

I really like it here on the Star—some very nice people and a relaxed atmosphere. I do my first piece this weekend. I think I’m taking a tiny house (about nine feet wide, you won’t believe it) in old Alexandria. Much of Alexandria has been restored to what it was in colonial days, and you’re going to like the atmosphere. But it’s the tiniest house you ever saw. . . .

I sit in a huge city room with a bunch of wild characters, like something out of a Hollywood movie about big-city newspapers.

I hope you’re working hard on the books. I’ve told you before, you can do anything you want to if you just set your mind to it. You’re a lot more intelligent and imaginative than I was at your age; in fact, a lot of times I think you’re smarter than I am right now. What you need is more discipline in your work, the same kind of discipline you’ve applied to photography. You’re going to get into a good college; I’d just like for you to have as wide a range of choices as possible.

I’ll talk to you on the phone next week. I don’t know my home number yet. Yoder and Winston Groom send their best.

Love, Daddy

[For three months in early 1976, my father was a guest columnist for the Washington Star]

The Bridge

February 15, 1979

Dear ol’ Dave

. . . It’s been bitter cold here, about the coldest weather I’ve ever known in my life. I’m deeply into Taps. I hope it will be the finest thing I’ve ever done—it’s about growing up, about one’s first encounter with death and love, and the beauty of the Lord’s earth, with a story line that encompasses a good deal of what I’ve learned about the complexity of being human. It’s closer to the controlled emotions of the Great Gatsby, say, than it is to The Bear or Look Homeward, Angel, or at least I think so, and at any rate I don’t think you’ll be ashamed of me for this.

We miss you very much here, and are immensely proud of you for the hard work you’re doing in college. All of your many, many friends believe in your courage and talent, and I don’t say this lightly. You have a kind and beautiful way with your fellow human beings which undergirds your talent and will hold you forever in good stead no matter what you choose to do. I hear these things about you all over this town from the black Reverend Williams to Joe Valin to Jack Whittaker to Billy DePetris, etc., so never lose this rare, perceptive kindness you have with people.

I do hope we’ll collaborate on those two books—“The Sounds and the Silences” and “Mississippi.” However, if we don’t, and if anything ever happens to me, I hope you can find that spot in the Raymond Cemetery where all our people are buried—where we buried good old Mamie that day. Raymond is ten miles from Jackson, and your great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents and aunts and uncles are buried, largely in unmarked graves, not far from the picket fence with the Confederate dead. Some day many years from now you’ll be passing through that place with someone you love and will want to put a flower there, and take a photograph.

But that is many years from now, and in the meantime this is merely a note to tell you I love and miss your funny friendship. And try to read as many great books of literature and history that you can.

The snow is falling again, and why not?

Your friend, Daddy

[University, MS]

May 18, 1982

Dear Dave,

I’ve tried to phone you two or three times, to no avail. Well, I was so busy the final semester at the University of Texas, I wouldn’t have returned a call from Winston Churchill.

I wanted to know the exact date of your graduation so I could send you a graduation present which I have in mind—preliminary to the camera you want. Actually, “Pete” picked it out. I’ll try you on the phone again. Otherwise phone me.

I’m very proud of you. It seems like yesterday morning that we had breakfast at “The Triple Crown” (then called “The Village”) and you got into “the Golden Toad” and took the three ferries to the mainland. I’d lost my centerfielder, of course. Somewhere in one of my boxes I have your first letter to me from Hampshire: “Dear Daddy . . . I like this place.”

As I said on the phone, I’d like to be with you at your graduation. But your mom will be there giving the commencement speech, and quite frankly I’m very proud of both of you for that. The family will be represented there, and unless you phone me and want me to come too, I’ll just wait and give you a fine graduation party at Bobby Van’s this autumn with your best friends. If you wanted me up in Amherst for the graduation, all you’d have to do would be tell me, and I’d come. You know that.

I’m enclosing a check for you to buy some champagne and Moosehead for the graduation, and to take your mom and three or four friends to dinner on one of the evenings. I’ll certainly be thinking of you.

If there’s anything I can do to help after graduation, let me know—I mean in the way of advice on jobs and/or money. You say you’ll stay in the Berkshires this summer. I’ll be in “The Bridge” this fall, so we can get together and check signals. I’ll help you in any way. I’m enclosing a review from the Texas Observer this week of Terrains of the Heart, which may interest you, especially Mamie’s funeral, read it. It’s all just about places. Ronnie’s book on LBJ is just out and I’ve talked with him on the phone. . . .

Larry and Dean, and the Chairman, and Cornelia and Charles, and Patty and William want to send you graduation presents. I’ve told them to wait til you’re here. . . . Pete got terribly sick last week, a bad infection, but Dr. Shivers cured the good old fellow with antibiotics. . . . I’ll be in Washington D.C., next Monday for two days, then back home—dinner with many old friends, including “Dollar Bill” Bradley.

So—just a word to congratulate you on graduation, and to remind you I love you, and to call on me if I can help in any way.

Daddy

p.s. I’m working on Marcus, of course.

[I graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, in May 1982. My mother was the commencement speaker.]

[University, MS]

11/9/84

My Dear Dave,

It’s none of my business, but I get the impression you’re working too hard.

At your age, I worked my heart out. When I was married to your mother, I once went to a doctor in Austin because I was so exhausted in putting out the Texas Observer at age 26. I think he told me to stop drinking so many Coca-Colas and coffee and to seek a psychiatrist, neither of which I did.

I’d say, take it a little easier. I won’t say have an occasional beer (since both of your parents are hard drinkers) but to not drive yourself so much. Give a party at your house. Make spaghetti. Get a girl. Work slowly on “Highway 61,” for this is your baby.

Also, you should come see us in Oxford. Oxford is only 2 1/2 hours away, and there are a good number of people who really love you. You can have Thanksgiving here among close friends, and Christmas, if you wish. However, if you’re short of cash, I’ll certainly help you on a plane ticket to Austin for Thanksgiving, or to Washington for Christmas. At either holiday, go where you wish. Your Mom will surely want you with her at one or the other. You’ve been working hard, and the [Delta-Democrat Times] should give you some days off at both holidays, or at least one. . . .

It’s a curious relationship, father and son, and I do want to help you in any way I can. Unless I write a big best-seller in the next few years (which I may do) I’d like you to set up a special savings or investment account in Greenville where I can give to it a certain portion of my earnings as a writer. Henceforward, I’d like to put 20 or 30% of what I earn into this account for you. This won’t be much of an inheritance, but it’s the best I can do right now, or probably ever. I enclose a preliminary check for this account now. If I get more money, I’ll give you more. You might wish to consult [an] advisor as to how to best invest or deposit the money I’ll give you for this account. I’m not much of a businessman, but I’d put what I send you into an account which you can’t touch for a while. I’ve applied for a Guggenheim to write my novel Taps, which I may or may not get ($20,000). It’s strange being a writer in America—sometimes you hit it big, and I may do so. Anyway, take this enclosed check and start an account for you. Promise? One that you can’t touch for a few years? I’ll try to feed more into it, as I get it.

Sorry for the length of this letter. I love you and am proud of you . . .

Daddy

[After working for a year at the Scott County Times, I went to work as a staff photographer at the Delta-Democrat Times in Greenville, MS, in July 1984.]

Bogue Chitto River 3/12/89—75 degrees

Dear Dave,

I’m getting this in the P.O. to you in the hopes you receive it before you and Dietzel head south toward home. “Mississippi Burning” and “Dr. Jane” really touched me. You’re smarter than I am, you know, and I never took a photograph except with an old Kodak those many years ago, beginning in the Yazoo cemetery. And you’re a great writer. Your sensibility is of the heart—kind, bemused, tender, and brilliant. I can’t tell you of my pride and gratification in your courage and talent. Vern read the two pieces out loud. We shed a few Mississippi tears. Wow!

Love,

Daddy

p.s. Of course you can’t take the Delta out of the boy—it’s in your blood. Major Harper would be proud. Reading your piece, now I want to finish Taps on a strong note—for our progeny. This is important to me. Thanks for being my son.

[In the winter of 1989, my father moved into a cabin on the Bogue Chitto River outside McComb to finish Taps. I had already contributed several pieces to the student paper at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Daily.]

Jackson

4/18/97

Dearest Susanne and Dave Rae,

Charlie’s burial was one of the touching moments of my life. I’ve always been one to shed tears, unlike both of yours today, until later, and they’re coming now. Thank you both for being there with me, as you always are, and forever will be.

Thornton Wilder once wrote that we should owe the dead, not grief, but gratitude—and I believe that so poignantly true of Charlie, for we owe him so much. Grief is hard, but the gratitude assuages it a little.

“Fish” cried on my shoulder today and said, “We should all sing ‘Darkness on the Delta.’” Charlie was both expression and [a] creature of the tragic, crazy Delta earth—know it in his indwelling soul and played his sax and sang about it. I think that’s his legacy, and the friendships and loves that went with all of it. . . .

Herewith a check for Galatoire’s for two, maybe Monday or Tuesday before Celia arrives. Ask for Gilberto the Peruvian, not Gilberto the Cajun, but I think you know that.

Thank you.

Love,

Willie (Daddy)

[Charlie Jacobs was a saxophone player from the Mississippi Delta. He was a founding member of The Tangents in the 1980s. He died in New Orleans in April 1997 at the age of thirty-nine.]

All letters © David Rae Morris and JoAnne Prichard Morris. All rights reserved. The letters may not be reproduced in any form without written consent.

That Christmas Eve was wet, and just cold enough that ice was a threat.

“Your mother fixed a good dinner,” John Gardiner said as Will Adams drove.

“She did. She usually does.”

Gardiner was silent except for his watery breathing. “I hope she knows how much her mother and I appreciate her,” he eventually said. He needed half a minute to say this, and he coughed when he was finished. When he finished coughing he took a puff on the cigar that he had snuck past his wife.

“I think she does,” Will said. “I know she’s happy to do it. She’s happy to be able to do it.”

John Gardiner nodded. He stared out the window, watching the thin woods and hemmed fields pass by, watching how the brown high grass of the Catawba valley had shrunk in this weather. Will wanted to think he was remembering the abundant woods and fields that filled the valley when he was a boy, and remembering how much he missed that abundance. Will wanted to think he was reflecting on how the woods and fields had receded since then, and reflecting on the part he had played in that. As a boy John Gardiner had helped his father bring trees down, haul them with hooks and chains out of the woods, and saw them into lumber. In his retirement he invested in development, in housing tracts, condos, and shopping centers. From Hickory to the west side of Charlotte he had helped remake the valley. Will wanted to think he was remembering deer hunts and turkey shoots.

Will parked the van under the clinic’s carport. He took his grandfather’s wheelchair from the back and unfolded it next to the passenger door.

“You want to finish that cigar before we go in?” Will asked. Gardiner shook his head. He set it gently on the edge of the ashtray. Will had been told not to help him out of the car or into the wheelchair. He held the chair still while his grandfather raised himself from his seat and lowered himself into the wheelchair, and before Will started to push John Gardiner was shuffling the chair forward with his slippered feet.

Gardiner looked back at the van. “Hand me that there,” he told Will, flipping a shaky hand at the dashboard. Will fetched the cigar. Gardiner shuffled toward the canister outside the front door, with Will pushing gently behind. He did not put out the cigar. He tapped off the ash and shuffled on toward the door.

“Pappy,” Will said, eyeing the No Smoking and Oxygen In Use signs, “they’re not going to let you in there with that.”

Gardiner blew a plume of smoke into the air. “I’ll hide it,” he said, with what sounded to Will almost like a snarl.

On gurneys and in wheelchairs those who lived in the clinic clustered just inside the sliding doors. They watched Gardiner and his grandson with no expression that Will could read, but then he could not look them in the eyes for very long. Nurses and candy stripers bustled around and behind the central desk. Gardiner shuffled forward.

“Damned if I’m going to be the dork here,” Will thought. The doors slid open. John Gardiner and his grandson, a slight column of smoke trailing behind them, passed through the lobby without notice or comment. Down the length of the hall. Will couldn’t wait to tell his mother about this.

They were met at the room by the candy striper who had signed Gardiner out that morning. She fluttered in, walking quickly on short legs, and took the handles of the wheelchair from Will.

“I bet y’all ain’t changed him since he’s been at the house, have you?” she said.

“No, I’m pretty sure we haven’t.”

“Well I’ll go ’head and change him while you sign him back in. Come on, Mr. Gardiner, let’s wheel you right into the bathroom and—good Lord, Mr. Gardiner, you can’t have that in here.”

John Gardiner didn’t argue with her, and he certainly didn’t plead. He just said, “I’ll finish it in the bathroom,” and shuffled through the bathroom door while the candy striper flurried, her reflex sending her off for an ashtray.

“No, no, Mr. Gardiner, I can’t let you smoke that thing in here, we’d both get in trouble.” She took the cigar from his fingers and dropped it into the toilet bowl. He at least managed to arch an eyebrow.

“You go on and sign him in now,” she said to Will. “I don’t know what you were thinking, anyway, letting him in here with that.”

Will was still thinking that he couldn’t wait to tell his family about this. He was thinking how much he’d like a cigar himself. Will Adams was thinking, in some channel of his mind, of mythology, of all he’d ever heard from or about John Gardiner, of how his grandfather was now left with only the force assembled in the stories about him, of how the knowledge of those stories made this wheelchair-bound husk of John Gardiner more powerful than either this woman or Will himself. He was thinking of which story he could or should tell her to give her an idea, to bring a part of the power of personal legend to bear:

When he was in California (where he’d hitchhiked, by the way, to work on airplanes, the day after high school ended, because the Washington Senators hadn’t signed him, as he thought they might), Joe Louis made a morale-boosting tour of the factory floor. Being a teenage backwoods hick from North Carolina, my grandfather refused to shake the champ’s hand. Years later he was on one of his many trips to Las Vegas (where often he won enough at cards to pay for the entire trip) and Joe Louis, in his sad decline, was working as a casino greeter. John Gardiner walked up to him, shook his hand, and told him about his ignorance two decades and two wars before. Joe Louis smiled at him and said, “That’s really bothered you all these years, hasn’t it?” My grandfather said, “Yes—yes it has.” Joe Louis leaned in close to him and said, “Hasn’t bothered me a bit.”

In the war he was a turret gunner on an A-20 attack bomber, sitting alone in a Plexiglas bubble on top of the plane, he and his .88 millimeter the only thing between him and his crew and the Zeroes. On one mission they had to blow up a dam in the Philippines, a dam built deep in a gorge between two peaks. The Japanese had built anti-aircraft batteries into the cliffs, and as the bomber dove the guns followed, shooting down on them from above. John Gardiner fired back, and since he was there to tell and I was there to listen, he must have aimed well. He and I sat in his den, with a baseball game on TV, back when he lived with my grandmother in their own house. I had to beg him to tell me this story. He told it, and then he said, “I didn’t know until then what those big .88 slugs did to a human body,” and then I watched my grandfather cry.

“I was thinking that the man wanted his cigar,” Will told the candy striper. He left the room and walked to the nurses’ station.

Stories had been told, existed and were out there, about John Gardiner’s toughness, his shrewdness, his audacity. Images were still around, like the photograph of him on the deck of a cruise ship, looking lean and expert with a shotgun in his hands, shooting skeet off the stern. Finally prosperous, his back to the camera, in the photo he represented to Will an entire population on the move, off of the farms and out of the woods and into the commerce of postwar America, wily and rugged and tempered, claiming their part of the nation that their wildness and violence had saved and rebuilt. No war has been won without backcountry boys who are comfortable with blood, who can shoot like they can point.

Will had a favorite story. His grandfather liked to tell of his time in London, when the Air Force called up the reserves during the Korean War. Gardiner and his squadron got no further east than England.

“This was in 1951,” Gardiner liked to say, “and I was in a club having a drink with this old Brit who liked to talk politics with me. I told him that by 1955 Dwight Eisenhower would be president of the United States and Winston Churchill would be prime minister again. And do you know that that old man laughed at me?” Then John Gardiner liked to laugh himself.

Will was almost thirty, and had lived in London himself, before he asked his grandfather: “What were you doing in one of those clubs in the first place? I mean, they don’t hand out memberships to those on the Tube. I lived in London for half a year and don’t even know where one is.”

Gardiner lived in his own house then, the house that he had retired to on a Lincoln County cove of Lake Norman. The water was sparkling; the wind was blowing across the face of the water. Will had come up from Charlotte to spend a few hours. Gardiner took several deep breaths, collecting his thoughts.

“I had a friend who was a member. He arranged for me to have a temporary membership for the duration I was stationed over there.”

“How’d you meet him? And how’d you become such good friends that he’d do that?”

“Several of us were in a hotel bar one night. I was the only one that was married. And there was this Australian who kept getting louder and louder the more he drank. Some of the guys I was with started mouthing off to him, and he started mouthing back, and—these were just boys, now. I stepped in and he and I jawed for a while, and I was fixing to knock his teeth down his throat. But this waitress that knew us both got between us and told us we didn’t want to do that, and she was right. Turned out he had been a commando during the war, part of a team that went into the jungles on these islands in the South Pacific to rescue downed fliers. So no doubt he had saved some of my buddies at one time or another. So I bought him a round and he bought me a round.

“Well, before I left I thanked that waitress and she and I got to talking a little bit, and she said she’d always been fond of me since we started coming in there because I looked just like her husband that had been killed in the war. She lived with her brother in this little flat, and she said I ought to come have dinner with them sometime.

“I did. And I tell you, Will—when I saw the picture of her husband—the resemblance was uncanny.” Gardiner shook his head. “They still had the wartime rationing going on then. Her brother and I hit it off. He was a writer for the Times of London. He was the one who got me into his club.”

The wind moved across the water. Will had more questions than before, but John Gardiner seemed tired.

Will drove home and called his mother to see if she had ever heard this story. “He was real good friends with a brother and sister over there,” she said. “They stayed in touch for years, until they died. They went to see them every time they went to England. He does that—usually he can’t be bothered to hold a two-minute conversation, but every now and then he’ll get to talking to somebody and they’re devoted to him for life. I never heard the rest of that, though. You never know with him.”

Will sat that night staring at a blank sheet of paper, conjuring up a London that his grandfather might have known. Accurate scholarship could re-create what had been bombed out, what had been rebuilt, what had been replaced, what was still rubble in 1951. He could get his hands on a Pevsner’s guide and figure out what stood while his grandfather was stationed there. From his own life in London he could imagine the rudiments of landscape: the white Regency line along St. James; the slow, straight rise from Westminster to Trafalgar Square; the rush and confusion of the Imperial capital. John Gardiner hadn’t said where the flat was, or which hotel the sister worked in, and Will wondered if he remembered. Will wondered if he’d made that part up. John Gardiner could bluff without blinking. Will had once asked him what a particular movie was about, and Gardiner had rattled off the voiceover prologue as if the words were his own eloquent insights. Will knew only two other people who could not just remember but steal like that, and Will himself was one of them.

If John Gardiner knew by then what Will did, that his personal force was reduced to his bank account and his history, then why would he not do all he could to make his history as strong as possible? If that history was not to be trusted, what was left of his power? If little was left of his power, what was left of the only inheritance that mattered to Will?

When Will returned from signing him in, John Gardiner was in bed, looking exhausted.

“Can I get you anything?” Will asked. He had other questions.

Gardiner shook his head and tried to clear his throat. He raised one knee so that his pants leg draped over his wasted, bony thigh. Will noticed that his grandfather’s wrists and ankles were the size of a child’s.

The candy striper brought a large plastic cup that she had filled with water. “Now you just press that button if you need anything,” she called out as she left. Will watched her leave. He knew he would not get to ask his questions.

“I better head on back,” he said. “You best get some rest.”

Gardiner nodded. His words came in long intervals. “You take care. You take care of those kids.” He nodded again. “You’re doing good, Will.”

Will put his hand on his grandfather’s shoulder, and squeezed with restraint. “I’ll see you again soon.” Gardiner looked up at him. Will slowly bent over and kissed his grandfather’s cheek.

Through the open doors along the hall, Will could see pictures of men in uniforms, young conquerors looking mighty and glad to be alive. Those same men lay in beds and watched old movies on TV, surrounded by children and grandchildren who sat tentatively bedside, sharing time. Through the open doors Will could hear the children gossip—Mr. Henderson from the church, he fell and broke his hip; no one likes the new preacher; Mizzus Abernathy at the store, she finally retired. Will saw a son-in-law change the channels, saw a granddaughter hold Christmas cards up and heard her read them aloud, saw a daughter hold her mother upright while she coughed up phlegm and blood, while her body shuddered and shook. Will saw women growing old, holding the hands of their mothers and fathers, exchanging what they could while they still had time.

Back at the duplex, Will thought as he drove from the clinic, my children will be spread out on the floor with their uncle, loudly playing a new game. His wife, my wife, our sister, our mother and father, our grandmother, will be seated around them, smiling and sleepy. Christmas music will be playing or a ballgame will be on TV. The room will be warm.

As he drove the rain began to fall again. Will thought of a brief prayer, asking that the wet roads from here to home not freeze. After the prayer he thought of a briefer thanksgiving, that ice was the most imminent danger he had to fear. He thought of a longer thanksgiving for all he was allowed, and for all that the generations had done that he would be allowed to avoid.

Before they drove home they would drive down the valley, following his brother Luke to another Catawba mill town, where his brother would preach the Christmas sermon to the town’s stagnant middle class. Luke had talked over his sermon with Will, had tested out his themes and parables, that morning before they ate dinner. Luke wanted to preach on Hauerwas’s critique of Neibuhr, on Augustine’s cities and idea of just wars, on the problems of the Constantinian shift and the fallacy of the so-called Christian nation. He and Will parried, honing thoughts, providing examples and counter-examples from philosophy and from Scripture, quoting, dragging in Kierkegaard and Chesterton, showing off their luxurious educations. In the midst of this Will looked up to see his grandfather in his big chair across the room, listening to them, looking amused and happy, looking grateful and justified.

Drowning and infected, John Gardiner stopped breathing that March. In the funeral home the next day, his widow and his daughter asked Will Adams to write the obituary. The week before, Will had begun a new poem, trying to build some kind of frame or explanation, and he had that typescript in the breast pocket of his jacket. He took out that paper and his pen and went with his mother into the hallway. She shook her hands relentlessly. She gave him bare facts: positions, titles, years, memberships; and Will realized that she gave them to him in the unasked hope that he could turn them, concisely, into something like what they had known of John Gardiner.

Linda McCune abandoned early success as an abstract painter to explore mixed-media sculpture deeply connected to place and family. Her new direction coincided with a moment in the 1980s that saw an exponential growth of interest in art by and about women. McCune’s work addresses materiality and the ancestral and psychic connections that bind people to each other over place and time. Her sculpture and more recent drawing series constitute a diverse body of work based on shared issues she has sustained for over three decades. She exhibits widely, from the West Coast to a recent show in New York City, and continues to explore the ever-changing issues and relationships of our accelerated world.

Artist Statement

Separation from my extended family and the west Tennessee landscape has led to an obsessive need to preserve the rural content that has been an integral part of my being and provided me with visual sustenance while in my current state of constant city transience. The interwoven visuals in my series are embedded with the personalities and deep strengths of my loved ones. Along with my longing for them, I seek to honor and memorialize them. These sculptures and drawings are ligatures—direct connections to the past—and each detail is a repository of their existence. The elements in these objects are not to be viewed only as ornamentation, and the details within the works should be carefully considered, as they are intended to convey a specific message. These mimetically stated, symbolic objects have an even richer abstract metaphorical language inherent in their shared use of the materials and in the content of the craft used to produce them. As objects, they have a familiar formal and informal ritual base. This combination of commonly used objects, such as a hope chest or mourning fan, enhanced by aged surfacing and underlying message, offer the most possibilities for exploration of visually communicating the emotional and for providing increased content readability. With a likeness in character between the form choice and the content, the related visual and written parts of these works are accessible and can, I believe, produce associations from common experiences found within the interactions of many families, especially in the South.

Although my involvement in the research and making of other series also have great importance now, these expiative documentary works retain their urgency and vitality for me because of this attachment to, and concern for, the preservation of personal and familial histories. In these works, an understanding of a settled generation past and the very real and transient present, with its emotional and ethical struggles, join and give support to each other in this separation. Both magnify the continuum of the universal, leveling effect of time on all who long for an everlasting reunion.

Series Content Notes

Ede Series 1–5: Because there are four sisters and a brother in my immediate family who have had full and long lives, I was compelled in remorseful grieving to make the five children that I lost viable through their memorial preservation in Ede 1’s hope chest. Its making helped with the grief transitions of stating that they are my children, they have names that are recorded and embroidered on their gowns, and their lives are important even if they lived only for a short time. Ede 3 records the joy of the births of my daughters. These two live-birth children, with my husband and I carrying them, are shown on Ede 5’s mourning fan and on the Slew Series Family Portrait 1. My experience with wanting children is recorded in Ede 2. A part is added every tenth year to this ongoing work owned by the SC State Art Collection. I am engaged now in the sixth part of Ede 2 that will record the last ten years, which presents the marriages of both my daughters and the birth of my grandsons. Experiencing the growth of my own family, their inevitable separation as persons who need to care for their families, and the transient lives of us all seems to mirror the contemporary dilemma of job searches and financial stability away from the single-family farm life that was my idyllic childhood. Not shown is Family Portrait 2 that shows my Grandmother Ruby, her firstborn daughter, my mother, me as her firstborn daughter, and my two daughters. The Ede and Slew Series works were indeed made as private statements, but when exhibited have proven to be a comfort to women who have had similar experiences.

Essie Series 1, Ruby Series 4, and Willard Series 1: The Essie works are remembrances of Chloe Essie Gauldin Bradford, a great-aunt living on “the next farm over” who had the richness of a “green thumb” with the sadness of an end of life in Bolivar State Mental Hospital. Ruby, her sister, and my grandmother through financial frugality during the Depression bought land for my mother and uncle to add to the holdings of the family farm, therefore preserving the ability of new members to make a living at home. The Ruby Series is dedicated to her strength and forethought. Though the documents are a “cabinet of curiosities” in the way the deeds are written and lands are recorded. Willard Charles Williams, my father, and my uncles built houses for everyone out of wood felled and milled on our land, with barns and smokehouses to preserve meat for survival. In the Willard work, smokehouse wood was gathered from my mother’s farm and is a visual of family members clinging to its rafters and being warmed by its quilt.

“I can either get ready or go. I can’t do both.” That’s one of Mama’s favorite quotes from her cousin, Naomi, now dead. From the look of Mama’s household, she’s not getting ready for eventualities. She’ll just go.

I’m used to the one-way traffic pattern that has evolved in my mother’s house since my father died, twenty-two years ago. Now that she lives alone, she has spread out. You have to flatten against the chest in the dining room and suck in to let anyone else pass. I’m the one sucking in. She has politely refused my efforts to consolidate the piles, we call them, to make it easier for her to get around and, just as important, to make room for someone to be there to help her if and when she can’t function as well as she can now.  She’s “too busy living” to bother with unpleasant ordeals such as I have in mind.

“Let’s not get into all that, now,” she will say. “Let’s just enjoy your visit,” effectively sidestepping the issue. I register despair with a wry smile and try to be grateful for what order there is, which entirely falls apart on the dining room table, Mama’s office.

This is where she conducts a voluminous correspondence in her beautiful, albeit illegible, nineteenth-century handwriting and on her trusty Royal typewriter. Somewhere, under something else, is just the right blank card and a copy of the precise quotation to enclose so that she may, promptly, dispatch the quintessential phrase to ease a loss, celebrate a success, or convey a bit of news “just in case you’re interested.” A note of warning floats on top of a vast collection of newspaper articles and miscellany that constitutes her clipping service: Don’t Straighten My Mess . . . You’ll Foul Up the System. Rising out of the appearance of chaos on her “desk,” happy Oriental lilies, arranged in a tall cut-glass vase, brighten the whole house.

“When I look at those beautiful flowers, I don’t see the mess,” she will say.

In the face of such charming resistance, over the years, my efforts to disturb her system anywhere in the house have been as condemned as Sisyphus with his rock. Why don’t I learn?

Maybe it’s because I know I’ll have to deal with every piece of this stuff, someday, that I get anxious when I look at the neatly labeled and bundled artifacts of her ninety-five years of living, stacked in every conceivable spot: under mahogany tables with nicely turned legs and on top of uncomfortable, antique chairs that belonged to a matrilineal ancestor. Memories, I know, are attached to the things in her house that indicate her interests, her travels, and her sensitivity to beauty. The cards she has received and the copies of letters and clippings she has sent and will send are artfully tucked around the brightly polished silver service and pretty vases of various description, holding sometimes a single flower from her garden or a collection from the curb market.

“The container is the secret of a good arrangement,” she wants me to know. “You must have the right container.”

The container, I think. She has certainly outgrown hers. She is root-bound.

• • •

There has never been much storage space in the two-bedroom house at 9 Penn Street, but now that the attic stairs are impassable, with the vacuum cleaner and miscellaneous other things stashed within easy reach, the situation among Mama’s books and interesting possessions has reached critical mass—tripping hazards everywhere. Clothes hang on both of the open bedroom doors and the shower rod in the bathroom. Plastic bags protect her wardrobe from gathering dust and an exasperated daughter—getting in and out of the tub is like going through the car wash.

I try not to think about all that, which will inevitably become a discussion when I get there. Instead I remember cousin Naomi’s quote as I try to get my household in order. I am not looking forward to the drive from Chapel Hill to Greenville, South Carolina, to go with my mother to her cardiologist’s appointment. I wish I could just go.

I want to be there by teleportation. But before I can leave my own house I’ve got to pay bills, sweep out the car, water the houseplants, water the hydrangea in the yard, make sure I’ve got cat food (where is the cat?), do the laundry so Betty can iron, go to the bank—Betty likes cash. While the laundry spins and tumbles I make a batch of Tollhouse cookies with twice the nuts and half the chocolate chips. Mama likes those. I’ve got her covered up in nonpareils, her favorite dark chocolate candy with tiny white beads on top. I don’t have to stop at Southern Season on the way out of town. She believes in the restorative properties of chocolate and Early Times—in moderation. Every day. But I can’t let myself get distracted. I will need the cell phone, which I only use to call out. And, please, don’t let me forget the damn cell phone charger and gas and something to wear to church.

• • •

I check to see if the fountain in my garden is squirting straight up, and not out, so the pump won’t burn up. I need to set the hose dripping on the newly planted pink dogwood that looks a little forlorn. The mow-blow-and-go guys will turn off the hose tomorrow. One last time I survey my postage stamp–sized Eden, if a little singed around the edges, to see if there is anything fit to travel the 250 miles with me to Greenville. I keep a five-gallon bucket in the car for hauling flowers in water. But even the roses have sense enough to lie low in the middle of July. Nothing that blooms is not fried but one confused gardenia, who doesn’t know its season has past. I’ll take it to Mama. It can ride in the cup holder on the remainder of my iced tea.

As I drive away from my house and get on the highway I light a cigarette, crack the window, and set the cruise control five miles over the speed limit. I try to get behind someone I suspect has a fuzz-buster and kick it up to 85, or more, and follow them until I get to the known speed traps around Greensboro and Salisbury—a regular cottage industry. I forgot my books on tape, so I have three and a half hours to think.

I call Mama to tell her the exact time I’m leaving so she’ll know what time to expect me. When she knows I’m on the road she’ll take a nap and I’ll call her again when I get to “the peach,” a giant water tower in the shape of a peach and perfectly painted with gradations of yellow, pink, and coral. From certain angles it looks like a gigantic, obscene posterior. It’s illuminated and glows at night—mooning its heart out from way up there. When this I-85 icon pops into view over the curve in the highway, above a Tijuana Fats, I’m in Gaffney, South Carolina. The blue mountains I grew up with are still there in the distance, and I’m exactly forty-five minutes from home.

I have to laugh out loud as I conclude my quick call to Mama from the peach and toss the cell phone in the other cup holder beside the gardenia. She told me that the police had called (a recording notifying everybody in the vicinity) to ask her to be on the lookout for a short man wearing a baseball cap who had just robbed the bank on Augusta Road. I’m glad they’ve got my mother on the case. There would be nobody better if they need a detail person. Once she gets attached to some thing or idea, she never lets it go. And, worst-case scenario, it would be a good thing if the robber did come to 9 Penn Street to divest my mother of a few of her possessions. That might make room for some ’round-the-clock help. Neither one of those things will ever happen. If a burglar set foot into Mama’s territory, he’d break his neck. The whole house is booby-trapped. And, as far as ’round-the-clock help is concerned, she doesn’t want to look at anybody “lying about,” and she doesn’t have the energy to show anybody new what to do—the way she likes it. She “makes the effort” to do what’s important to her. This is not important in her scheme of things. I worry about her every day. Especially since things have changed.

• • •

In 2008, to celebrate my mother’s ninety-fifth birthday, I took the whole family to the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, for Thanksgiving. Friday would be my granddaughter’s sixteenth birthday, and the big birthday would be the following Sunday. I could kill three birds with one stone: two birthdays and one holiday. It would also be a shot across the bow to my family that I was retiring from my role as Johnny-on-the-spot—a grand gesture before I carved out the next two years for myself, to seriously work on my writing. I had been accepted in a low-residency creative writing program, beginning in January. It was a great relief to them, too, that I had run up the white flag on my campaign to try to fix everybody else’s life.

Prior to my surrender, I had had the full-court press on my mother to consider a move to a retirement home near me with an assisted living arrangement, before it was too late. Before something happened and she couldn’t drive.

“I drive better than I can walk,” she says. It’s true. I’ve been in the passenger seat when she parallel parked on a dime in front of the main post office. When she got out of the car the people on the sidewalk applauded. Why, I knew she was thinking, I’ve had a lot of experience. She likes to go, even though she can’t walk more than half a block because her back is collapsing due to the cumulative effect of gravity and all those years of moving around. To ensure that she wouldn’t get stranded (and with regret at trading in her old car) she bought used Taurus, in mint condition, last year. The car dealer from Travelers Rest, twenty miles away, drove it over for her to test drive. I admire her optimism—she’s getting a new roof on the house, too, guaranteed for twenty years. But I can’t stop imagining the many things that can happen between now and when she leaves her house, feet first. If you’re not ambulatory, a retirement home won’t take you; you’ve got to get on a waiting list.

Three years earlier, when I began this siege that was going nowhere I was also remodeling my kitchen. In the bargain, I added a walk-in closet to the downstairs bedroom so my mother could move in with me in Chapel Hill. She doesn’t want to leave her friends and come live with me, but I made a deal with her: “If you fall or anything happens and you can’t drive, I’ll come get you. You, the silver service, and your jewelry will come to my house.” I made her promise me that, as a last resort.

To complicate my life further, I had another front blazing with my granddaughter. I had her in the crosshairs of my determination to convince her to go away to school—get away from those grungy-looking friends in her band. I wasn’t too old to know that sex and drugs go along with rock-n-roll and this Joan Jett image of hers—heavy black eyeliner, blue hair, and provocative clothes—was dangerous. Something should be done! Both Mother and Eliza heeled in and said, “No, no, hell no.” I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. When it was clear that Eliza wasn’t going to budge about going away to school, the opportunity of a lifetime, I said, “O.K. Fine. Then I will!”

My mother and I shared a suite at the Homestead that became de facto headquarters for a drink when the troops weren’t scattered, doing their own thing. While my daughters, Gibson and Mary—the mother of my grandchildren—were taking the spa treatments and horseback riding, my thirteen-year-old grandson, Asher, was on a fly-fishing jaunt. My granddaughter, Eliza, and I went off to tango lessons in the ballroom while Mama “stretched out.”

Except for the tango lessons, Mama and I hung together. I tuned my pace to hers, and we enjoyed the rolling mountain scenery, the comfortable atmosphere at teatime in the lobby of the Revolutionary War–era hotel, and a daily soak in the healing waters the area is famous for. She soaked. I supervised the spa assistants that helped Mama in and out of the long, deep, claw-foot tub. A fall would be the worst thing that could happen. I liked indulging my mother, and she loved being waited on, as long as she was calling the shots.

She enjoyed all that but wasn’t too satisfied with our driving or the fact that wheelchairs don’t have shocks. We all took turns pushing her around the long corridors of the hotel and over the steep, bumpy sidewalk to the adjoining restaurant for lunch. On one such trip, the edge of the pavement caught the front wheel of the wheelchair on a right turn, and we almost dumped Mama into the shrubbery. She was a good sport about it, but she didn’t think it was as funny as the grandchildren did.

“There’s no damn reason to get in such a bloody hurry. You’ve got precious cargo here.” She readjusted the silver combs in her hair. “You’ve got my flask, I hope.”

That wasn’t the only hazard of “driving Miss Daisy,” as Mama called it. On the daily trip back to our room from the spa, my slick, leather soles slid backward when I tried to push her up the carpeted incline, a reconfigured concession to the handicapped. She’s not a shriveled-up, little, old lady. She’s shrunk some, from her full height of 5’10,” but she weighs ten pounds more than I do, and I could stand to lose fifteen. I tried again, with a running start and no better outcome. Unlike Sisyphus, we have options—she could get out of the wheelchair and walk up—but a teen-aged boy fell in with some muscle. “Don’t mention it,” he said when we awkwardly laughed and thanked him.

She’s embarrassed to be in a wheelchair, period. It’s only a concession she makes to the long halls and the speed of her companions. She’s used to poking along at her own speed, on foot, with the assistance—or, I should say, accompaniment—of a slender wooden cane. She would not be caught dead with one of those heavy-looking, aluminum, three-pronged things that might actually be of help if she lost her balance. But even in the wheelchair, my mother gets a lot of attention.

Although Mama drives me crazy with most of her string-saving, obsessive-compulsive habits, I have studied her like a map of the world to try to learn her secrets not just of living so long, but living so long with an adaptable spirit and a good attitude. Not many have made the trip from being a Strom Thurman Dixiecrat in the ’50s to voting for Obama. Hell, she dated Strom. “It wasn’t much of a date,” she said, “I went with him a few times while he shook hands with everybody in sight. Besides, I was too old for him.”

This Thanksgiving Day, I looked at her afresh along with the other guests as they met her for the first time. In the cozy grouping of chairs and sofas in the lobby, I watched the firelight play across her beautiful features. She had the good fortune to be born with the look of her era, the ’30s: tall, thin, cheekbones to kill for. She used to look stunning in the broad-brimmed hats she wore to church. Although those same hats are in boxes in the attic, you wouldn’t say Mama’s looks had gone with her era. She is still beautiful. Her auburn hair is silver now and thinner, but she can twist it up with combs that keep her natural waves in place, softening her face. Not a line in her forehead. I watch other people light up when they meet her, and it’s usually not long before they discover a connection: someone they both know who went to college with someone they know, or someone they grew up with, in a small town in South Carolina I’ve never heard of, who knows someone they know. Or someone they knew. Her real attractiveness and her secrets to living well spring from her interest in other people and her general good humor. Oh God, deliver Mama from old people who can only talk about what ails them. To her few remaining peers, and to mine, she is a marvel. She still lives in her own house. And she drives.

Mama is an asset wherever she is. At the Homestead she charmed the guests, the staff, and her great-grandchildren. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving. We had a lot to be thankful for. However, the day before we were scheduled to leave, at 2:00 a.m. on her ninety-fifth birthday, she woke me up complaining of “a tightness in her chest.”

“I made it to ninety-five, and then I blew it,” she said at the twelve-bed Bath County Hospital, two miles from the hotel, fixing the young doctor with her usually more brilliant smile and sharp brown eyes. He sat down and spent a considerable amount of time, more like a visit, explaining his diagnosis: atrial fibrillation. That was a lot for all of us to take in on top of seeing my mother, for the first time in her life, hooked up to all sorts of monitors. I suddenly felt responsible for every silver hair on her lovely head and wanted to do something. Anything. We brought her a small, pretty, inedible cake from the hotel and gave her our get-well presents and funny cards. The X-ray technician gave her a teddy bear.

Mama quit smoking on the spot, but the doctor said she could hang onto the Early Times, a present she appreciated in the face of yet another loss: a loss of her trademark vitality that had outlived most of her generation.

On the drive back to Greenville from the Homestead, my concern went into overdrive that my mother’s needs may, at some point, outstrip her neighbors’ generosity. However, their devotion to their friend, Margaret Williams, was and remains truly steadfast. Charles Gentry is her neighbor across the street who, daily, lays Mother’s paper at her door. He was in the driveway when Gibson pulled her car up to 9 Penn Street—Mama packed into the front seat with four hotel pillows like something fragile. I was depending on Gibson to stay a few days to make sure we knew how to work the portable oxygen—Mama’s ticket out of the house—a smaller tank than the two torpedoes that rode in the back seat with me, one of which connected across the front seat to Mama’s nose. Nancy, the next-door neighbor, is a physical therapist. She came over at midnight to be of assistance when the oxygen service showed up to deliver the air purifier and to pick up the heavy artillery. Mama promised not to trip over the long cannula that wrapped around her head and reached all over the house.

Her friends she has lunch with at Tommy’s Ham House (her club) had all left messages on her telephone. They are a gang of all ilk, from judges to engineers to plumbers to “computer people,” thirty or forty years younger than my mother—some in worse shape—who had been alerted and were ready to offer assistance, especially Skip Spooner, a labor lawyer who grew up in south Georgia. He has been calling himself “Rescue One” since he saved Mama from the power outage during the ice storm three years ago. He took her to his girlfriend’s apartment where they, all three, passed the dark, cold night in front of the girlfriend’s gas logs, drinking bourbon and eating steaks that Skip cooked on the gas grill. Skip had called to offer to come get her in Virginia if we needed him to. These “playmates,” she calls them, all sit with her at the Bull Table at Tommy’s Ham House where there’s no telling what you might learn. Mama’s their historian and on the receiving end of a lot of abuse.

“There’s not anybody older than Margaret,” they say. And Skip teases her about dropping out of her water aerobics class when one of the geriatric men showed up in a Speedo. They have no mercy. But Mama is still a game girl. She is not one of those sweet old ladies who is delighted by any attention. She can be quick and wicked.

An example of her wickedness—I thought it was wicked—occurred two summers ago when I came home in July to take her to visit a friend of mine who invited us to stay a few days at her house in the mountains. At the time, Mama was making noise about the stepping-stones at the bottom of the eleven steps up to her front door. Over the years these flat stones had sunk and become uneven.  I knew she wanted me—I’m a professional gardener—to lay a brick walkway from the big steps over to the three little steps at her driveway, a distance of about twenty-five feet. This doesn’t sound like much if you say it in a hurry. But I knew she would also have me dig up the Charleston grass where the walkway would be and resprig it in the bare spots in her lawn, carry the cube of brick her next-door neighbor had left over from her extensive landscaping (a gift to Mama), and level the path. I had offered to pay somebody to do it, but the price was too high for her sensibilities—no matter who paid for it. The whole time we were in the mountains I was dying, thinking of the July heat and the work that would be for one person. Me. When we returned, there was the walkway, laid in a basket-weave pattern, bent in a forty-five-degree angle around her Chinese hollies. Charles Gentry had done it with the aid of his wife and Nancy as hod carriers.

“Didn’t your mother just cry?” my friend asked when I told her about this most recent episode in the life of my mother’s support network.

“No. I cried.”

As Mama walked across her new walkway she simply said, “Isn’t it amazing what a man can do with a little supervision?”

She said this to only me, a shot across my bow, in a sense, that she can still take care of herself within the community of caring she lives in and has developed over her lifetime. She has a reputation of being the first one there with her brand of support for them and her sense of humor. Of course she wrote each of them a note acknowledging there is no way to repay a gift like that. No way. She wrapped jars of scuppernong jelly we brought back from the mountains to leave on their porches.

Someone with more wherewithal, like my mother-in-law, might pick up the phone and ask her secretary to call the florist and have a bouquet delivered or send an Hermès tie to acknowledge a kindness. And I don’t discount that. But my mother operates on her South Carolina state retirement from working twenty years as a social worker, a few wise investments, the mess on the dining room table, and the wrapping paper, neatly rolled or folded and stuffed beside the piled-up, unusable luggage rack in my old room. Nothing leaves her house without commemorative stamps, at least, or a pretty, hand-tied bow. Presentation is important to her. You can tell that by the way she, herself, is always so well put together. She never goes anywhere without looking cheerful in her favorite colors: shades of coral, turquoise, lime green, and “Love That Red” lipstick.

• • •

I stayed with Mama in Greenville long enough to evaluate the situation as much as possible. We went to her internist and the new cardiologist who wanted to pray with us. I thought, Oh God. Are they turning it over to the Lord? Is this the end? Is she just going to go? I wondered what she thought. I knew she believed in praying, but what I usually saw was that she also believed in rowing toward shore. The new doctor prayed that he would be directed to know what to do and gave thanks for Margaret Williams’ long and remarkable life. I kept one eye open. She trusted that he “knew what he was about.” He was tall and handsome. That goes a lot farther with Mama than where-did-you-go-to-medical-school. I made sure he knew that she had more miles to go and started making notes about a second opinion.

In the meantime, I cleaned out the kitchen—threw away a jillion scratched Tupperware containers and miscellaneous other stuff, anything with an expiration date in the last century. The trash bin was practically piled up to the eaves at the back door, and my car was crammed with glass jars and the rest of it for the Nearly New. While Mama rested and wrestled with whether she should give up or keep going, I scrubbed out the cabinets, relined the shelves, laid in the roach motels, and reorganized everything to within an inch of its life. At last someone, besides Mama and me, could function in there if necessary.

Mama was not pleased. She couldn’t find anything, and she might need those things she hadn’t seen in thirty years. She hadn’t given up.

• • •

Now, eight months after Mama’s first episode of atrial fibrillation, I was still full of apprehension. Mama had a pacemaker on her mind. The doctor had said that he wanted to try to control her heart “flutters” with medication, but that hadn’t seemed to work. Daily, sometimes several times a day, when I spoke with Mama on the phone, she complained of that “tightness” in her chest. It had happened the last time I was home (or was it the time before?) when we spent a whole day in the emergency room where they have the equipment to measure her distress. When she doesn’t feel well—a new thing for her—she doesn’t know whether to lie down, take a series of three nitroglycerine tablets, or call an ambulance. I don’t know whether to tear off to Greenville, quit school, go get her, or what. What would be the risk of inserting a pacemaker? I would let her make the call. She’s been making them for ninety-five and a half years.

To my relief the cardiologist said, “No.” A pacemaker would not solve Mama’s problem, at any age. And she volunteered that she hadn’t had any more “tightness” since he doubled the dosage of the heart medication a month ago. Her next appointment would be three months out.

That information from the cardiologist—I liked it that he was so definite—combined with the B-12 shots from her internist, allowed us to go home with hope for the near future. We could go back to 9 Penn and work on those piles. I never give up, either.

I pour Mama a bourbon and Coke with plenty of ice, a dash of frozen lemon juice, the damn straw, and a napkin. I drink mine neat: about two fingers of Early Times with a splash of branch water. She promises to go through at least the two stacks on the floor beside the chair, in the way of changing the water in the flower arrangement on the dining room table. But first, we just relax.

After we rest up from the doctor’s appointment, we have a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on that good sunflower bread. She fixes the sandwich in the toaster oven because the real oven—with the exception of one eye she needs from time to time to make her buttermilk salad with orange Jell-o, pecans, and crushed pineapple—has been retired for years and stays covered up in aucuba foliage, rooting in water. She will pot them up when the yardman comes and when she feels like it. I’m suspicious that mosquitoes are hatching in there, too. I’ve killed five so far—that would take care of the ones that may have flown in the door. But I don’t say anything to distract her from our task. Surreptitiously, while she was resting, I changed the water in her makeshift potting shed on the stove. It’s part of her nature to have living things around her. A reminder of the ongoingness of nature. Mosquitoes don’t bother her.

As I sit on the porch (it used to be a screened-in porch, now it’s the library/sitting room and the only place where more than two people can sit down) waiting for Mama to get off the phone in the kitchen, I notice the gardenia in a silver bud vase. Mama has put it beside my place on the sofa. They only last a day in their most pristine state. This mixed-up one—blooming in my garden when the others were spent—is turning an ivory shade but, days after its prime, it still retains its fragrance and may begin to root. Do I really want to tackle the piles? Shouldn’t I just “enjoy the visit?” I may need to save those documents in the pile for another a chapter I can write in my writing course. They could be part of a book someone may want to read about a life well lived and a hard act to follow. Do I want to be that mosquito this trip that does bother my mother? I think we’ll just think of somewhere to go and forget about getting ready.

I don’t think of myself as sentimental or nostalgic, but having said that, I confess that almost every day I look back to inform my work. Now more than ever I find myself trying to bring the good but simple food of eastern North Carolina to the diners at Crook’s Corner. I grew up in a time when large families were still the norm. Like as not, these families were run by matriarchs. Ours on my mother’s side of the family was my great-grandmother Inez. She was a fantastic cook and hardly a day passes when I don’t think back on something she had cooked.

I paid a lot of attention to cooking as a child. This was way before it ever occurred to me to be a chef. (I was sometimes called upon to assist. For instance, if I produced four cups of wild blackberries or perfect pecan halves, there would be a pie.) At my grandmother’s table, food was a serious topic. Endless discussions of country butter versus store bought; arguments over seasoning; backhanded compliments about skills. Without even realizing it, I was learning a point of view that shapes me as a professional chef. Good food. No nonsense.

Hard crab stew is one of those favorites that I had not brought to the restaurant because it is so messy to eat. It’s a summer stew, eaten outdoors on tables covered with newspapers. It has rituals. We probably only had it twice a summer. Once in grandmother’s garden and once during the week when we took a house at the beach. In those days, we caught our own crabs, so it could be quite a production for that reason alone. All you need is a chicken neck on a string and a scoop net. It is a stew that is eaten with the hands as much as with a spoon. There is a slice of white bread in the bottom of every bowl. Don’t make fun. I served it to a group of friends at the Outer Banks last weekend and their bowls were clean.

I have finally begun serving a more refined, less messy version of hard crab stew at Crook’s Corner and public events. Below, however is the original. Nut crackers help you get to the meat. Use the claw shells to dig it out. Most people only have patience enough for a crab or two, but it’s the broth that counts—along with the slice of white bread.

RECIPE FOR HARD CRAB STEW

Serves a crowd

½ pound sidemeat or fatback

2 medium onions, peeled and cut into large dice

2 dozen hard crabs, cleaned and halved

½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

4 bay leaves

1 teaspoon thyme

6 baking sized potatoes, peeled and cut into eighths

¾ cups all-purpose corn meal, stirred into two cups of cold water

Salt and pepper to taste

Sliced grocery store white bread

Render the sidemeat in a large stock pot. Do this slowly, as it has a low smoking point and you want to extract as much fat as possible before it gets too brown. It will resemble crisp bacon in color when ready. Add the onions and sauté until soft but not brown. Add the crabs and cover with cold water. Add the red pepper, bay and thyme. Bring to a boil, then turn back to a simmer. Cook for half an hour, and then add the potatoes. Cook until they are well done, fifteen to twenty minutes more. Turn up the heat a little (but you don’t want a hard boil) a stir in the corn meal and water. This will be a little difficult because of the crabs. You need to mix this in thoroughly. Bring back to a simmer until the stew begins to thicken. Taste for salt and pepper. Sometimes the sidemeat will be saltier than other times.

To serve, put a slice or two of bread in the bottom of large soup bowls and ladle the stew, crabs and all on top. Claw crackers would be handy. We used to get yelled at for cracking the claws with our teeth.

Generations

Young man to older:
You’ve got to slow down,
take it easy,
not work so hard.
There’s more to life than this.

Old man to younger:
No, there’s this,
just this,
exactly this.
What else would you hope for?

On the Days I Am Not My Father

Originally published in The Fractured World by Scott Owens

I don’t yell. I don’t hold inside
the day’s supply of frustrations.
My hands stay open all day.
I don’t wake tired and sore,
dazed from senseless, panicking
dreams. On the days I am not
my father I hold my son
when he cries, let him touch my face
without flinching, lie down with him
until he falls asleep, realize
that just because he has a sharp tongue,
just because he’s sometimes mean,
just because he is smarter than me
doesn’t mean he’ll become my father.

On the days I am not my father
holding you is enough until
holding you is no longer enough
for either of us. I listen well.
I let things go unfinished,
in an order I didn’t plan.
My mouth is relaxed. My teeth
don’t hurt. My face stays
a healthy shade of pink all day.
On the days I am not my father
I don’t fill the silence with my own
irrational rants.  I don’t resent
the voices of others. I don’t make fun
of you to make myself feel better.

On the days I am not my father
I don’t care who wins
or loses.  The news can’t ruin
my day.  I water plants.
I cook. I laugh at myself.
I can imagine living without
my beard, with my hair cut,
without the fear of looking
too much like my father. On the days
I am not my father I romp
and play, I don’t compare myself
with everyone else, the night
is always long enough, I
like
how much I am like my father.

In Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle, the main character, Odessa, is fourteen years old and has lived in rural Mississippi with her biological mother, Ella Mae, for less than a year. In the following scene Odessa is visiting her much older, gay, New Yorker brother, Lamont, and his partner, Richard. Odessa wants to understand her relationship with Ella Mae through other relationships around her, but age, geography, and a history of family ostracization stand in the way.

Ella Mae disappeared into the little bathroom and did not come out until we were silent, watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In black and white, all the Whos were gray; the Grinch and Max were gray. Without color, the meaning was lost, so the three of us entertained ourselves by changing the Seuss rhyme: “All the Whos down in Whoville, the straight and the gay, they all will join hands and sing ‘YMCA.’”

Richard stood up and directed us to stand up too. We obliged him, including Ella Mae. And with that he showed us how to use our bodies to make a Y, an M, a C, and an A to the tune of the song “YMCA.”

My arms had not been away from my body for such a long time. Maybe it was the new, musty smell of my own onion-musk underarms that had kept them down, or maybe it was the thought that if my arms ever left my sides, I might be expected to hug someone. But under Richard’s direction, my arms came free from my sides, and my mouth opened and sang.

“Not, so loud, not so loud,” Ella Mae muttered each time her smile was about to turn to laughter.

“Odessa,” Lamont announced, out of breath, “Tomorrow I’m buyin you a coat, and I’m doin your hair.”

I was not one to squeal like a girly girl, but I squealed and hugged him hard, completely forgiving him for leaving me in Mississippi and the phone call betrayal. Ella Mae smiled and sat down, and I sat down with her to even out the attention.

The next night Lamont held me still between his knees and pressed my hair, long after Ella Mae and Richard were snoozing on opposite mattresses. He used oil of bergamot to soothe the places where he’d pulled too hard with the comb, and while he worked he let me complain about school, Mississippi, and Ella Mae.

I told him the truth, the two of us open without worrying about what we should and shouldn’t say in front of the others. “I don’t wanna go back,” I said.

He pulled my head back, looked at me with eyes that showed alarm and concern. “Is she mean to you?”

I snorted and smiled at the thought that he could possibly do anything to protect me from a woman as thick and strong as Ella Mae. “No, she’s really good to me. She doesn’t yell, or rush me, or punish me for anything.”

He pushed my head back down in a jealous shove. “You mean she spoils you?”

“Kind of, but not with stuff. She doesn’t have a lot of money; she’s just like you.” I picked the dirt from under my fingernails at the sudden revelation that I was equating Lamont with someone who played the role of mother. “She gives me whatever I need, and she gives me so much space and time to say whatever I need to say to figure things out, and then to apologize if I end up saying something stupid.”

He laughed out loud. “Girl, you crazy. What are you complaining about then? Don’t tell me; you’re bored.”

“Yeah!” I threw my arm down off his thigh in defeat. “She doesn’t say anything bad, but she also doesn’t say anything. It’s like she’s being so careful with me that I don’t end up knowing her at all. And lately it’s like living with somebody that you can tell is having a conversation in her head, but I can’t tell what it’s about.”

I looked at the heap of her body on the living room floor, and I felt something for her that reminded me of when I looked at the river and knew that at the bottom there was a tempting darkness and beauty that I would never see unless I drowned.

“Like Thursday,” I said. “Remember?” I turned around to face Lamont, risking a burned ear. “Something was bothering her. I even think she cried after dinner, but who the hell knows why.”

“Shh.” Lamont shoved me. “I feel like that a lot with Richard. It takes a long time for people to open up and trust. You were quiet with her when you first got there, but you opened up, and now she’s going through her own thing. Ella Mae lived by herself for a long time with no family that she could trust beyond goin to Grandeddy Bo if a storm blew the roof off or something. But Ella Mae is your mother, girl. That means you got as much responsibility to her as she does to you. Draw her out. There’s all kinds of secrets she keeps ’cause she think she protectin you.”

“So Richard keeps secrets and doesn’t trust because he’s protecting you? And that’s what Ella Mae is doing too?”

He put his hand on top of my head and turned me around like he was screwing the top on a Mason jar.

“Girl, I’m talking about doing for Ella Mae the same way she would do for you. Give and take. Emotional responsibility. Don’t act so immature.”

I tore the loose skin from around my fingernails while he continued to give unsought advice. “You and Ella Mae just need to be together longer and she’ll get comfortable and quit being all closed up.” He pulled my head back again and whispered, “You just gotta draw Ella Mae out. Not by getting on her nerves and hoping she’ll slap your ass, but just draw her out.”

“Okay,” I whispered back. “And what are you going to do about Richard?”

He shoved my head back into place. I had exhausted him, “Okay, Miss Odessa Contessa, keep tryin to be cute. I’m tryin to give you some advice.”

“The woods are full of regional writers and it is the horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one.”

—Flannery O’Connor

Jack Kerouac told us, “Nobody’ll ever know America completely because nobody ever knew Gatsby, I guess.” But it was not while living at home in America that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that most American of novels, The Great Gatsby. Instead, he was wandering unrooted among the rich in Paris and the French Riviera (like some disenchanted hero of a trite tale told by Jay Gatsby himself). Had Fitzgerald not been obliged to rely on transatlantic cables to communicate with his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in New York about Gatsby, it’s possible he would have succeeded—he tried—in persuading Perkins once again to change the novel’s title, this time to Under the Red, White and Blue, a declaration that Gatsby does distill our national mythology. As for the Riviera, it became the setting for a novel that he finally managed to write nine years later, in Baltimore: Tender Is the Night.

The map of Fitzgerald’s compositions shows that he moves away, turns back, and looks: At St. Paul, at Princeton, at Long Island, at the Riviera. In the end, he had to stop at the edge of the West, in Hollywood, where there was nowhere else to go. And he said so in the almost finished Last Tycoon. Exile in Hollywood gave him that novel.

Landscape is an invaluable gift to a writer. But distance from that landscape can also open doors to roads otherwise never taken, and so make “all the difference.” Speaking of her forced departure from Chile, novelist Isabel Allende explained to an interviewer, “I started my first novel . . . because I was living in exile in Venezuela and my grandfather was dying in Chile. And I could not return to be with him, so I started a letter for him that turned into The House of the Spirits.” Would her novel have been different had Allende not left Chile? Or is she implying that perhaps it never would have been written?

I’ve always wanted to see that local habitation and a dwelling place in which a novelist created a work I love. In my travels to pay calls on fellow American writers, I’ve visited hundreds of sites as varied as the log cabin where Twain came up with “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to The Mount in the Berkshires where Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Abroad, I’m always looking for writers’ homes, schools, bars, theaters, graves.

Sometimes writers live out their lives in the midst of the settings of the fictions they write. In an English village, Jane Austen wrote novels that take place right there in, as it were, her own drawing room, just outside her windows, and up the High Street in just such an English village as her imagined one.

Other writers are looking from a place far away, as Isak Dinesen moved out of Africa before she wrote Out of Africa. We can wonder, would James Joyce have described the Dublin streets of Ulysses differently had he been living in that city where the entirely Irish June 16 that we now know as Bloomsday took place? Might he instead, for example, have set Bloomsday in the present, at the start of the 1920s, and not in the past (1904)? Might he have taken us into other pubs, let us hear other voices? The Irish author certainly didn’t expect any other dwelling place through his long exile (Trieste, Zurich, and Paris) ever to provide a setting for his fiction: “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

That “particular” changes, writer to writer; often for the same writer, book to book. Of a trilogy of mine called the Hillston novels, Uncivil Seasons was written in Connecticut, Time’s Witness in Philadelphia, and First Lady was begun in London and finished in a small Southern town very much like the one where all three novels take place.

Uncivil Seasons is narrated by Justin Savile V, very much an insider in his Southern community. He begins his tale:

Two things don’t happen very often in Hillston, North Carolina. We don’t get much snow and we hardly ever murder one another. Suicide is more our style; we’re a quiet college town and our lives are sheltered by old trees.

The third book, First Lady, has the same narrator. It opens:

I go riding in the mornings on a horse named Manassas. I ride the old bridle path that runs behind the big summerhouses at Pine Hills Lake. The lake is just outside Hillston, North Carolina, where my family has always lived. My family’s circle is wide. My circle is this narrow red clay track around the lake.

Is there a discernible difference in how I hear Justin’s voice in the first book, when I sat in a cold winter’s room on a New England salt marsh, and how I hear his voice many years later in a summer’s London flat? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, if you ask me, would I have written any of those three novels had I not been “raised” in the South Piedmont? The answer would be no, absolutely not. The North Carolina Piedmont is my “particular.”

“Particular” can mean any of a number of different places, of different kinds of places. A place never seen (or seeable) except in the imagination (Jules Verne never traveled to Mars, or 20,000 leagues under the sea). Lawrence Thornton is a professor in California who wrote Imagining Argentina, without ever having personally experienced the Dirty War in 1970s Buenos Aires. But he imagined it with such extraordinary clarity that the book won the PEN/Hemingway Award (I served on that committee and I remember my surprise at first learning Thornton had done exactly what his title declares: He had imagined Argentina).

However, it is more probable that if a novel’s setting is not the writer’s current home, it will be a landscape once personally known, revisited in the writer’s imagination, often a place long left behind. Present life can be a pale imitation of those dreamed pasts of our childhoods and our youths, when our senses were more permeable and our spongy memories soaked in sharp ardent memories and kept them for us, unfaded. Willa Cather’s family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was nine years old, and she left that flat, dusty town at fifteen. But her fictional landscape remained, in novel after novel, those endlessly rolling waves of prairie, where “the grass was the country, as the water is the sea.”

Red Cloud is what Cather meant when she advised Eudora Welty that writers must let their fiction grow out of the land beneath their feet.

America is so big a country that all our writers can be called regional writers: New England poets. New York playwrights. The Southern novelist. But we’re a restless country, too. We won’t stay put. We’re always telling each other to go West, to fly to the moon, to “move on.” We tend not to die the same place we were born. We are likely to agree that everybody, as Sinclair Lewis pointed out, “needs a hometown to get away from.” (Some years ago, when I paid a visit to his hometown, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a banner over Main Street declared that merchants were in the middle of their annual “Sinclair Lewis Days” celebration. The author of Babbitt would have gotten a kick out of their boosterism.)

But if there is any part of this country where writers do tend to stay put—both in how they define themselves as writers and in choosing the subject matters of their fiction—it’s the South. That’s why legend has it that after only a few weeks in Hollywood, William Faulkner asked the studio, “Mind if I work at home?” And when the studio said “Sure,” the legend goes, Faulkner packed up and returned to Mississippi. That’s the legend. Actually Faulkner hung around the studio Dream Factories for extended stays in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, drinking at the Garden of Allah, having an affair with a secretary, hunting with Howard Hawks, working on Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep. The legend tells us that a Southern writer went home to Mississippi because a Southern writer needs to be in his Yoknapatawpha, his “little postage stamp of native soil.” As they say in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, between the fact and the legend, print the legend.

I am often introduced as a Southern writer, although I lived in the Northeast most of my adult life, and the majority of my novels were composed above the Mason-Dixon Line. But while I don’t like to see my novels separated by genre (Handling Sin in “Literature”; Time’s Witness in “Mystery”), I never mind finding myself on a shelf of “Southern Writers.” Why? Because I believe it means something real. Did you ever hear anybody introduced as “a Northern writer”? Is there something different about our native soil, that if we do leave, we carry it with us like the earth in a vampire’s coffin? I think so. Because to be Southern is to see from a slant, from a minority position, from the outside in. Ever hear anyone speak of a wonderful “male” poet or a great “white” actress? It doesn’t occur to the Insiders that they need to specify a distinction from some Other. They have been led to believe they are the All. Southerners know there’s something else, and that it’s useful as a contrast.

My first three novels were not set in the South, but they all had expatriate Southerners in them, slightly apart from the others, seeing things at that tilt, with a winked eye. I’m also reminded that I drew complete detailed maps for the two fictional towns I’d imagined as the settings of those novels: one for “Floren Park” in The Delectable Mountains, a version of Estes Park, Colorado, where I’d spent a summer in a stock company; one for “Dingley Falls” (influenced slightly by my single day’s visit to Washington Depot in the Litchfield Hills, Connecticut). The maps of those imaginary towns appear as the inside covers of the published novels. The critic Malcolm Cowley, who lived in western Connecticut, told me Dingley Falls was the most Southern town he’d ever seen move there. I never drew a map of any Southern town in my fiction. And maybe that’s because I didn’t need to.

For years I have told the story of how in my late teens I drove all the way from North Carolina to Jackson, Mississippi, to tell Eudora Welty how much I admired her work. She still lived in the house in which she’d grown up, and if you knew someone from Jackson, you could learn its address. But parked across the street from her, I lost my nerve in the end. I sat in the car for hours, then drove off to Oxford, Mississippi, to visit Faulkner’s grave. (There were wilted flowers and a bottle of whiskey leaning on his tombstone, gifts from admirers.)

A decade later, I met Ms. Welty at Yale. And more than another decade later, we talked in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel and I told her that story of my travel to Jackson long ago. She said, “Honey, was that you? I almost called the police on you!” It pleased her that I’d published three novels, but when I described them—Painting the Roses Red set in California and in Cambridge, Delectable Mountains in Colorado, Dingley Falls in Connecticut, her mouth twisted in that smile. “All those ‘C’s. You’re just sneaking up on Carolina.”

It is perhaps the most resonant remark ever made to me as a young (reasonably young) writer. I went home to that town by the New England salt marsh and imagined North Carolina. And I’ve kept doing that. In my fiction, I come back to that red clay Piedmont country that is the landscape of my imagination. Then, for reasons beyond my own work, my wife and I moved to that very region. (We came because she had accepted a position as the chair of Duke’s English Department. She’d never lived in the South, and found it both alien and fascinating: “I feel like I’m inside one of your novels. . . . There goes Cuddy Mangum in a police car. . . . I thought it was just you but everybody down here acts like you.”)

But at the same time that the South is somehow “outside,” after all, defeated by a stronger force, to say one is a Southern writer, is also to put oneself at a center of meaning, a place, a social self that is definable, relatable, historic and mythic both, where “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” so that you never need to question whether you can repeat the past or not. Of course you can!

You carry the Southern past with you, in your family, in the South’s history and in its storytelling fictions. The relation of the two narrators of the Hillston novels, Justin Savile and Cuddy Mangum, owes as much to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as to my years in the Piedmont.

Some years back, I moderated two separate panels at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville. One of them gathered writers from the North living in the South; the other put together writers from the South living in the North. After the panels, the Northerners discussed their belief that there had been no real reason they should ever have been on such a panel. The Southerners took off together in a hired van for trips to the Parthenon and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.

My generation of Southern writers saw themselves on a raft in a flotilla floating down the same river. We’d been warned to believe both that you can’t go home again (so Thomas Wolfe had advised, melancholy and relieved) and at the same time that you can never escape from home. Often Southerners don’t ever leave home at all. Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor never did. “Southern writers are stuck with the South, and it’s a good thing to be stuck with,” argued O’Connor, from that farmhouse Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lived with her mother. Of some new group of artful writers, she quipped, “You know what’s the matter with them? They’re not frum anywhere.”

Of course many Southern writers do leave home and never come back. But mostly they take the South with them, as did Mark Twain, when he wrote his Southern books in Hartford, Connecticut, and Elmira, New York. A writer can’t get away from what lies at the heart of Southern fiction—it’s always “space and race,” as William Styron described the plot of our foundational text, Huckleberry Finn. In that novel, Huck and Jim keep trying to head north up the Mississippi, to get away from the South. But in the end they’re taken back home to St. Petersburg (Hannibal). Only the death of Mrs. Watson, the slave Jim’s owner, sets him free. Only Huck’s distaste for civilization (“Go West, Young Man!”) frees him from the shackles of the South: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before. the end. yours truly, huck finn.”

The South is of course not the only region of this country with a strong sense of local habitation. New England has its own. In Concord, Massachusetts, Sleepy Hollow cemetery is cozy with the writers who lie near one another on Author’s Ridge—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson. But there’s something particular in how contemporary Southerners are still collecting together in that old-fashioned Concord way, coming home. I live in Hillsborough, North Carolina. It’s not very large, but you can swing a dead possum and smack a dozen Southern writers in the face, many of us repatriated from “the North.” The truth is, it’s not that we can’t go home again; it’s that we can’t help it.

My mother, a Southerner, a public schoolteacher, a lover of books and of those who wrote them, told me, “You’re Southern, you’re Irish. Be a writer or you’ll end up in jail.” In my teens I wrote sonnets in purple ink, slipping them in the tasseled boot of a majorette. In graduate school, far from the South, I wrote a novel, inspired in part by my mother’s advice and by the mad recitations of an old English teacher from home who had floated through our cafeteria reciting Edgar Allan Poe to nobody in particular and whispering to us as she passed by, “I am looking for the next Thomas Wolfe. Is it you?” (Madness was no reason to fire her. She was a native of the town and from a good family. The South doesn’t mind insanity as long as it’s local.)

What it is to be a Southerner informs my fiction. Justin Savile wants to talk about his preference for the “Old South” over the New, even when he’s in London.

A hundred years ago, my ancestors trotted their horses and drove their pony carts along North Cove Road and tipped their straw hats to one another. At dawn that past is still present and peaceful at Pine Hills Lake. So usually I begin my ride just as the indigo Piedmont sky brightens to pink, while a mist still floats above the cove, curling in slow drifts towards shore, as if restless beneath the dark water the Lady of the Lake were waiting to rise through the mists with her sword. This early in the day, before the Southern sun makes everything too clear, even the Piedmont can be Camelot and that’s how I prefer it. . . . In the past a Hillston homicide came out of the Piedmont particularities of our town, its tobacco and textiles, its red clay farms and magnolia shaded university, its local people tied to land or town or college or family, it came out of something distinctive and therefore traceable. But that world is as distant as my grandparents’ straw hats and pony carts, and in the Hillston we live in today, there are no landmarks to guide us.

Cuddy Mangum wants to argue with him, even when they’re in Philadelphia.

Cuddy Mangum had his old suede loafers up on the cluttered desk of his corner office on the top floor of the huge Hillston municipal complex known now as the Cadmean Building. It was the biggest office in the place, bigger than the mayor’s office downstairs. Cuddy was my age but he’d gone further faster. He was eating Kentucky Fried Chicken from a cardboard bucket when I dropped my damp hat on the coffee table beside a painted wood chess set. I said, “We lost the South when we lost the past, and what we got in its place was junk food.”

Hillston’s youngest police chief winked a bright blue eye at me. “J.B. Savile the Five, it’s a small price to pay. Want some Extra-Crispy?”

I showed him my sushi take-out. “No thanks. But I could use a blanket.” His air conditioner was on so high that frost dripped down his windows. The morning mist in which I’d seen the beautiful woman at the lake had been burned to haze by the summer sun. About an hour ago, heavy clouds had let loose a thunderstorm that had torn down some tree branches without doing anything to cool the humid horrible heat. By noon drizzle steamed off the sidewalks and the temperature had climbed into the high nineties. In Cuddy’s office, the temperature was half that.

“Hail the new millennium. Everybody in America can eat the same trash now,” I grumbled.

Cuddy gave me an ironic snort. “I never knew a man so incensed by junk food.” He spun his hands in a tumbling circle. “I say roll out the polyester carpet for the new millennium. Let it roll, let it rock ‘n roll, right on over the past. The Old South’s got a lot worse to answer for than Colonel Sanders’ family-pack.”

Whenever I’m asked why I, a “literary novelist,” turn to the mystery, I rather grumpily reject the generic distinction. In fact, long ago Knopf pressed me not to publish Uncivil Seasons after having written a novel like Dingley Falls and, young and indignant at the time, I asked if they would shelve The Sound and the Fury in the literature section but put Intruder in the Dust among the “lower” mysteries? Where do they shelf the great Southern writer of To Kill a Mockingbird?

A murder mystery (all of Dickens’s novels could be so described) enlarges the canvas beyond the relational and domestic, beyond the intimate confines of much modern fiction. You bring in police and courts and prisons, juries and judges, different occupations, different classes. You move your story into a public realm where plots have moral and political and social dimensions, where private acts have consequences beyond the personal.

Now, all stories, like all lives, are mystery stories. Everyone listens to stories to meet strangers and learn their plots because humans are detectives searching for clues to our connections. So the heart of fiction is always to get at the secrets. That there should be such a strong Southern heritage to the mystery therefore makes perfect sense. To solve murders, detectives must unearth all the buried social and familial entanglements that led to the crimes. Here in the South, the roots of our lives are tangled together, deep in a shared rich and often painful past.

That South has changed enormously over the decades that I’ve been writing about it. In my youth, almost all the people in North Carolina were natives of the state, and the joke was that our license plate mottos should read, “Five Million People; Fifteen Last Names.” The population is now much more heterogeneous, and now the jokes are of this variety: that CARY stands for “Containment Area for Retired Yankees.” But we should note that both kinds of jokes reveal how the South continues to define itself mythically, as a place that can be defined. Past-haunted about our virtues and our sins, we create and sustain ourselves out of those fictions. That’s why so many of us are writers, and why all of us are storytellers.

On one of my writer’s pilgrimages through America, I went to Ashville, North Carolina, to see Thomas Wolfe’s grave. Next to his grave is that of his brother. On the gravestone the inscription says, “Luke of Look Homeward Angel.” It’s not true that you can’t go home again. You can’t help it.

My novels evolve from the characters who inhabit them. The minute I hear the voice of a narrator, from word one of page one, I am listening to that character’s voice. The narrator of Handling Sin is very different from that of The Last Noel (set here at my home in a fictional Hillsborough). But all the storytellers of my fiction, and all those who live their lives inside the covers of my books are, I trust, equally at home. Now they live in North Carolina, in the red clay landscape of my imagination. Here’s the first paragraph I wrote after I came home again, the opening of Four Corners of the Sky.

In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine the days move monotonously, safely, but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky and do away with the sun so fast that, in the sudden quiet, birds fly shrieking to shelter. The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen.

Is there any better-trod topic in American history than the Civil War? In 2002 the Library of Congress estimated that 50,000 to 70,000 books and monographs about the conflict had appeared since its conclusion. In 2013, and nearly two years into the war’s sesquicentennial, that number is undoubtedly much higher. And then there are the dozens of Civil War journals and magazines, the hundreds of conferences, the thousands of lectures. It’s enough to make a book browser look upon the latest  Ulysses S. Grant biography at Barnes & Noble and despair.

Yet the books keep coming, and somehow, they keep having something new to say. It is the nature of history, and history writing, and especially history writing about this seminal American story: if the war was what Robert Penn Warren called an “American oracle,” then its insights will by necessity change as America itself changes. The questions that a multiracial, globalized nation asks of its history in 2013 are very different from those asked by the same country fifty years prior, when it was a segregated superpower locked in a nuclear-tipped cold war.

During the 1950s, a time of often repressive national consensus, the questions revolved around proving that the war could have been avoided, the better to demonstrate that all was fine with America and always had been, save for the odd hiccup. A generation later, the country was reversed, and so were the questions: the war was inevitable, because conflict, not consensus, was endemic to the American political psyche—a view that came naturally to the ’60s generation. Traveling alongside were historians asking wholly new questions about slaves and gender and culture, things that their elders ignored but that the new, post–civil rights America made necessary to explore.

In asking different questions, historians not only get different answers; they come up with new evidence that feeds back on, and obliterates, received truths. Few historians in the 1950s cared to ask what women thought and did during the war; over the subsequent half century, new questions have led historians to examine previously overlooked sources, which in turn have shed new light on conventional wisdom about all facets of the war. Women, we now know, not only played important roles on the battlefront, but through their positions as informal political advisers and activists, they helped shape the course of the war on the homefront as well.

What sort of questions are historians asking today? If a consensus exists, it is that there is no consensus—if it’s not quite “anything goes,” it’s certainly a much more permissive, wide-ranging field of inquiry than before. The interest in culture, in women, and in the black experience remains, but they are less the ideological firestorms they were in the 1980s and ’90s. The radical, insurgent perspective has become the establishment.

At the same time, we do not yet see (at least in academia) a return to any sort of “great man” history; the war as seen by the average soldier remains more interesting to the latest generation of historians. Material culture and mass media are frequent subjects. In the New York Times’s Disunion series, we have published young scholars writing on Civil War music, Civil War humor, and Civil War literature, all of which points to further investigation in the coming years. Regional experiences are also of new interest—the war in the Appalachians, or the northern Ohio Valley, for example. That old chestnut about the Civil War pitting “brother against brother” is once again at the front of scholarly minds, as historians examine how communities along the north–south border navigated the violence of divided loyalties.

There is also a movement to put the Civil War in an international context. In part this involves a deeper investigation into the war’s diplomatic aspects, the view from London and Paris, as it were, embodied most recently in Amanda Foreman’s A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. This is hardly new ground: Frank L. Owsley wrote King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America, still often considered the standard text on Civil War foreign policy, in 1931. But the staying power of that book, written by an avowed, if erudite, racist, demonstrates why a book like Foreman’s—and, hopefully, others to follow—is so needed.

Most significantly, scholars have clarified how deeply the Haitian revolution resonated through antebellum Southern society. The fear that a slave population could rise up and defeat a white master class—a fear underscored by the occasional domestic slave revolt—made Southern whites increasingly paranoid through the first half of the nineteenth century, to the point that any possible challenge to their social structure became a life-or-death threat. At the same time, they pushed endlessly for any avenue for expansion of slave-owning territory: the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, the invasion of Nicaragua by filibusteros. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the Southern fear of Republican power—culminating in Lincoln’s election—without understanding this international context.

This is hardly unique to Civil War history. Americans, including American historians, have long tended to see the country’s history in isolation, with any relationship to the outside world being relegated to subdisciplines like diplomatic history. But that has started to change. In recent decades scholars have insisted that the United States, from its earliest colonial moments, was a part of a transatlantic world, both influencing and influenced by events in Europe.

Review of Federal troops on the 4th of July by President Lincoln and General Scott; the Garibaldi Guard filing past. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC-DIG-ppmsca-31563]

Thanks to improvements in information technology, historians can now ask questions that they never thought possible to answer. Scholars at the University of Richmond have shoveled thousands of Civil War–era pages from The Richmond Dispatch into a database, which they can sift through to find once-hidden patterns. For instance, they found that notices for runaway slaves tended to spike after Union victories, hinting strongly that slaves were not only well aware of the course of the war but willing to act on the news they received—conclusions that undercut conventional assumptions about slaves as passive, uninformed pawns in a white man’s war.

Yet, amazingly, there are wide swaths of Civil War history that remain poorly covered. Southern history, despite a few recent, groundbreaking works like Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning, is woefully underappreciated. Perhaps this is one of the last vestiges of political correctness: taking the Confederate States of America seriously as an institution and the South seriously as a political culture is still thought by some to give them credibility, at a time when public displays of Southern pride and the Confederate battle flag still rub people the wrong way.

There is also much work to be done on the American West during the war. We tend to see the Civil War and the later settlement of the West as two discrete stories. But of course they weren’t: conflicts with Native Americans were frequent during the Civil War, most notably the Dakota War of 1862. Moreover, the war forced many Native American tribes to take sides, choices that reverberated through the rest of the century. At the same time, attitudes toward violence and power that were forged during the war helped ease qualms about massacring Native Americans later, a point brought home in recent books like Heather Cox Richardson’s West from Appomattox and Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation.

When we began publishing Disunion in November 2010, we weren’t sure how popular the series would be, or how much new there would be to say, at least to a general audience. Not only has the series been immensely popular, but we’ve also been impressed by the depth and breadth of new perspectives coming from young and old scholars, both inside and outside the university gates. While we like to think we’re publishing the best of what’s available, we also hope that the series inspires even younger scholars and writers to enter Civil War history. The field remains wide open, and ripe.

When my Spartanburg-native husband got a job in upstate New York six years ago and we were packing up our Nashville house, I started making the necessary phone calls with a heavy heart. Canceling services, forwarding information. I was a new mother; I called our pediatrician to ask them to forward my son’s records. I can still hear the receptionist’s disbelieving voice: “New York? New YORK?” As if it might not be possible for one to move from Nashville, Tennessee, to New York State. “Mnmn. Ain’t no place like the South, Baby.” I could hear her shaking her head, feeling sorry for me. I felt even sorrier for myself; we loved Nashville—and what’s more, I knew she was thinking Manhattan, which I considered the best-case scenario. Not the extra-freezing and remote New York upstate.

To me, a Connecticut Yankee, the receptionist’s response was totally consistent with not only my feelings about the South, somewhere I’d been in love with since vacationing on Hilton Head and reading Pat Conroy novels as a romantic teenager with a penchant for nostalgia, but also with generic notions about old-fashioned Southern pride. And she was right: upstate New York was nothing like Nashville. Certainly no doctor’s office receptionist up North ever came close to calling me “Baby.”

So we endured five interminable, oppressive, light-starved winters full of cabin fever in New York state. (Emily Dickinson became more relevant than ever: “There’s a certain Slant of light / Winter Afternoons— / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes—.” Talk about seasonal depression.) But we not only endured, we actually prevailed; my husband got another job that miraculously brought us back down South. And this time to our favorite place on the planet: the South Carolina Lowcountry.

I had been living in Murrells Inlet for two and a half months when my parents came to visit from Connecticut, and we went for po’ boys at the restaurant down the road by the black waters of the Waccamaw River. My dad struck up a conversation with a retiree who was singing Sinatra tunes out on the riverfront deck under a postcard-pretty live oak, practicing his act for later that week. This old crooner was a New Jersey native who had lived in Litchfield for the past few decades. My father—forgetting he was on the Grand Strand, retirement mecca for so many Northeasterners—was shocked at this coincidence. It was as though he had met the only other American in Europe. “Ha!” snorted the crooner triumphantly in response to my father’s naiveté as he coiled the power cord for his amplifier. “There aren’t any Southerners here anymore!” It was as if this proud occupation by New Jersey retirees was the belated spoils of war—“The War,” no need to clarify which one. The carpetbagging that began during Reconstruction, along with the stereotypical Northern scorn of and condescension to Southerners, seemed alive and well. Was this retiree in his NY Giants sweatshirt some less exalted latter-day version of Arthur Huntington or Bernard Baruch, those famous Yankee financiers who bought up ramshackle, abandoned Lowcountry plantations in the early twentieth century to remodel into hunting and country estates? I didn’t have high hopes. Their carpetbagging ultimately gave us Brookgreen Gardens, Huntington Beach State Park, and Hobcaw Barony. And—no offense to New Jersey retirees—I doubt they wore sweatshirts.

This faux Sinatra just about ruined my day. No Southerners? I wanted to tell him that he was wrong. I’m married to a Southerner, after all, and we live a mile up the road! Plus I have plenty of real-life Southern neighbors who’ll bless your heart any day of the week, even (or especially) if they can’t stand your guts. And my kids go to schools full of Southern kids whose mothers all drive identical and massive GMC Yukon XLs through the carpool line.

I could retreat to my “historic” neighborhood of 1980s Georgian-style custom homes and strict architectural covenants, but I could not deny the daily evidence that we had indeed arrived in the new South, built on outsiders’ views and expectations of what the South should be or once was. And I confess that sometimes I’m still surprised to see immaculate world-class golf course operations instead of derelict antebellum Big Houses when I peer down the long, oak-lined allées of “plantations” announced by historical markers. What better proof that in moving to an international tourist destination we have moved directly onto a veritable fault line of the global South? How could I help but shudder some weeks ago when our waiter in a Conway bistro addressed our table as “you guys” in his Southern drawl? What a harbinger.

I know what you’re thinking: who’s a Connecticut Yankee to care?

People describe my new town as a fishing village. I’m from New England and I honeymooned in Nova Scotia. I know fishing villages. I’m willing to buy that Murrells Inlet was a Lowcountry fishing village—at one time. But it’s a stretch now, and perhaps mainly a stretch into tourists’ pockets. I can appreciate that this reputation has economic benefits; it attracts millions of tourist dollars annually. Tourists are willing to pay—a lot—to see The South. Yet when tourists come to the South Strand, don’t they want to see genuine Lowcountry landscape: iconic moss-draped live oaks, the gray-and-green marshes, maybe some rusty old fishing boats? Our Restaurant Row is still local, but all the big chains—and I mean all—are just a block over. In place of tumbledown, weather-beaten, or just plain modest clapboard cottages, there are expensive and magnificent Southernized raised beach houses on freshly paved, made-to-order cul-de-sacs. You can barely see the sky, much less the marsh, behind the monstrous creekside megahomes going up. I know the legendary hurricane of 1893 didn’t stop at the coast, but kept pressing and pounding inland; still, the waterfront architecture four highway lanes away from the water isn’t really fooling anyone, is it? Candy-colored houses on pilings—no matter the distance from actual water—featuring double-decker porches and majestic staircases, are springing up on any available green space, even in the median at the split between the highway bypass and the business route. Down here, you can’t help but notice what writer and champion of the Georgia longleaf pine Janisse Ray has similarly pointed out: street names that at least used to mean something in the community—people, function, even the ecology the streets themselves uprooted (Ben Horry, Coachman, Old Beach, Little Tunny, Loblolly)—are systematically replaced with generically aristocratic neighborhood names that tragically reinforce a sense of disconnectedness and placelessness. The Olde Midway is a local plantation allusion (I checked), but Queen’s Harbour? Windsor Plantation (complete with majestic lion heads on the gates)? Equally ridiculous: Key Largo? With this blurring of state—if not continental—borders, with this retouching of local history, it seems likely that tourists might easily forget where exactly they are.

The architectural nods to our collective imagination of the Old South are obvious and many throughout the developments in my corner of the so-called gloSo, but because they’re based largely on myth (advertisements, novels, Hollywood), the effect is that these gorgeous houses are strangely unbelievable, very unreal. Erasing the past and replacing it with a romanticized, one-dimensional version built more on tourists’ expectations than any kind of vernacular history means that my town is in danger of masquerading as a Disneyfied Key West, Miami, or—at best—Charleston’s Rainbow Row. Looking at these over-the-top tropical megaliths, there can be little doubt that many of our twenty-first-century developers have outdone the original landed gentry for grandeur and ostentation. This must be what historian Harvey Jackson refers to as “pastel hell” in The Riseand Decline of the Redneck Riviera: in this new version of the Old South, history and culture have been manufactured and airbrushed to perfection. Who needs character? Who needs soul? Everything is perfectly lovely or else.

If you live or visit down here, you know that anywhere you need to go means driving up and down 17, the Ocean Highway. I spend a lot of time in the car, primarily trekking back and forth to my kids’ schools, two towns and ten miles away. This drive gives me the opportunity to hone two of my greatest talents: observation and obsession. And I might not be quite as desperate to preserve a unique sense of place if I weren’t panicked about the unbridled and often redundant development I see as I drive the circuit everyday. Commercial for sale signs are everywhere—along the marsh, in the yards of the humble historic district’s charming 1940s cottages, on vacant frontage lots full of sprawling old oaks. Up and down 17, I pass how many mini-storage facilities? How many half-empty strip malls? Just this summer, an Auto Zone and an O’Reilly Auto Parts sprouted up simultaneously in fields across an access road from one another. Another Dollar Store, as inoffensive as possible in its attractive contemporary Lowcountry design, opened its doors in Litchfield this past fall.

What’s heartbreaking is that here, unlike more established neighborhoods and more urban places I’ve lived, you can still see so much of the past. It hasn’t all been built up and covered over—yet. There are ghosts and vestiges and remnants in the abandoned fields and near the wrecked cottages where the big signs are planted. These interruptions in the strip are not shiny or glamorous, but they are beautiful and soulful, crooked places with porches and paint strips hanging on for dear life. They bear moldering witness to the real past, to the special history of this place that inspires so much of our cultural imagination—and, indeed, tourism. This, it strikes me, is the “wildness” South Carolina nature writer John Lane promises we can find in any landscape, if only we care to look. And if we do look, then we may notice a palimpsest of Southern history and culture, layers of time spent and lives lived—right here.

I saw a sign the other day: Historic Sunnyside Plantation For Sale. It’s marshfront, prime property. I think about how almost all of this land was once one historic plantation or another, stretching in slivers from the riverfront to the ocean, how secrets are hidden underground with signs of the place’s past. Would the old inhabitants of the Waccamaw Neck—those who owned land here and those who worked it—recognize the new Caledonia Plantation? What about Litchfield Plantation? Wachesaw or Richmond Hill? They wouldn’t be able to get through the gates without a pass. Every day I nervously check the status of the signs around me with a sense of foreboding. Someday I will drive by and see condos or a home improvement store instead of these beautiful trees or that faded vestigial barn. New signs will read “Farmfield Plaza” or “The Oaks at Historic Sunnyside Plantation: Lots Starting in the Low $500’s!” I can only imagine the stories those backhoes and excavators will dig up and dump aside.

Somewhat ironically, amid all of the cultural shifting and historical erasure where I live, genuine Southern identity matters and manifests in even small ways—as if the bona fides might stem the tide of globalism or at least distinguish themselves from the New Jerseyites. Here, not only do Ford trucks sport bumper stickers proclaiming “Local” status, they also up the ante with the more prestigious and far less common “Native” sticker. In honor of the state tree, the “I” is the shape of a palmetto. I get it: I may currently be local. I will never be native.

As a Northern transplant (and as a Target-loving Northern transplant who doesn’t even “go local” as much as she should), do I have much of a right to lament these signs of the global South even as I contribute to them? Probably not. Yet I want what that Nashville receptionist said to be true. I want there to be no place else like this. If I’m going to live down South, then I want it to be all live oaks and Spanish moss and friends who say “y’all.” I don’t want this place to look like everywhere else I’ve ever lived, no matter how good the shopping or how breathtaking the homes. But if developers bulldoze what makes this place the South Carolina Lowcountry and turn it into a super-luxe, tarted-up caricature of itself, complete with couture shopping and discount mega-retailers on every corner, then it will inevitably be just like every place else—and therefore no place special at all. A tourist utopia, if you’ll pardon the pun, indeed.

This is why the best way to hang onto the uniqueness of the South Strand might be to practice what University of North Carolina anthropologist James Peacock calls “grounded globalism.” My historic fishing village of a Lowcountry tourist town is a place where globalism increasingly and inevitably happens, but we must try to maintain its local integrity and character as much as possible. I get it that the “old world” Italian restaurants, “authentic” New York–style pizzerias, and Philly cheesesteak stands are here to stay, along with a spanking-new Target (that I’ve visited twice in the past week and whose Bahama shutters I do appreciate) and a proposed fourth Walmart in a twenty-five-mile radius. In response, a vigorous grassroots “Don’t Box the Neck” campaign (complete with its own bumper stickers and lawyers) has lighted up. Peacock wisely reminds us to negotiate: “Some kind of grounding in locale is necessary to human beings. Once we achieve global identities, we must ground them, integrating the global and the local in some way.” All of us—the developers, the tourists, the natives, the New Jersey retirees, the Connecticut Yankees—need to respect and honor this landscape, this history, this culture, these stories; we need to ground this ever-expanding mowing down that eventually turns little towns like mine into treeless hodge-podges of chain retail busts, acres of weedy tarmac, and creekside mansions in foreclosure. We cannot forget to see the beauty and wildness here. Maybe the newest Walmart will occupy one of the vacant strip mall grounds instead of a green tract of gnarled live oaks. Maybe we will only buy local shrimp. Maybe those people with the “Native” stickers are onto something.

Since moving here, I have loved a century-old falling-down barn way back in the trees and brush by the corner of the road leading to my neighborhood. It’s a silent and lonely testament to a way of life here not that long ago. I don’t know what farm the land was once part of or what crops or livestock used to be stored there. But I wonder. Clearly this square of property was forgotten for a long time. But not anymore. As if on cue, a big, blocky commercial for sale sign went up a few days ago.

Edward Rice, Painter
Born 1953 in Augusta, Georgia
Lives in Augusta, Georgia, and North Augusta, South Carolina
www.edwardriceart.com

I have been asked how my work is informed by place. Memory must surely play a role. Many of the subjects I depict I have known since childhood. My father’s family settled here in the 1840s, my mother’s in the 1770s. I have lived and worked here all my life.

I generally drive to the studio about nine o’clock and head home about five during the week. I like to work for half a day on Saturday or Sunday—the phone doesn’t ring. I usually have a dozen or more canvases going at various levels of completion. I spend a year or so on a larger work.

I have also been asked why I do what I do. I can only say that painting has been my chosen field of endeavor from an early age and that it has been my livelihood for over forty years.

I am not an architect, historian, photographer, philosopher, nor poet—however, my limited knowledge of these disciplines influences my work. It is about looking, being quiet, being still.

All living cultures are dynamic, evolving, and difficult to categorize as “pure or authentic.” Living cultures in a process of gradual transformation from one mixture to another soften across geographic and other cultural boundaries. Experiencing the process of the contamination of cultures, whether in the Eastern or Western Hemisphere or even in seemingly forgotten places in the United States, provides us with a heightened awareness of being between worlds within worlds. These places and conditions can be filtered and translated through the act of design. Brief immersions into living cultures such as the Arkansas Ozarks and Delta provide for an exchange of cultural perspectives and act as a deep source of possibilities in the conception of things and spaces that are understood and felt as somehow strangely familiar.

We engage in a process of reflective observation, empirical and abstract, and critical experimentation that aspires to the discovery of the formal and sensual character of things, the poetic quality of things, using the intersection of forces, natural and constructed, to understand what things are, not just what they mean. The ideas that nature builds on are local concepts that multiply, mix, and overlap. Their qualities are dense, embedded, and complex. This necessarily involves us in a macro- and microscopic investigation of “things,” their novelties, peculiarities, and dynamic organizations revealed in time. We attempt to translate the “outer beauty,” the measurement of things, their proportions and materials, as well as their inner beauty, the essence of things.

The world of things—things born and things made—provides a rich source of analogies and immanent relationships to be used to enrich our sensibilities and design strategies with regard to the things we make.

Architectural vernaculars at their best are like familiar faces in which we can recognize a deep character and rediscover the essential qualities we value most in architecture. We seek to re-create strangeness, beautiful and sublime, to revive and intensify a place and what is familiar by complicating and defamiliarizing our relationship to it. Drawing on the specificities of local situations allows for permutations of type that are resistant to the diminishment suffered by the vernacular through commodification so evident in most commercial development.

However, the field of view for architects is larger than the subject of architecture. Observed through a lens whose angle is wide and focus microscopic, nature and material culture provide rich reservoirs of ideas and images that can motivate a design. Biological and geological analogs and metaphors inspire methods and processes, which are often inductive. Our intentions are to amplify the small things that manifest in the larger.

What emerges through the mixing and hybridization of figures and types is local form—a transmutation of place—a secular vernacular that in place becomes spiritual. Our ambition is to put forward a logic that may open up the repressed raw power of architecture and the environment through a rethinking and remaking of where we already are. This place logic functions as the basis for architecture developed as an integrated system of determined relationships—sensual and sensible—with authenticity and integrity, which does not rely on store-bought theories or ideas. A poetic pragmatism is expressed through the aesthetic or emotional impact found in solving problems and in the process of connecting things that would otherwise be unrelated between the figures of nature and industrial types within a material culture. In the end we are motivated by the search for an architecture of use and convenience, permanence, and beauty, deeply rooted to place, with an emotive atmosphere and qualities that affect us deeply.

Inflections of Spirit Outside My Window

arkansas ozark mountains worn by time by weather tipped toward mississipi river delta the pattern after forest the mathematics of cotton rice patchwork of landscape of rural electrification measured pole to pole to pole wires overhead brown dirt below green fields and american postcard vernacular occasional punctuating shots of color from placards or posters tacked to wood creosote-stained and shot full of holes woodpecker ghost risen up from this arkansas landscape land of the trinity johnny cash dyess born million-dollar quartet when a million meant something memphis bound and beyond in black in rows of two of three of five long house chickens feed me give spirit to form to skulls to bones lucinda lucida lucid stories of this place from this space revival tent ephemeral and songs acute and real picture this this pictorial ancient alligator gar land reverent and irreverent and kin to jerry lee high low and in between the source and the inspiration

David Buege and Marlon Blackwell

Excerpted from the novel A Different Sun, forthcoming from Berkley Books April 2, 2013 

“I plan a safari into town tomorrow,” Emma said, she and Henry with bowls of morning coffee.

“Ask Jacob to go with you. I’m meeting with a local chief tomorrow,” Henry said.

“I’ll ask Duro,” she said, sorry her husband had not offered to come with her.

As different as Yoruba land was from Georgia, it was still possible to anticipate an outing if you had the energy after coping with the heat. Emma would not see church spires or admire the city gardens, but once in Ijaye’s open-air market she had found European china. Anyway, walking was her bent. Her great-aunt Helen had been a walker until she took a stroll on her ninety-sixth birthday and never came back. That was a story her father told. As a boy, he had been sent to look for her and when he found her, she was faceup, next to the goldfish pond at the center of a boxwood grove. Her hat was still on, just a little askew.

That evening Duro came in limping. He had twisted an ankle in the countryside turning up yams. That left Jacob to accompany Emma on her safari. The next morning, Abike and Wole were waiting with him in the outer compound. They all stood at her approach, and she was surprised again by Jacob’s height and the smile hovering in his eyes and along his cheekbones that did not suggest obedience. She thought the golden key to the African mind was in that smile.

“I haven’t given much thought to our direction,” she said.

“We can begin,” he said.

She drew on her gloves.

As soon as they passed through the gate and stepped into the street, a band of children appeared out of nowhere, gathering around her as if she were a great odd bird. It was hardly a new experience, but she was disappointed that Wole and Abike simply stepped aside for the throng, unaware of how they betrayed her. “Whew,” Emma said to no one. The houses were as predictable as day: uniformly mud, one story, thatched roofs. She smelled bean cakes frying in palm oil. Here and there stood a palm or pawpaw tree or great shading hardwood. Roosters and goats dawdled; a black-and-white pig tripped past. The lane was clean and open. Some boys sauntered by, pretending not to look at her. Then an old farmer passed so close she could smell the earth on his hoe, but he took no notice of her, as though he had no mental picture she might fit, and therefore she did not exist. When they had traversed the equivalent of three city blocks, a tall woman stepped into the road with the clear intention of intercepting them. Her calves were straight and lean and she seemed of some indefinite and eternal age like a character in Virgil. Emma felt her heart beat in her temples as the woman made a little speech. She used the word funfun. A number of the woman’s neighbors stood silently in the shade. “What did she say?”

“She says your skin has been rubbed off and is white like raw cotton,” Abike said.

Emma was again seized with the sense of discord she had felt when first in the country and her color was called out, not for its loveliness but its absurdity. It made her angry with Abike to be reminded. “Jacob, ask if we may visit,” she said.

Jacob addressed the woman, who had put a hand to her cheek as if all skin might now be in jeopardy. In a moment, he turned back to Emma. “She invites you to her house,” he said.

“Tell her first, while we are here in the street, that my skin has not been rubbed off. God has made us different for the glory of His creation.” She reached for Abike’s hand and gave it a good squeeze.

When Jacob translated, the woman went into another speech, her voice moving about on the scale and landing on such unexpected notes that it put Emma in mind of a xylophone.

“What is she saying? Have you vexed her? Tell her I am Mrs. Bowman.” A goat came close to her skirts and made ready to do something unbecoming, and Emma shooed it away.

“Mistress Bowman,” the woman said, waving Emma toward her.

They followed her through a small room, out the other side, and down a narrow yard where a pawpaw tree hung heavy with oranging fruit. As they walked, children joined them, all in a line. The group stepped through another passageway and out the other side into a large yard and finally to the room the woman had in mind for her visitor. Emma was delighted. This was just as she imagined. She was entering a new stage in her development as a missionary. God was with her and had provided this woman for her first real evangelism in Ogbomoso.

The room had a window of all things, shuttered with a gatelike contraption but now propped open. Their hostess captured a stool out of the corner and offered it to her guest.

“Joko,” she said.

Emma gathered her skirts and aimed her hind side for the low seat. Once settled, she looked up to see sky. “Your window is fine.” She spoke slowly in her best Yoruba, hoping to communicate her admiration.

The lady was arranging herself with a pretty green scarf. Then she took her own seat, a stool so worn the wood was ashen. With clear authority, she told Wole and Abike to take seats on a mat and left Jacob to decide his own fate. He stood leaning against the wall. When a native beer was offered, Emma tried to resist. But the hostess insisted and then filled her gourd twice. It must have been fresh because the taste was finer than usual. As Emma let her legs float out in front of her, she thought of Jesus taking wine with ordinary people as he ministered. After a moment, she beckoned Wole and then pushed him forward in the fine new shirt she had sewn. The woman took the boy’s hands and swung his arms out and back with hers, like girls might do in play. She said something longish and delicate, and the boy nodded in agreement. Jacob translated because Emma didn’t catch it all.

“She says one’s true nature is like smoke; one cannot hide it in the folds of one’s garment.”

Emma might have found the woman’s proverb a challenge if she hadn’t been so relaxed with the beer. Instead she was open to its wisdom—open like the window. “Who is she?”

“She is the mother of the town,” Jacob said, “not simply iya but Iyalode, woman governor. Women with trouble come to her.”

“How wonderful,” Emma said. She did not recall that Ijaye had included a female governor, but right here she had stumbled across the most important woman in Ogbomoso, well, apart from the pagan priestess. The Iyalode could help her reach other women through a sewing circle. Teach trade, Henry said, and the church will follow.

The woman nodded her head back and forth as if she were, through some sixth sense, in possession of Emma’s own thinking. A child’s head appeared at the window but quickly disappeared.

“The Iyalode wishes to know if you have a title,” Jacob said.

“Not exactly.” She wanted to try her Yoruba again, but this sentence could be spoken only in English. “I have a college degree that took several years of study.” She peered at Jacob, wondering how he would translate. It took him a while.

“She asks if only women go to college,” he said.

This was almost as fine an idea as a women’s government. “No, not at all,” she said, thinking she might explain women’s and men’s colleges. But Henry did not have a college degree, and it wasn’t such a fine idea to explain that. “My husband is an ordained minister, an aluffa of the true God,” she said. Unfortunately the Iyalode seemed not as impressed with this as college. Emma thought she must press on in the direction of the gospel, even if just briefly.

“The one God,” Emma said, keeping it simple and using her own Yoruba, “sent His son to live with us and open the road to eternal life. His name is Jesu Kristi. He brings hope to the poor and all who suffer. My husband and I have come to Ogbomoso to share this true faith.”

The Iyalode adjusted her headdress. She talked back to Jacob.

“She wants to know why this God-on-earth was preferring the poor.”

“Because the poor are most in need of God’s mercy.”

Again the woman went through Jacob.

“She says big men also need God; who will come to them?”

This question had not been put to Emma in Africa. She thought of most everyone as poor. “Of course, if the rich man is willing to give up everything to follow Jesus, then the way is open for him.”

The dialogue continued to move through Jacob, and Emma was glad to have him. He was a better interpreter than Duro.

“She says the rich man has a responsibility to keep his wealth so that he can distribute it to his wives and children and other members of the town in need.”

This was vexing. Emma thought the woman might prove a challenge. She flexed her fingers in her gloves. “As long as the man’s primary allegiance is to Jesus and loving God and if he lives a good life, giving freely of his wealth, he can enter the church and be saved,” she said, thinking, That should do it.

“The Iyalode wishes to know what else is in your head,” Jacob said.

“I know mathematics.” Emma put him in a stare, meaning to convey that the talk was a little drawn out. “I’ve studied poets, gurus, astronomy, zoology, physics, and Latin,” she said. “I can show her a picture of her own country.” This possibility bloomed in her mind like a white morning glory. She could promise to bring it on a future visit. Her back was starting to hurt from sitting so low, and her dress felt snug in the middle. The Iyalode stood, without any apparent effort. Wonderful. They could leave.

“She says you can show her,” Jacob said.

“Yes, when we return.” Emma had nothing to get hold of, to lift herself. Jacob held his hand out. She looked at it hard and grasped it, feeling her hand small in his. When she was up, standing before him, she was startled to see how clearly handsome he was. For a moment she forgot what they were doing.

“Now,” he said. “She says you can show her now.”

“Now?” Emma stammered, feeling all tossed up. The Iyalode was out of the room, talking this way and that to children who had converged at the door. Emma struggled with her skirts and adjusted her hat. She drew in a breath. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll need a good stick.”

Out they filed into the yard. Jacob sent a boy to fetch a drawing stick. Everyone else took seats on the veranda. Shortly, the boy was back, his chest puffed out as he passed the stick to Emma. “Where to begin,” she said, and took her gloves off. Her hands were already freckling; her mother would be horrified. “Yes, your country, of course.” She started with the vast curve of West Africa, remembering it from her father’s globe. Blue blue blue. Down she went to southern Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, up the eastern coast to the horn of Ethiopia, up toward Egypt. Her Africa was a little irregular but she kept going, straight across North Africa, smoothing it out as she went. What princes and sheiks and mighty Moors did she topple with her driving Herculean stick-pen, shaving their kingdoms back? Briefly she glanced at Jacob and then on she went, the last lap, all around and back to her beginning place. West Africa was a bit too large, really, about twice its size in relation to the rest. “Now,” she said, straightening herself, “we are here,” and she made an X on the Yoruba country. “Ogbomoso.”

The Iyalode waved her hand over the continent and Emma understood her question.

“This is your larger country. Africa. Surrounded all by water, odi. It’s called ocean, okun.”

The woman stared at the dirt. She wrung one of her ears out with the tip end of her little finger, as if the image had done something to her hearing. She moved to stand in the middle of the continent, out of the ocean.

“Too small,” she said. The children laughed—perhaps, Emma thought, at her.

“It’s quite large indeed,” Emma said, “so large it would take you a year to walk across it. This is a rendering.” Quickly she sketched a human figure in the dirt, a woman with a skirt and a basket on her head. “Now. What is this?” The Iyalode pointed to herself. “Exactly. And yet she is very small, while you are large, titobi.” She pulled herself up to indicate large.

The woman looked doubtful, cupping her chin in her palm, a worried expression on her brow. Suddenly she erupted, her hand pointing to the map as if to scold it. “Where is your own country?” That would be harder, Emma thought. How to draw North America? She looked again to Jacob, but he was gazing off as if preoccupied. Gird up, she thought to herself, using a form of speech he had frequently spoken to the porters on their journey. She did her best, but the rendering of her own continent looked something like the udder of a cow. Africa is clearly more decorous from a certain point of view, she thought. She made an X where she estimated Georgia to be, just above Florida. Then she drew a line across the portion of the Iyalode’s yard that had become the Atlantic Ocean. “It takes sixteen market weeks to get from my home to the coast of your country. Be sure she understands, Jacob.” She wanted to bring the man’s attention back and for the Iyalode to know how hard she had worked to get here. “Then it takes several days’ journey overland to arrive in Ogbomoso. In good weather.” She stood back, took off her hat, wiped her brow with the gloves she had stuck into her belt, and replaced the hat. Her spurt of energy was gone.

Jacob passed on this lesson and the Iyalode continued to study, with some disapprobation, Emma thought. The woman moved across the ocean to stand inside North America. She walked the line back to Africa, disturbing the illustration with her footprints. She scratched her head beneath her headdress. Its upward slant reminded Emma of Mittie Ann from back home and the resemblance brought a torrent of memory—Uncle Eli standing at the back door that morning, his feet still whole, the little girl who wrote JESUS on a bit of bark. There was a horrible complication in the drawing, and it made Emma terribly hot. The Iyalode had walked the route of the slave trade, and it was Emma’s own route. How had she failed to see this before? Something blue, a quilt, Uncle Eli’s stars. Now the woman looked into the sky, not even sheltering her eyes against the sun. Then she held her hands, palms down, before her, arms straight, and swept the air. Jacob relayed: “She asks how you saw this vision unless you have been in the sky?”

Emma had her drawing instrument to the ground now, like a walking stick to steady herself. Her head felt dangerously hot. The Iyalode was too demanding. Let her try to understand Copernicus. Emma took in a breath and let out a puff of air. “Tell Iyalode men travel in boats around the globe, around the world, and use tools to measure the land. The earth is round”—she showed with her hands—“like an orange. People have sailed, in large canoes, all the way around her big country”—she pointed to Africa and saw Uncle Eli’s maimed foot. Quickly she pulled her eyes back, and the stick too. She adjusted her hat. “Around her country and across the ocean to my country and back.” Jacob explained at leisure and Emma boiled in the sun. Finally, she could continue. “They have even sailed all the way around the earth.” About the time sweat started running from her scalp down into her dress, it dawned on her that it took significant abstract thinking for the woman to have realized that the best place to anchor a drawing table for sketching out the earth would be the heavens.

“She says she will think some more,” Jacob said.

“Yes, I heard her,” Emma said, grateful for her own endurance. What a trial the lady was, over there shaking her head, looking out at the horizon.

“One more question mah,” Jacob said, this time with his smile.

“What?” She tried to be impolite.

“She wants to know why have you come so far to this place and left your mother?”

Emma looked at the map she had sketched, but it seemed the earth had slanted funny and the brown dirt was slipping away beneath her. With the Iyalode’s walking about the map, the area of Georgia looked like a burst pumpkin. When Emma raised her eyes, the sun nearly blinded her and she remembered for a moment swinging out under the big oak in her front yard when she was a girl, how she would let her head go back to watch the sun falling upside down through the trees. Then when she got off the swing, the right-way world looked upside down.

She put her arm out and the Iyalode caught her at her elbow. What a relief to be led to a mat under a tree. Emma took her hat off and fanned herself. Her stomach was certainly in turmoil. She looked to see if anyone had noticed her weakness. Abike and the Iyalode’s girls were comparing hair styles. Wole took turns with the children jumping from the piazza into the yard. Jacob pulled out a lobe of kola nut and was intent on his ceremony. The Iyalode’s long legs stretched before her on the mat. She began another speech, using the xylophone sounds, and Emma didn’t try any longer.

“What is she saying, Jacob?”

“She says the world began in her country. Therefore your ancestors traveled to America from this place and now you have returned home. She says you managed to leave your birth mother because your ancestral mother resides here. Otherwise you could not have come. She says you will need your mother soon.”

Reprinted from A Different Sun by Elaine Neil Orr by arrangement with Berkley, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright (c) 2013 by Elaine Neil Orr.

Excerpted from the book of poems, Copperhead, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011

Say Amen
For Avon skin-so-soft and the
Liberty Baptist Church,
the Family Dollar discount
grocery, this thunderstorm,
heady and thick, the cogs
and the wheels and the sign,
Goats for sale.
For bugs flat to the windshield,
for the Trailwinds bus, the driver
who calls you girl,
his slow syllables, the gum
that rolls over his speaking tongue.
Praise the envelope of night
licked shut, the grasshopper
crawling your neighbor’s seat,
his open-mouthed snore, his
smiling eyes, the dream
he’s having, the gators
in their swamps . . .

Excerpted from Tomorrow’s Bread, a novel in progress

Setting: 1961, St. Timothy’s Second Baptist Church in the Brooklyn neighborhood in Second Ward, downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. Brooklyn and much of Second Ward are slated for destruction in urban renewal. “Eben” is Reverend Ebenezer Gabriel Polk, soon to be pastor of St. Tim’s.

1

Eben sat at Pastor Tilley’s bedside, wanting to leave the sour dry smell that aroused memories of Nettie’s last days. Across the room the top of a chest of drawers was covered with pill bottles. Eben wondered who managed them for Tilley, given that the old man had no living relatives. At eighty-six, wasted by cancer, his mind murky, Harold Tilley hadn’t been able to name anyone who should be notified of his coming demise, other than his longtime parishioners.

“You tell Sister Monroe, she’ll get the word out.”

“I already did. Everyone’s praying for you.”

With a wheezing laugh, the preacher replied, “Save dey prayers for dem what need ’em. I’m ready to go, ready to go.”

Eben believed him. He’d never known anyone as genuinely devout as Harold Tilley, and had benefited from the guidance of this good man who’d led the congregation for almost fifty years. When the time came for Eben to take over as pastor of St. Timothy’s, he was intimidated by all that was expected of him, but eager to begin.

Harold lifted a skinny finger, growled out a word: “Important.” He hesitated, spoke again. “Got to tell you sumpin important ’bout de sanctuary.” Sank-cherry. Eben had become used to the old man’s dialect. Gullah. The South Carolina coast. Though Tilley’s accent was at first odd to Eben’s ear, he’d come to love the sound of it. “Dey’s papers . . . ”—the word sounded like ‘peppers’—“I’se not showed you.”

Eben leaned closer. “Papers?”

“Records. Dey was kep secret, den forgot about. Sumpin seem vital, den folks die or forget. Come enough years, what was worth keeping secret don’t matter no more.”

Eben had learned to sit quietly while Tilley rambled.

“Slaves ran off, you know.”

Eben nodded.

“Kin might say dey was dead, and point to a new grave.” The old man’s wrinkled hand smoothed the covers over his chest. “Weren’t dead, jest run off, but who wants to dig up a grave? Happened. Not often.”

Eben began to understand. “The cemetery.”

“Uh-huh. Not all de markers tell de whole truth.” He stared at the wall behind Eben’s head, his eyes—his awful yellow eyes—moving from left to right as if he were reading a message written there. “Dey’s a marker, JTQ.”

Eben remembered a gray pock-marked stone about a foot square, lichen covered, but the initials carved so deep they were still readable. The grave was a depression near the back wall of the cemetery. He’d sat down beside it one bright day and scrubbed the stone to see if there was anything else besides the two-inch high letters, “JTQ.” He’d found a date, but didn’t know if it marked birth or death or—as was too often true of infants a hundred fifty hundred years ago—both. His best guess was 1825, although the eight might have been a nine. He spoke aloud. “JTQ, 1825.”

“Dat right, you seen it. John Thomas Quarry, but it nineteen and twenty-six.” Tilley made a grunting, coughing sound, clearing his throat as he did often. “Wonder what came of him.”

“You mean how he died?”

“Oh. Yeah, I reckon he is dead now, all dat time. He a fine man, good friend.”

“Harold, you’re not making sense. The man’s grave—”

“Not his grave, jest his marker.” In a complicated series of moves, as if every motion hurt, Tilley rolled over, away from Eben. “De register’s got everything. All about it. In a trunk. In de cellar, back of de coal bin. Still there.” The old man sighed as if the exchange had worn him out and was asleep within seconds.

Eben returned to the church, went straight to the basement, and stood facing the coal storage bin. He managed to maneuver it a few inches out from the furnace, enough to see the solid brick wall behind it. No room for a trunk or anything thicker than a sheet of paper. After pushing the bin back under the delivery chute, he dusted his hands on his shirt, without thinking, then looked down at the black smears. He had coal dust in his hair and his mouth, on his trousers. Why hadn’t he changed into old clothes before tackling the job, and what had he been thinking, giving serious attention to the foolish mumbling of a sick old man?

Tilley died that night, never having said another word.

2

When Eben took over the parsonage, he came across cartons of correspondence that dated back to just after the Civil War, detailing events before and during Harold Tilley’s life. Over the next months, he spent many evenings going through letters, journals, albums, bills of sale almost a century old, and determined that Harold Tilley had been born in 1875 to Lissa Younger, a freed slave who bore the child by Solomon Tilley, her former master. Just before the end of the war, Solomon had sold Lissa’s common-law husband, a slave named Manning Tilley, “up south.” Manning was later traced to Brownsburg, Virginia, near Charlottesville, where he died in an accident in a blacksmith shop when the head of an ax flew off the handle and hit him between the eyes.

The blacksmith had been touched by Manning’s story of a soft-skinned freed woman on the Tilley farm west of Charleston. Manning told the blacksmith that Solomon Tilley—jealous of the love between him and Lissa—had sold him at the slave market in Charleston in the second year of the war. The buyer traded Manning to the blacksmith in Brownsburg to settle a debt for the shoeing of six horses. The smithy, an abolitionist, freed Manning and gave him a cabin to live in, indenturing the former slave for the $400 mortgage on the shack and the land it sat on. The day the ax head split Manning’s skull, he still owed $183 on his homeplace, which then reverted to the blacksmith. Although he’d been a fair boss and was in general a good man, it never occurred to the smithy that there was little difference between indenture and slavery.

Lissa learned of Manning’s death in a letter the smithy sent her by way of a traveling leather goods peddler who was headed for South Carolina, and who—for a dollar—agreed to deliver the letter.

At birth Harold Tilley had weighed over nine pounds, was light-skinned with a full head of loose brown curls. His skin darkened, but his hair remained a Caucasian hallmark that would prove to be both a blessing and a curse. In the course of his lifetime it was often remarked that he could have passed, but Harold never felt the slightest interest in doing so.

3

Eben rolled to a stop in front of the church, sat and studied it as he often did—the white cross centered beneath the gable peak, the uneven stones of the front walk, the two rocking chairs on the porch set at precise angles. He got out of the car, locking it behind him as he always did—no point in tempting anyone—and went up the creaking steps. He stopped at the door, surprised to find it open an inch or two. He pushed it gently, feeling as much as hearing the squeal of the hinges, peered into the dark foyer and beyond to the light-filled sanctuary, where smoke rose from between the two back pews. A sweet smell in the air. Unmistakable.

He approached the smoky haze, knowing what he would find, making no effort to be quiet. His brother was stretched out on the last pew, a half-smoked reefer in his hand, gazing upward, his dark face almost lost against the ebony pew. Oscar focused on Eben. “Hello, there.” He took a long draw, holding the smoke in while the two men stared at each other.

Eben stood at the end of the pew and waited, incensed at this violation of his church and alarmed by his brother’s thin, almost emaciated appearance.

Oscar held out the roach, his eyes heavy-lidded, red-rimmed. “Want some?”

Eben shook his head. “That’s not for me.” He shoved his brother’s feet, knocking them to the floor. “I want you out of here. What if one of the deacons walked in?”

Oscar smiled and sat up. “You gettin’ paranoid, brother? That ’posed to be my thing.”

“Why are you doing this in a holy place?”

Oscar pulled on the joint, holding the remaining half-inch between two fingernails, sucking in a deep lungful. He spoke haltingly, letting out a little bit of smoke with each word, “Safe . . . my . . . brother. Yo . . . church . . . is . . . safe.” He sighed out the last of the smoke, tapped the reefer out on the floor, and put what was left into a matchbox he took from his shirt pocket. “Waste not, want not, ain’t that right, Pastor Polk?”

Eben controlled his voice. “Out, Oscar. Now.”

His brother got to his feet, stumbled into the aisle, pulled Eben into a reluctant embrace. “Ease off, Neezer.” The old nickname. “I met a man what’s maybe gone help you.”

Eben gave in, hugged Oscar in return. “What are you talking about?”

Oscar stepped back. “Fella I met at the grocery, axing ’bout who in charge of the graveyard. I say, ‘That’s my brother, the preacher man.’ ” He patted Eben’s cheek. “He coming to see you. That what he say.” Oscar walked down the aisle, swaying and humming as he left the church.

4

Eben opened the back door to a cold so sharp it cut his face, and retreated inside to grab his old coat, the one he’d bought right after he came home from the war and found he’d outgrown his civilian clothes. It still smelled of cigarettes. He’d smoked years ago, until Nettie got after him about it, after she’d heard cigarettes were bad for your health. Then she, who’d never smoked, was the one who got cancer. He’d have to have the coat cleaned sometime, which is what he thought every winter when the cold forced him back into it.

He left the parsonage with a bag of trash for the bin near the driveway, again bothered by the necessity of hauling the barrel out to the street. The city garbage trucks sent their men to carry bins from behind houses in Myers Park and Eastover, while folks in Second Ward had to carry theirs to the street. When he’d called the sanitation department about this inequity, he’d been told that the garbage men didn’t feel safe going behind houses in Brooklyn or off Beatties Ford or in Biddleville. Eben had to hold his tongue to keep from pointing out that Brooklyn was home to the vast majority of garbage men. Just one more aggravating slight against coloreds that he couldn’t fix and wouldn’t fret on any more than he had to.

The can was full and he half-dragged, half-carried it out to the street. He’d heard about a trash bin on wheels, and every Wednesday he vowed he’d look into that. On his walk back to the parsonage, he saw someone in the cemetery behind the church, walking among the graves. A small man—couldn’t be more than five-five—in a heavy coat, tan suit, and brown fedora. White or light-skinned colored. Eben watched him moving around, reading headstones. Definitely white. No reason to be there that Eben could fathom. The fellow stepped behind a memorial that rose twice as high as most. Eben didn’t like such shows of money, felt folks shouldn’t over-spend on death when others had so much need in life.

He headed for the cemetery, calling out, “Hello?”

The man came out from behind the elaborate marker, but didn’t appear to have heard.

Eben raised his voice. “May I help you?” He opened the rusty gate in the fence that surrounded the graveyard, certain the man would turn at the screech of the iron hinges, but instead the fellow knelt and ran his hand over the face of a stone, continuing to study the marker as Eben approached.

At Eben’s touch on his shoulder, the man stood, putting his finger to a bulky plastic device that encircled his right ear.

“Yes?” The casual reaction of the deaf, not startled or surprised.

Eben extended his hand. “I’m Reverend Polk.”

“Sure,” the man said, “Oscar’s brother.” He spoke in a modulated monotone. “I’m Marion Lipscomb.” He shook Eben’s hand, his fingers feeling slight under wool gloves. “I guess you wonder why I’m here.”

Eben looked down at the stone Lipscomb had been examining. “No, sir, a cemetery is public, maybe the most public place there is.” He could feel the man’s eyes reading his lips, felt it was okay to ask, “Does the hearing aid help?”

“Not much. And as to why I’m here—” he waved his hand, encompassing the half-acre cemetery. “I’m a grave robber.”

Eben laughed. “I suspect if you were, you wouldn’t tell me.”

“Nope.” Lipscomb touched the gravestone. “I’m just an amateur archaeologist. No training, nothing formal, but I have a special interest in burial places that go back a couple hundred years.”

“A hundred and fifty one, to be exact,” Eben said.

“Slave remains, right?”

Eben nodded.

“You may already know that at best slaves got a wooden box, but many were buried in a homemade shroud, sheets sewn together.” Lipscomb looked at the grave they stood beside. “It’s what was buried with them that interests me. I don’t want the stuff, just like to know what was considered necessary to take on with them.”

“To heaven?”

Lipscomb studied Eben’s face, nodded. “Uh-huh, or wherever. When the time comes,” he nodded at the bulldozer sitting on the street, “I’d like to have a look at whatever you find. Document it.”

“Are you making a record for anyone in particular?”

“Nope. But it would be useful to other historians, archaeologists, the descendants of those buried in this peaceful place.”

Eben gestured toward the bulldozer. “Yes, peaceful, until . . .”

“It’s a damn shame, that’s what it is.” Lipscomb said. “Why not just leave the cemetery, even if they take everything else?”

For the first time since Eben had received notice from the city that the graveyard had to be moved, he felt as if he had an ally.

I’m sitting in a dark movie theater in Los Angeles, face lit by The Campaign (that’s last year’s Will Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis political farce). I’d seen the trailer, which featured a baby getting punched and debate trash talk that leaned heavily toward the scatalogical. I was not expecting an emotional experience.

A few scenes into the movie, though, I feel a full-body rush. “Go back, wait, pause, I want to see that,” my mind begged. The creators of The Campaign had no such arousal in mind, I can only assume, when they had a pot-bellied Zach Galafianakis stride across a Main Street USA town square in a Cosby sweater and a prissy grin. My quickened pulse was due to a choice made for strictly practical purposes. They chose to shoot their movie in New Orleans, my former home. That’s what had grabbed my attention—the “Wait, is that . . . ?” calculation.

My brain and heart dug deep and fast to solve the puzzle and delivered their answer in an instant. The building labeled Hammond City Hall on screen was the old courthouse in Gretna, a neighborhood on New Orleans’s west bank of the Mississippi River. There were the archways at the base, holding up the four long columns, and then that triangle on top. I remember discovering it on a weekend, part of long sunny day when I took my bike on the ferry across the river. The courthouse appeared as a welcome surprise, stately and proud compared to the neighborhood around it. From the point of that onscreen recognition and the flood of memory attached, The Campaign was no longer about slapstick humor for me. Much as I’d wanted a night free of thought, I was now in emotional territory.

I moved away from New Orleans to Los Angeles a few years ago. The city certainly hasn’t been lonely, though. In the meantime film and television production has migrated in the opposite direction. Thanks to the state of Louisiana’s lucrative (and some have said corrupt) tax credits, countless cable specials, made-for-TV movies, straight-to-DVD releases and, yes, Big Hollywood pictures now set up shop for weeks or months on my former home turf. It’s a big enough trend that budding screenwriters might think themselves savvy to drum up scripts centered on voodoo queens or Mardi Gras heists.

But there seems no need to bother. So many of the TV and movie projects now shot in New Orleans have no use for the city’s particular aesthetic, history, or culture. By erasing any hallmarks of place, a broader range of stories can be set in the city. There’s more money to be made by masking New Orleans’s identity than showcasing it.

I feel some pang of offense at this. I have hard-won specific knowledge of New Orleans, so it’s painful to see it undercover as a generic backdrop. Of course it’s hardly the first place to be used this way. My current home of Los Angeles has had its identity erased for mass audiences since the film industry began. The feeling I’m having watching the old courthouse in Gretna play mythical Hammond City Hall in The Campaign is the same feeling Los Angelenos have had for decades, watching their home play Rome or Africa or New York, or get blown up time and time again for the delight of action movie audiences worldwide.

It’s a feeling filmmaker and scholar Thom Andersen explores in his 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. It’s a labor of love, a three-hour attempt to dissect the relationship between the actual, physical Los Angeles and the roles it has played onscreen. Composed entirely of voiceover and movie clips from every era of filmmaking, Los Angeles Plays Itself has never been commercially released; the copyrights would be far too expensive.  Andersen acknowledges his hurt feelings about the way his city gets used in the opening narration: “This is the city Los Angeles, California. They make movies here. I live here. Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city. I know it’s not easy. The city’s big. The image is small.”

The reversal of those roles is exactly the fear, I think. Movies feel big. They travel around the country, around the globe, and earn billions of dollars in profit. Who remembers the city’s contribution once the movie posters are printed, the film has had its run, and the DVDs sit in bargain bins at big-box retail stores? What does the city get once the camera has had its way with her and left her behind? Tax revenue, jobs! That’s what the economists and politicians would answer.

Yet I’m thinking more of pride, glory, honor, history. “You’re too good for this, baby,” I want whisper to New Orleans as I take her delicate elbow in my arm and steer her away from the film set. When I see one of her wrought-iron balconies blurred in the background of a satirical stump speech, I try to resign myself, like Andersen does, to the fact that my gripe is moot. “Of course I know movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories. If we notice the location, we’re not really watching the movie.”

After all it is me who’s failing to do my job, not the movie. I am neglecting to watch the way I’m supposed to. Though how can I ignore the fact that the camera is sweeping in on the main dining room of Commander’s Palace, that grand dame New Orleans restaurant? There are the unmistakable birds on the periwinkle wallpaper, and my eye even catches the real feathers that stick out from the wall, the taxidermy specimens. What could the film’s characters possibly be saying that would be of more interest to me than figuring out what’s on their plates? Is that the pecan-crusted Gulf fish? A filet mignon topped with lump crab?

Like an old lover you see unexpectedly walking down the street, I recognize New Orleans immediately, and everything in the foreground dissipates.  The rise of a pillar like a familiar neck. The silhouette of a rooftop like the slope of beloved shoulders.

When Will Ferrell stands at a podium for a scene of a candidates’ luncheon, I recall a real one. It was in this space, a hotel conference room, where a handful of men and women making a run for mayor of New Orleans gave speeches in 2006. Back then, in person, I also stared at the half oval of tawny carved wood above each set of French doors.

It’s not only my personal history I feel I’m defending. When the movies come to town, their imprint can overshadow the deeper history of a place. Los Angeles is a city many people visit assuming there is no past that matters except the movies. One reason fictional narratives so easily layer on top of the place is that the general public doesn’t know or care what else happens here. Visitors ride around in open-air buses to snap pictures of sites where movies were shot. A precious gem of public space like Los Angeles’s Griffith Park observatory becomes not a place to view heavenly bodies but a photo op with a “real” star—a bronze bust of James Dean installed conveniently with the Hollywood sign in the background.

It concerns me that New Orleans would add this strata of meaning. Take the brick arch facing the Gretna courthouse. It didn’t get a fake sign for the movie; it still says Jefferson Memorial on the screen. Without knowing the exact location, you can’t see that it’s a gate, of sorts, to the banks of the Mississippi River. It serves a memorial to the veterans of Jefferson Parish. There’s also a brown state history sign at the foot of the arch, telling you that an old iron works there cast the first gun for the Confederate navy. A conflicted history, to be sure. I imagine a new sign hung just below or next to this one, noting that the major motion picture The Campaign was filmed here. Perhaps a scene from the movie will be cast in bronze. I doubt the film will make the annals of cinema, that the next generation will have any idea that The Campaign existed. Then again, maybe they won’t know much about the Civil War either.

To be fair, the film industry can play a role in history and preservation. In Los Angeles, one of the city’s finest architectural prizes, the Bradbury Building, was restored in part because of its long history in film. Its intricate iron and wood interior played in several noir films of the 1950s and later in Chinatown and much of Bladerunner. New Orleans landmarks have benefited from work in film, as well. As the city continues to restore itself after Hurricane Katrina, the revenue from location work has helped theater owners, schools, homes, and churches beat a path toward restoration.

I doubt that seeing New Orleans go undercover for a movie bothers current residents as much as it does me. Because I’m away, my pride in the city is easily wounded. I’m still in a mindset that New Orleans is threatened, that it needs protection, that its beauty and history cannot and should not be ignored. Locals, hopefully, don’t walk around in a constant state of buzzed consciousness over every sweeping side porch or perfectly proportioned window pane. They’re moving along with their lives, their stories, their own fictions set against the backdrop of the city. When my feathers get ruffled over how New Orleans is represented on film, it is indeed desire at the heart of it. It’s a longing for my own story, the one that unfolded in that red-framed doorway, lunched at that corner table, strolled across that particular square, and met my very best friend on that very same street.

“Don’t go there; you wouldn’t fit in,” my city friends told me, slightly amused by the prospect of my moving to this side of the Appalachian mountains, their eyebrows raised with intrigue and bafflement. “They call it the town that time forgot,” a realtor told my husband and me as we took a tour through Grundy, Virginia, only to find that well water still flowed through the faucets of some homes, staining dishwashers and bathtubs, and mold (and in some cases water) still lingered in basements that hadn’t been lifted after the town’s most recent flood.

Yet the “forgotten town” was intriguing because it reminded me of Liberia, the “forgotten African backwater,” as Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuściński called it, where I was born and raised—the country I was then having difficulty writing about. I didn’t know how to express it, but as I lay in my room at the Comfort Inn (the only hotel in the town), somehow I sensed that Grundy would be the place to help me forget; forget who I was now, so that I could write about who I was then. I just knew that the town’s generous mountains, flowing creeks, warm skies, light mist, and spunky birds would help me complete the first draft of my book about a formerly peaceful Liberian childhood assaulted by war and trauma.

Upon entering Grundy, you know that you’re in the belly of southwest Virginia, with mountain roads uniquely steep in some places and obtrusively curvy in others. You don’t need an almanac to tell you that once you drive along routes like 460 or 624, you won’t experience anything else as thrilling and terrifying, with V-shaped terrains that take you to Bristol, Tennessee, or Bluefield, Virginia, if you continue to Route 19. Grundy is coal country that stands proud and tall, where fumes and gray sheets of dirt from passing coal trucks rise with the sun in the morning.  It is a town that exists around the strong, the brave, the miners—where you’re at first taken aback by the “black lung” signs posted by lawyers, doctors, and insurance companies; where the first time you walk into the post office the postal worker at the counter says “ya reckon” in the middle of a conversation with a customer, and you’re completely dumbfounded with excitement because this is the first time the phrase has jumped out of one of your books and skipped around your eardrums.

We came here at a good time, they tell us, because Grundy has grown up. It has been over a decade since the law school where my husband teaches was introduced to the town. Now there is now a brand new Walmart, a shopping plaza, and a choice between Mexican, Chinese, or American cuisine. Daily construction along Route 460 has been initiated to improve the infrastructure and accommodate new buildings and a potential housing development. The town that is said to dislike outsiders has graciously accommodated lots of us: some young, some old, some graduate students, some professionals, everyone nestled closely into the mountainside.

To most people, our decision about where my husband should accept a law school faculty position was obvious: say yes to one of the schools in one of the “normal” cities. Yet even after we had driven through the town for the first time, on a dark, snowy evening, staring wide-eyed at the houses nestled comfortably in the valley below us, perturbed by the crookedness of the roads and intimidated by the bravado of the truckers, we chose Grundy.

How could I tell them that once in Grundy, I felt God in its mountains and creeks, looming next to me on its mountain trails, flowing from its springs, swinging from its many tree branches and church steeples? How could I explain the same soothing presence that kept me sane when I sought shelter at a church compound for two years during the 1990 Liberian Civil War?

Nestled between the former French and British colonies Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, Liberia is the first African Republic and the only American-influenced West African country. It is known for its flatlands, its lagoons and oceans—a country that has suffered no major natural disaster. Founded in 1847 with the help of the American Colonization Society, Liberia is the West African country where American freed slaves built a home for themselves. They brought with them bits and pieces of the only world they knew—America—causing a divide between themselves and the indigenous Liberians. However, once we found ourselves huddled together at our church shelter during the war, seeking cover on the floors and beneath beds and benches, this divide seemed miniscule.

Now Liberia, once the heartthrob of West Africa, nicknamed “Small America,” is Africa’s prodigal daughter and America’s forgotten sister. Liberian natives scarred by war often ask each other, “Why would you want to go back there?”

The same thing happens in Grundy.

“You go to school here, sweetie?” a Grundy native and Walmart store clerk asked me.

“No, ma’am.”

“Work here?”

“No, ma’am,” I answered again with a slight smile, because I knew what was coming next.

She stopped bagging my groceries, gave a quick glance over her shoulders, and faced me with the concerned eyes a grandmother reserves for her sick grandbabies. Her eyebrows were pulled together in silent thought when she placed her hands on my arm and whispered, “Why are you here?”

Some mornings, when I feel Grundy beneath my feet as I walk my dog or exercise, I’m reminded of Annie Dillard’s words, “They say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift,” because in order to truly see Grundy, you must have the kind of vision that surpasses its narrow roads and limited shopping; in order to see the gift that its nature conceals, a gift so rare that once the veil is lifted from your eyes, you see the town for what it really is: a treasure valley. Hidden compartments that conceal the most obscure revelations, valleys that dazzle with the kind of sensations that force you to slow down for a minute to, say, write a book.

When I write about something as personal as childhood and family, of something as traumatic as the loss of childhood and family, the mountains of Grundy become as necessary as the shell of a turtle, its shelter as private as the inner compartments of my mind. There are no rules in Grundy’s mountains, no codes to entrap you. You can’t even count on your iPhone weather app to be close to accurate like you would in other cities because, like Danny Glover’s character said in the movie, Switchback, “Weather don’t make the rules, mountains do.” Mountain life is an existential burrow that propels you forward, deeper and deeper into its folds, until from beneath its shadows, while you await the sun’s slow dance around its peaks, while you gaze in awe at its sharp, rugged beauty and encompassing breadth, you become deeply aware of who you are, who you are not, who you can become, because nothing explains the baffling world better than its indescribable nature.

As I sometimes ponder the road I traveled to get to Grundy—from Liberia to New York City, then Columbus, Ohio, now Grundy—I know that I am not alone. Grundy is as global as its inhabitants: the law students from Africa and Asia; the mission school that boards international students just across the street from where I live; the bird that wakes me up on hot spring mornings with its part-whistling, part-humming, the same one that woke me up on mornings during the rainy season in Liberia (one day I will learn your name, dear one).

Sitting next to Slate Creek with my eyes closed, sniffing for words, sounds, thoughts, and feelings, I am aware that, just like Liberia, Grundy will live on, despite its refusal to conform, its dare to be different. If Grundy can survive its deviance, if Liberia can survive its incongruity, so can I, I quietly deliberate. In moments like these, I am fully aware of how this Southern town has transformed me, and unexplainable joy crawls from my belly, sweeps across my face, and becomes one with the creek, slowly treading its way through Edgewater Drive, through Grundy, through Buchanan County, through Virginia, and onwards, ready and willing to connect with a destiny that is bigger, more expansive, and even more challenging.

Excerpted from the novel Raney

III

Charles is in the bedroom covered up in the bed. There are eleven broken monogrammed glasses here on the kitchen floor and every window in the house is locked from the inside.

This all started last Saturday afternoon when I called Mama as usual. I try to call her every day. We’ve always been close and I say those television commercials about calling somebody—reaching out and touching—make sense. Belinda Osborne drives to see her mother every day—forty miles round trip—which I’m not about to do. That is too close. Three times a week is often enough. (Belinda’s mother is sick a lot though.)

I’d like to be living closer to home and I know Mama and Daddy were disappointed that we didn’t move into the Wilkins house, and I would have, but Charles insisted we live here in Listre because it’s close to the college. I finally said okay when he promised he would still go to church with me at home in Bethel.

But: he’s been going to church less and less, and we’ve only been married six weeks. He’ll take me to Sunday School and drop me off, still wearing his pajamas under his clothes. He’s done it twice. Deacon Brooks said since Charles was Methodist he must think he’s too good for Free Will Baptists. He pretended he was kidding, but I could tell he was serious.

Well, as I said, I called Mama last Saturday afternoon and she told me that she had come by with Aunt Naomi and Aunt Flossie to see us that morning but we were gone. They came on in to use the phone to call Annie Godwin so it wouldn’t be long distance. (We don’t lock the door normally.) Aunt Naomi went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and accidentally broke one of the monogrammed glasses Cousin Emma gave us for a wedding present. Mama told me all this on the phone. I didn’t think twice about it. I figures I’d just pick up another glass next time I’m at the mall. I know where they come from.

Sunday, the very next day, we’re eating dinner at home in Bethel with Mama, Daddy, Uncle Nate, Mary Faye, and Norris. Mama fixes at least two meats, five or six vegetables, two kinds of cornbread, biscuits, chow-chow, pickles, pies, and sometimes a cake.

Mama says, “Where did you tell me you all were yesterday morning?” She was getting the cornbread off the stove. She’s always the last one to sit down.

“At the mall,” I said.

“I like where you moved the couch to,” says Mama. “It looks better. We waited for you all fifteen or twenty minutes. I’m sorry Naomi broke that glass,” she said.

I hadn’t mentioned it to Charles. No reason to. He says—and he was serious: “Why were you all in our house?”

I was mortified in my heart.

“We were just using the phone,” says Mama. There was a long silence. It built up and then kept going.

“Pass the turnips, Mary Faye,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out what was wrong in there so I moved things around until it looked better and sure enough it was the couch. The couch was wrong.”

My mama ain’t nosy. No more than any decent woman would be about her own flesh and blood.

Listen. I don’t have nothing to hide. And Lord knows, Charles don’t, except maybe some of his opinions.

We finished eating and set in the den and talked for a while and the subject didn’t come up again. Charles always gets fidgety within thirty minutes of when we finish eating. He has no appreciation for just setting and talking. And I don’t mean going on and on about politics or something like that; I mean just talking—talking about normal things. So since he gets fidgety, we usually cut our Sunday visits short. “Well, I guess we better get on back,” I say, while Charles sits over there looking like he’s bored to death. I know Mama notices.

Before we’re out of the driveway, Charles says, “Raney, I think you ought to tell your mama and Aunt Naomi and Aunt Flossie to stay out of our house unless somebody’s home.”

To stay out of my own house.

He couldn’t even wait until we were out of the driveway. And all the car windows rolled down.

When we got on down the road, out of hearing distance, I said, “Charles, you don’t love Mama and never did.”

He pulls the car over beside the peaches for sale sign across from the Parker’s pond. And stares at me.

The whole thing has tore me up. “Charles,” I said, and I had to start crying, “you don’t have to hide your life from Mama and them. Or me. You didn’t have to get all upset today. You could understand if you wanted to. You didn’t have to get upset when I opened that oil bill addressed to you, either. There ain’t going to be nothing in there but a oil bill, for heaven’s sake. Why anyone would want to hide a oil bill I cannot understand.”

He starts hollering at me. The first time in my like anybody has set in a car and hollered at me. His blood vessels stood all out. I couldn’t control myself. It was awful. If you’ve ever been hollered at, while you are crying, by the one person you love best in the world, you know what I mean. This was a part of Charles I had never seen.

Here’s what happened yesterday. We went to Penny’s Grill for lunch. (I refuse to cook three meals a day, I don’t care what Mama says.) When we got back, there was Mama’s green Ford—parked in front of the house.

“Is that your mother’s Ford?” says Charles.

“Where?”

“There.”

“Oh, in front of the house? I think it might be.” That long silence from the dinner table last Sunday came back to me, and I hoped Mama was out in the back yard picking up apples because I knew I couldn’t stand another scene within a week. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I didn’t want to fuss at Charles right before he talked to Mama, and I certainly wouldn’t dare fuss at Mama.

Charles got out of the car not saying a word and started for the house. I was about three feet behind, trying to keep up. The front door was wide open.

Charles stopped just inside the door. I looked over his shoulder and there was Mama coming through the arched hall doorway. She stopped. She was dressed for shopping.

“Well, where in the world have you all been?” she says.

“We been out to eat,” I said.

“Eating out?”

“Mrs. Bell,” says Charles, “please do not come in this house if we’re not here.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. It was like a dream.

Mama says, “Charles son, I was only leaving my own daughter a note saying to meet me at the mall at two o’clock, at the fountain. The front door was open. You should lock the front door if you want to keep people out.”

“Mrs. Bell, a person is entitled to his own privacy. I’m entitled to my own privacy. This is my—our—house. I—”

“This is my own daughter’s house, son. My mama was never refused entrance to my house. She was always welcome. Every day of her life.”

I was afraid Mama was going to cry. I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“Mrs. Bell,” says Charles, “it seems as though you think everything you think is right, is right for everybody.”

“Charles,” I said, “that’s what everybody thinks—in a sense. That’s even what you think.”

Charles turned half around so he could see me. He looked at me, then at Mama.

Mama says, “Son, I’ll be happy to buy you a new monogrammed glass if that’s what you’re so upset about. Naomi didn’t mean to break that glass. I’m going over to the mall right now. And I know where they come from.”

Charles walks past me and out the front door, stops, turns around and says, “I didn’t want any of those damned monogrammed glasses in the first place and I did the best I could to make that clear, plus that’s not the subject.” (I gave him a monogrammed blue blazer for his birthday and he cut the initials off before he’d wear it.)

So now Mama’s at the mall with her feelings hurt. Charles is in the bedroom with a blanket over his head, and I’m sitting here amongst eleven broken monogrammed glasses, and every door and window locked from the inside.

Evidently Charles throws things when he’s very mad. I never expected violence from Charles Sheperd. Thank God we don’t have a child to see such behavior.

We didn’t speak all afternoon, or at supper—I fixed hot dogs, split, with cheese and bacon stuck in—or after. I went to bed at about ten o’clock, while Charles sat in the living room reading some book. I felt terrible about Mama’s feelings being hurt like I know they were; I hadn’t known whether to call her or not; I couldn’t with Charles there; and I couldn’t imagine what had got into Charles.

I went to bed and was trying to go to sleep, with my mind full of upsetting images, when I heard this voice coming out of the heating vent at the head of the bed on my side. I sat up. I thought at first it was somebody under the house. I let my head lean down over the side of the bed close to the vent. It was Charles—talking on the phone in the kitchen.

Now if we’d been on speaking terms I would have told him I could hear him, but we weren’t speaking. And besides, I won’t about to get out of bed for no reason at eleven p.m. And so I didn’t have no choice but to listen, whether I wanted to or not.

Charles was talking to his Johnny friend. I could hear just about everything he said. If we had been speaking, I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell him how the sound came through the vent. But we weren’t speaking, as I said. He was talking about—you guessed it: Mama.

“. . . She just broke in, in essence . . . just walked through the door when nobody was home . . . It’s weird, Johnny . . . What am I supposed to do?”

Now why didn’t he ask me what he was supposed to do? He didn’t marry Johnny Dobbs.

I agree that some things need to be left private—but the living room? The living room is where everybody comes into the house. That’s one of the last places to keep private on earth. I just can’t connect up Charles’s idea about privacy to the living room.

He went on about Mama for awhile and then said something about everybody saying “nigger,” and that when Johnny came to see us for him not to drive in after dark—which I didn’t understand until it dawned on me that maybe Johnny Dobbs was a, you know, black. He didn’t sound like it when I talked to him over the phone at Myrtle Beach. Charles and his other army buddy, Buddy Shellar, at the wedding kept talking about “Johnny this” and “Johnny that” but I never thought about Johnny being anything other than a regular white person. They were all three in the army, which of course everybody knows has been segregated since 1948, according to Charles, so I guess it’s possible they roomed together, or at least ate together.

He didn’t sound, you know, black.

I’ll ask Charles about it when we’re on speaking terms and I tell him about how the sound comes through the vent; but if he is a nigger, he can’t stay here. It won’t work. The Ramada, maybe, but not here.

Ten Jews Left

by Susan Todd-Raque

In Selma, Alabama, a town with a population of less than 20,000 people, there is one synagogue, Temple Mishkan Israel, with a congregation of only ten Jews.

These ten people are all that remains of what was once a thriving Jewish community. When they die, there will be no more. It is a tale of loss and identity taking place in every small Southern town in the last century and, most important, also of the Southern Jewish experience in those small towns as Temples close and the elderly die, leaving cemeteries as the sole markers of a formerly vibrant Jewish life.

Back in the 1830s, the Jews peddling their wares came north through the ports of New Orleans and Mobile to settle as merchants in Selma, already a fledgling economic center. As the Black Belt region, with its rich, dark fertile soil, prospered with the selling of King Cotton prior to the Civil War, so did the Jewish community in Selma with its development of the downtown commercial center. The Alabama and Mississippi Railroad construction connecting Meridian and Selma in 1854 enhanced the economic growth before and after the war. By the turn of the century, Selma was a thriving place, dominated by Jewish merchants such as Schuster Hardware, Adler’s Furniture, Meyers Shoes, Klotzman Furniture, and others.

As the Jewish population grew, religious services were held in various private homes until 1867, when it was decided to meet regularly at one home, that of Adolph Elkan. In 1870 the group formally gathered as Congregation Mishkan Israel, and though the congregation continued to hold services in semi-permanent places, it was not until 1899 when their Temple Miskhan Israel was built. Jews from the surrounding rural areas of Marion, Camden, and Uniontown traveled to Selma to worship alongside the Jews there, finding comfort in the new Temple.

During the 1930s, there were more than 100 families on the register of the Selma Reform Temple. Nearby, the Orthodox congregation, B’nai Abraham, supported its own small group of devout Jews. Many government public offices, including three mayors (Solomon Maas, Marcus Meyer, and Louis Benish), and civic organizations were thresholds in which both Jews and non-Jews worked for the good of the city. The local Council of Jewish Women provided free meals for the poor, regardless of race or religion, during the Great Depression. As European Jews fled rising Nazi power in the late 1930s, they came to Selma and were welcomed into the Jewish community.

The Jewish population of Selma began its steep decline in the 1970s as young people went away to college and later for the better opportunities in the larger Jewish communities in the South, such as in Charlotte, New Orleans, and Atlanta. Pursuing careers in the larger cities took precedence over returning to run the family businesses in Selma. Young women married men from other places. Some young people intermarried, and their interest in returning fully to the Jewish faith waned. When the rabbi died in the mid-1970s, no one replaced him; instead, the rabbinical school provided rabbis for special events and holidays. The closing of Craig Air Force Base in 1977, the opening of large discount big-box retailers nearby, and changing shopping patterns in the 1980s further damaged the local economy of small retailers, leaving them without business from the local people and forcing most of them to close.

Today, what is called downtown Selma is made of up deteriorating brick-and-mortar shells of what once was a busy, exciting city. The stores of the Jewish merchants on Alabama Avenue and Broad Street now stand empty and shuttered. For many of the buildings, store signs are barely noticeable relics of the past. Selma, like many small Southern towns, struggles to survive but is making efforts to engage in activities to restore and revive.

Nearby, the aging but still beautiful Temple Mishkan Israel stands, with its impressive central dome and square turrets, although it is rarely open. Paint peels off the walls, which are also stained from the leaky roof. The deep scarlet carpeting is worn, with threadbare areas from the beaten paths of previous congregations and the many services once held there. The magnificent organ is silent most of the year. Any meetings held there are shortened by the chill and dampness in the winter and the relentless heat in the summer.

The remaining ten Jewish members are all over age sixty and can neither financially nor physically handle the demands of keeping the Temple open except for High Holy Days and other special events. In their search for ways to survive and save their cultural legacy, the members are considering several solutions, including transferring ownership of the Temple to the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi, with the hope that the institute would succeed in establishing a museum or cultural center. But repairs are needed, and the sanctuary must be restored before this can happen.

The irony of this situation and the loss of their identity as small-town Southern Jews runs counter to the pop culture captivation with the Southern Jewish experience as depicted in popular books (Shalom Y’all) and films (Delta Jews).

A former member of the Temple, raised in Selma but now living in Atlanta, photographer Jerry Siegel travels back to Selma to photograph the few people maintaining the Jewish community, saying he sees his life disappearing. He remembers his childhood as a bubble of Nirvana, wrapped up and protected by his parents. When his father, Schuster Siegel, died in 2000 and later his Uncle Jerry, Siegel found his roots pulling him back to Selma to photograph first his parents’ home as they left it, then the places he knew as a child. Every time he returns, he sees anew, often finding what he has forgotten, taken for granted, or never noticed.

Through the lens of his camera, Siegel revisits the Selma of his youth and has begun to get in touch with his loss. Longing to gain an understanding of the Jewish community as it is today, he began photographing the remaining ten members in the Temple, at home, and in the community where they are all still active—and offering the images to them to use in proving the worthiness of saving the Temple.

The ten remaining Jews are Betty Rose and Richard Gibian; their daughter, Joanie Gibian Looney; Charles Pollack; June and Seymour Cohn; Hannah Berger; Ronnie Leet; and Connie and Ed Ember.

For years, the Gibians ran American Candy Company, a company founded by Bo’s family, before finally selling it. The Cohns are in their early nineties, and leaving Selma is not an option for them. Leet once ran the family businesses of J. Leet and Son, including Leet Auto Parts, and splits his spiritual life between the Temple and his wife’s Episcopal church. Jerry’s brother, Mike Siegel, is working from his home base in New Orleans with Ronnie Leet and his friend Rusty Palmer to spearhead fundraising campaigns.

In 1997 for the 100th anniversary of the Reform Temple, and in an attempt to draw attention to the community’s struggles, Al Benn, a former member, wrote an article for the Montgomery Advertiser. For a short time, hundreds of Jews came from all over the South to celebrate the High Holy Days. Many of them came because of their family roots in Selma. There was a flurry of media attention from newspapers around the country. An endowment fund was started. But the attention has faded, and the fund is being depleted by the demands of maintaining the building.

Now, as the few remaining Jews gather, encircled by those who once lived in Selma, the link between them is the desire to save the Temple, now a symbol of their way of life, family, and traditions. As Siegel has admitted, it is what grounds him. He recognizes that for him being Jewish is about not just religion but his ethnicity and life. Entering the Temple renders him quiet as he remembers sitting in the smoothly carved wooden pews as a child, where each family once sat for the services.

This is a tale of a small Jewish community in Selma whose formerly vibrant Jewish presence is fading, and it is repeated time and time again across the South in small towns. With globalization, big-box retailing, and corporate business outsourcing practices, small communities are struggling to survive. What once held a small town together is gone. This is the story of one community of Jews left in Selma as they grapple with the loss of their identity.

This article originally appeared on Room for Debate at NYTimes.com.

Much of the great propensity of Southern white working-class voters to align with conservative principles has to do with the distinct brand of conservatism in the South. It is far more rooted in social issues than in other parts of the country.

Whereas economic issues tend to move a share of working-class voters toward more progressive or populist positions, social issues (some candidates commonly use the shorthand “guns, gays and God”) have a tendency to crowd out other campaign issues in Southern elections. The trend is especially strong in the South, which has a much higher rate of church attendance¹—especially among Protestant evangelicals—than anywhere else in the country. And this trend has held true for decades.

The marriage between social and economic conservatism dates to the late 1960s, when the Republican Party developed a critique of the Great Society (the zenith of government liberalism) that bridged concerns about social entitlement programs as well as hot-button social issues that include abortion, prayer in schools and gun control.

The most catalytic component of this conservative critique—and perhaps the element that made the marriage effective—was conservatism’s attack on federal policies, like school busing, designed to dismantle the vestiges of racial discrimination in education, voting and employment. These policies challenged long-standing social norms in the South.

Race has always figured into modern conservatism to some degree: recall, for example, Barry Goldwater’s filibuster of the Civil Rights Act; Ronald Reagan’s campaign event in Philadelphia, Miss.; and Jesse Helms’s infamous affirmative action ad known as “White Hands”—all aimed at white working-class voters. But the contemporary conservative critique similarly hinges on the general claim that established norms and social institutions are under sharp attack because of the alleged excesses of government action.

1. See http://www.gallup.com/poll/153479/Mississippi-Religious-State.aspx.

When the image of Arab Americans is evoked, the vision that typically comes to mind is that of recent immigrants, Muslim, living in the Northeast or Detroit area. You rarely recognize them in your church-going Southern neighbors whose family store has been a Main Street fixture for three generations, whose great-uncle served alongside yours in World War II. This is the story of the cedars of Lebanon so firmly rooted in the soil of the native pines of the American South that only their names—like the eponymous Khoury Convention Center in Greensboro, North Carolina—attest to their origins.

The two-year project Cedars in the Pines: The Lebanese in North Carolina has been collecting oral histories, photos, music, home movies, letters, newspaper clippings, statistical data, naturalization records, and other material that collectively narrate the story of this community from its earliest days in the 1880s through today. Out of this continuing and geographically expanding research, the project has produced a documentary titled Cedars in the Pines that has been screened to large audiences across North Carolina over the past six months and was recently broadcast on WUNC TV. Additionally, this material has been digitized and made accessible to researchers and the general public through our online archive at http://nclebanese.org. The final stage of this initial phase will culminate in a museum exhibit that will travel across the state beginning in February 2014.

Mack Family, Copyright © 2012 Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies, Department of History, North Carolina State University

The story these sources tell is very different from the stereotype of the Arab in nineteenth-century Orientalist representations and Hollywood images. The image of the supposedly lascivious, murderous Arab arose in the guise of Barbary (North African) pirates and Moors who preyed on traveling Americans and was reinforced by subsequent depictions on the silver screen. In the notorious 1921 film The Sheikh, Rudolph Valentino utters the memorable line: “When an Arab sees a woman he wants, he takes her.” In the 1970s and thereafter, American popular culture added a new twist to these preexisting depictions: that of Arab as terrorist.

After the horrific attacks of September 11, 2011, as Jack Shaheen notes, “Series such as 24, The Unit, The Agency, NCIS, Sleeper Cell, Threat Matrix and Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye [and one may add Homeland] exploited post-9/11 fears pummeling home myths that made the profiling, imprisonment, extradition, torture and even death of these one-dimensional characters more palatable to the public.” The collective effect of these preponderant popular culture images has been the alienation of Arabs in mainstream narratives of American life and history.

Salem couple, Army uniform, Copyright © 2012 Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies, Department of History, North Carolina State University

Until recently, this was compounded by a conspicuous absence of countervailing narratives about the long history of Arab Americans as citizens of the United States who have lived in, built, and fought for this country over the past century and a half. Nowhere is this more glaringly apparent that in the American South. Though numerically less significant than its Northeastern counterparts, the community of Arab Americans in North Carolina (and the South in general) was nonetheless critical at two levels. First, their smaller numbers forced them to assimilate more rapidly while seeking to maintain elements of their heritage. Equally important is the role they played in reshaping the cultural, ethnic, and religious landscape of the state, as well as shifting its economy toward an industrial base that opened up the state to global connections, which helped reshape North Carolina into a more urbanized and cosmopolitan environment.

More significant than the raw numbers are the percentages that Arab Americans represented of the overall population. Although the population of Arab Americans in Massachusetts or New York was four- or five times the largest population in the South (Texas), Arab Americans in North Carolina represented almost 9 percent of all immigrants to the state, as compared to 0.4 percent of New York’s immigrant community. Today, there are more than 30,000 Arab Americans in North Carolina, and another half a million living in the South.

The pattern of early Arab immigration to North Carolina began with individuals traveling here as part of a larger peddling community radiating from “Little Syria” in New York. Riding the train to the eastern part of the state (Roanoke Rapids, New Bern, Goldsboro, Wilmington, etc.) or further west (Statesville and Charlotte), the earliest peddlers came to sell buttons, thread, needles, lace, and other sundry items out of their kashé (valise). Arriving in New Bern, Goldsboro, Raleigh, Burlington, or Charlotte, they walked into small towns and visited remote farmhouses, offering their wares and building relationships along the way. For those who excelled (and many despaired of this work), the reward was the accumulation of enough capital to buy a dry goods store in one of the textile mill towns in North Carolina. The Macks opened their store in Mooresville, and the Hatems moved to Roanoke Rapids. Others opened gas stations, clothing stores, or restaurants. Regardless of the nature of their business, the whole family worked, including children as soon as they were tall enough to reach the cash register. As the first generation established itself financially, its members parlayed their success into investment in the education of their children, who enrolled in universities to become engineers, doctors, and lawyers. This was meant not only to secure jobs but to attain middle-class respectability and gain entrance into the mainstream Southern society.

Kannan Family General Store, Copyright © 2012 Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies, Department of History, North Carolina State University

This desire for acceptance was partially borne out of a racialized environment that sometimes met them with indifference but more frequently exposed them to open hostility, as with other ethnic immigrant communities around the country. As one Wilmington newspaper wrote of the community in 1897: “These foreigners are not a credit to a community by any means; filthy and immoral in their habits, breeding pestilence and filth wherever they live, it is indeed to be regretted that Wilmington should ever be subjected to these pests.” Another newspaper item described the rough treatment meted out to “the Syrians,” as they were known in North Carolina. It noted that “their language was mocked, stones thrown at them, etc.”

The community in North Carolina and the South challenged these attacks directly at times. Hikel (Haykal) Gideon wrote defending himself against the charge of “filth” and “immoral breeding,” and noted, “I and all others who are not American Indians deprecate your injudicious fling at foreigners.” Joseph Salem recalled getting into many altercations in his high school in New Bern to defend himself and his siblings against verbal attacks on their “foreignness.” Thus, as newcomers and predominantly Catholic or Greek Orthodox Christians, these early immigrants faced an inhospitable environment that forced them to keep their Arab identity private within their homes and assimilate. Nonetheless, they maintained a sense of heritage and distinct identity through family, church, community, and food. This ethnic consciousness remained, albeit in its waning stages, well into the 1960s when the second wave of Arab immigrants began to arrive in South.

This latter wave of immigrants embodied different characteristics. From the 1960s on, as many Muslims as Christians came to the South, and they came here from a broader swath of the Middle East. Moreover, a significant proportion came with university degrees and sought higher education that allowed them quicker entry into the ranks of the middle class. This marked shift accounts for the fact that, on average, Arab Americans hold more and higher degrees than the average in the United States, and their income surpasses the median for the country. Additionally, their later arrival coincided with the rise of larger political consciousness of “Arabness” across the Middle East, and its concomitant Arab American ethnic identity in the United States. Hence, even as prejudice against Arabs in America became more overt and pervasive in the second half of the twentieth century, the community at large became more vocal in asserting its identity, as manifested in the plethora of Middle Eastern restaurants, foods, cultural events, and community groups that have spread across the South. Arab and Arab American music, film, and literature are also weaving visible threads into the tapestry of Southern American culture. Cedars in the Pines contributes to this trend by highlighting the integral and constructive role of Arab Americans in the South’s history, present, and future.

“History, like God and nature, [has] been both generous and unkind to . . . the South,” wrote “Fugitive” poet Donald Davidson in a 1938 essay titled “Still Rebels, Still Yankees.” “Defeat had possessed [it] and had rubbed deep, into [its] wounds.” The rebelliousness of the South, the pain of a military conquest, occupation by an external foe, and rule by its former servants may have formerly defined the region, but its legacy is very different now from that original experience.

Once upon a time—and it was not so long ago—the conventional wisdom was that the South would never overcome its past. Between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, it endured about a century of alienation. The evidence was most apparent in government statistics: the South was poorer, less healthy, undereducated, less urbanized, more religious, and resistant to change. It was ruled by one political party whose politicians ran on a platform of racial exclusion and resentment of the rest of the country. “We have never wished to be like everybody else,” wrote Ben Robertson in his upcountry South Carolina memoir Red Hills and Cotton (1942), “We have tried all our lives to be ourselves, to be different if the spirit so moved us.”

The memories, obligations, and resentments of the Southern past formed a special culture, but it began to change in the twinkling of an eye. Though predominately rural on the eve of World War II, the region welcomed an influx of defense contractors, soldiers in training, and workers looking for jobs. After the war, urbanization transformed the once-unspoiled wilderness into a complex modern society connected by interstate highways. Though the physical geography of the region did not change, the population of each state migrated and shifted. The eleven states of the former Confederacy grew in population relative to the rest of the country: from 24 percent of the U.S. citizenry in 1950 to 31 percent in 2010.

At mid-century, half the Southern residents lived in urban areas, defined as a population of 50,000 or more. Today, three-quarters live in such places. Houston, Texas, is the fourth—and soon to be the third—largest city in the United States. Author Larry McMurtry summarized the feelings of many when he wrote, “one sometimes wonders if Bowie and Travis and the rest would have fought so hard for this land if they had known how many ugly motels and shopping centers would eventually stand on it.”

The South may be urban now, but nothing was more native to its legacy than agriculture. “Everything about the Americans is extraordinary,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville after his visit in 1831, “but what is more extraordinary still is the soil that supports them.” Agriculture defined the Southern life, on the plantation and then on the farm, and set it apart from the rest of the country. In 1950, about a quarter of the Southern workforce labored in farming, compared to less than 10 percent nationally. Today, the South has put the “forty acres and a mule” inheritance to rest; only about 2 percent of the regional population have agriculture as their calling.

In 1950 the South trailed other regions in economic attainment. At that time, the per capita income for the region was 74 percent of the national average; by 2010 it was 91 percent. A 1970 issue of Fortune magazine listed the location of the 200 largest corporations; only 9 had a Southern address. By 2003 43 of the top 200 companies on the Fortune list were in the South, including Wal-Mart at the top.

Ironically, Southerners embraced their racial past and, in doing so, reversed it. Scenes of racial conflict in the 1960s were changed into state parks in Alabama. The 2010 census found greater African American in-migration than out-migration. Majority white congressional districts in Florida and South Carolina elected black Republicans—the first since Reconstruction—to represent them in Washington.

In the rest of the country, diverse economic and social changes led to a more secular, liberal, postmodern outlook and a changed political culture. Some of that is manifest in Southern cities, but on the whole the South remains the most conservative region in the nation. It is still ruled by one political party, albeit Republican now instead of Democratic. After the 2010 midterm elections, the GOP dominated every Southern legislature but one; and U.S. House and Senate representation was more than two to one Republican. The South voted solidly Republican in the 2000 and 2004 presidential races, but two states—Virginia and North Carolina—voted for Barack Obama by narrow margins in 2008. North Carolina reverted to red in 2012. The defense of established political, economic, religious, and social patterns in the culture is the very essence of conservatism, and it is still winning politics in the region. Why?

Two reasons abide. The first begins (as all cultural distinctions do to my mind) with faith. Christians in the South remained more devout, more churchgoing, and more likely to subscribe, even today, to the view expressed by Reverend James H. Thornwell in an address before the South Carolina General Assembly in 1854: “The best servant of the State is the faithful servant of God; and you would do more today . . . by consecrating each man himself upon the altar of religion, than by all your eloquence, prudence and skill.”

For many in the South, it was an article of conviction that social improvement came from individual conversion and regeneration, not popular movements, political programs, or causes. Many Southerners were Newtonians; they believed in absolute, unchanging laws of science—physical as well as moral laws. When Thomas Jefferson spoke of the “laws of nature and nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence, he asserted a complete truth on which Christians and deists could agree. One hundred eighty years later, when Martin Luther King Jr. preached from the prophet Amos and declared, “Let justice roll down like a river, righteousness like a never failing stream,” he appealed to an audience that believed the same thing. In 1973 North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin summarized the Southern sentiment again. “The laws of God in the seventh verse of the sixth chapter of Galatians declared: ‘Be not deceived, God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ ” Such was Ervin’s and many Southerners’ verdict on the misdeeds of President Richard M. Nixon, even though many had voted for him. God-given, absolute, unchanging laws revealed through scripture played an important role in the lives of both the black and the white communities.

Modern times beckoned with the biology of Charles Darwin, the philosophy of John Dewey, the economics of John Keynes, the “new” history of Charles Beard, and the physics of Albert Einstein. The rest of the country may have rushed to embrace the humanistic world, but in many places the South remains faithful to the old ways. Today the region has more mega-churches than any other part of the country, and more people regularly attend church there.

Nativity is the second reason for Southern social and political conservatism. Historically, the South has been called the most “native” region of the country. To quote short story writer Elizabeth Spencer, “There were Yankees ‘up there’ we said to ourselves . . . the other southern states, like neighboring counties, offered names that could be traced in and out among one’s connections and might prove acceptable.” Southern allegiance crossed borders, and kinship was strongest among eleven state cousins.

The 1950 census found that an average of over 70 percent of each Southern state’s population was native-born to that state, and another nearly 15 percent was native to a related Southern state. That meant that an average of three-quarters of each state’s population was “Southern-born.” Sixty years later, the percentages were reduced, but not by much. The 2010 census found the average percent of the population born in the state and still living there was down to 55 percent, but the proportion from a neighboring Southern state had not changed. As a result, today nearly 70 percent of each Southern state’s residents are from the region. Florida and Virginia have the least number of residents born in the state or another Southern state, whereas Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest Southern-born population.

The South is not tribal, it’s just neighborly. As North Carolinian Charles Kuralt said, “This is a different place. Our way of thinking is different, as are our ways of seeing, laughing, singing, eating, meeting and parting. Our walk is different, as the old song goes, our talk and our names. Nothing about us is quite the same as in the country to the north and west. What we carry in our memories is different too, and that may explain everything else.

This story was originally published in StoryQuarterly, Issue 40 and New Stories From South: The Year’s Best, 2005

Of course it would be exaggerating to say that Slug had so estranged himself from the neighborhood that a phone call from him was as astonishing to Della as, say, a rainfall of fish, or blood, or manna, and as baffling in portent. Still, as Della stood phone in hand, about to wake her husband, Alvin, who was sleeping through the six o’clock news in his recliner, she sensed with a sort of holy clearness of heart that what was happening on the television—two cows dropping down through the trees and onto somebody’s picnic in the park—was tied, figuratively if not causally, to the call from Slug. “Mais, the cows done flew,” she thought.

The anchorwoman for the Baton Rouge news announced that a livestock trailer carrying over a hundred head of cattle on their way to processing had plunged over the entrance ramp railing at the Interstate 10-110 junction that morning. The driver had been speeding, possibly drunk, and consequently, definitely decapitated. More than a dozen of the cattle were crushed outright. Several others survived the wreck only to climb over the edge of I-110 and drop to their deaths in the park below, while the remaining seventy or so, dazed and frightened, fled down the interstate or into the leafy shelter of the surrounding neighborhoods, followed by a band of cowboys called in for the impromptu roundup.

Fifty-three of the seventy cows had been recovered already, and all carcasses promptly removed from the roadway in time for the evening rush. Calls were still coming in, however: from kids who had a cow tied with cable to a signpost on their street; from riverboat gamblers who saw a small herd grazing on the levee downtown; from a state representative who stepped in a sizable patty on the lawn of the Capitol. The search would continue into the night.

It was not the first time an eighteen-wheeler had gone over that railing, Della remembered. Back in the late seventies, absurd but true, some poor woman driving northbound on I-110 was killed when 40,000 pounds of frozen catfish dropped onto her Volkswagen. Della thought then, as she did now, that it was certainly a shame to lose all that meat, with so many people starving in this world.

When Alvin finally snorted himself awake, he first tried to make sense of the man on horseback in a cowboy costume, waving a lasso at a boxy red shorthorn under the statue of Huey Long—another advertising bid for Texas gamblers?—before he noticed his wife in the doorway, waving the phone and hissing, “C’est Slug! C’est Slug!” Alvin yanked the lever on his recliner, sending the footrest down with an echoing concussion that catapulted him up and out. “C’est Slug?” he said. The name dropped out of his mouth in the Cajun-French way, with a drawn out uuhh. “Let me talk to him.”

Della held the telephone out, covering the mouthpiece with her palm. “Poor thing, you can’t hardly understand what he says.” She rushed to a notepad on the coffee table and scribbled Slug’s name under the names of her four children and five grandchildren, all scattered to the ends of the earth. Next to Slug’s she wrote: Face. Visit, cook, clean? Tomorrow, in a quiet moment, the list of names on the notepad would be passed to Pearl, then from Pearl to Estelle, from Estelle to Barbara, and on down the telephone prayer line.

Alvin squinted at her and leaned into the phone. “Quoi?” he said quietly. “Ain?” he said gently. “Ain? . . . Ain? . . . Quoi t’as dit?”

Della thought regretfully of how foolish Slug’s wife, Camille, had been. A doctor had told Camille she needed to watch her cholesterol, so she cut all meat but chicken from their diet, and would not at all countenance an egg. They stopped visiting their neighbors, terrified of the gumbos and étouffées that threatened their blood at every house. At church each Sunday for two years, the neighborhood watched Camille grow thin and papery, painted with watercolor bruises, and when finally she died of pneumonia, no one wondered why. Many now attributed Slug’s present condition to the two years he’d been deprived of meat’s vital nourishment. Why else would the removal of a tiny melanoma turn into an infection that, having started at such a small place by Slug’s ear, now crept fast over his face like mold on bread. It was so simple. Why couldn’t the doctors see?

“Ain?” Alvin said. “Une vache?”

Alvin wasn’t much of a carpenter; measurements bored him, and he didn’t have the tools or the fascination with things intricately wooden. While a gibbet did not have to be intricate, only sturdy and built to fit inside his fourteen-by-twenty-foot garage, Alvin could not even vouch for that. But Claude, down the block, could do amazing things with wood. He made reclining porch swings out of cypress that never rotted. He whittled his own fishing lures. Many years ago Claude had helped Alvin right a fallen chicken coop in exchange for a dinner of the last pullet left alive.

Because Alvin could not build, he butchered, and he was not so sure, despite what his wife said, that the stink of guts and mess of feathers, or the old ways of village barter were at all worse than the mad relay at the Winn-Dixie on senior discount days: he and Della in separate lines, each with the limit—two nine-cent-a-pound turkeys—then the dash for the car, turkeys into the trunk, and right back for two more each at different registers before some faster senior citizen in one of those go-karts snatched them all up. These cheap and plentiful turkeys provoked his wife’s instinct to horde. In three deep-freezers, Della had turkeys for the next five years’ holidays, and they were not to be traded, these hard-earned birds. At the same time, she fussed, she threatened: no more live chickens, no more rabbits, no more pigeons, doves, squirrels in traps. She griped that she would never live to see the end of this meat.

Around the neighborhood, though, Alvin’s garage butchery was held in the highest esteem, so for Alvin’s promise of a fresh brisket and sweetbreads, Claude traded woodworking consultation, even at this late hour. He took one look at Alvin’s paper-towel blueprint and smeared on a few changes with a leaky pen. “That’s how they do for deer,” he explained. “But deers aren’t near as heavy.”

“Us, we used to do it from a tree,” Alvin said.

Claude said, “Us too. We from the same place, you know. Or you forgot that?”

He traced over Alvin’s lines until the paper towel split into a fuzzy stencil of an A-frame, deliberating aloud over weight limits and angles, then he drafted his own design on the back of a receipt from his wallet. To the basic frame, he added a crossbar with two hooks. He attached the crossbar to a block and tackle that could be tied to a truck, in case the bare strength of all the neighborhood’s aging men wasn’t enough. He even drew the truck.

He was dying to ask, Alvin could tell. “You got him tied in your yard right now?”

“Aw no, man,” said Alvin. “He went in those Indians’ yard. Slug says we better come get him quick before that little lady gets scared and calls the cops.”

“He’s a peculiar fella, Slug.”

“Aw yeah, he is.”

A moment of silent contemplation passed in observance of Slug’s peculiarities. It had been a long, long time since anyone had seen Slug up close. It had been a long, long time since Slug had participated in the give and take.

The Indians were actually from Sudan, and had been living in the house next to Slug’s for three years now. Through the mail carrier, Della stayed informed about them and their funny ways. There was a mother named Fatima, a little girl, another littler girl, and the oldest, a boy. Their last name was Nasraddin. They sometimes got packages of meat, frozen over dry ice and labeled perishable, from “Halal Meats Wholesale,” through overnight mail. There had been no sign of a father, but they had twice received official-looking letters from Sudan. Wasn’t Sudan, Della guessed, a part of India? She never thought to look it up.

When the Sudanese first moved in, the woman and the three children, on their own, the neighborhood watched from windows and porches. After hauling each heavy piece of furniture from truck to house, the mother and son, both so small and narrow, stood panting in the driveway while the little girls picked at acorns on the ground. The neighborhood watched them survey the remaining pieces for the next lightest, putting off the inevitable six-foot, hide-away sofa, bulky and impossible as a bull. The bright flowered shawl wrapped around the woman’s head was wet with sweat, and kept sliding off. When Alvin and a few other men offered to help, the woman waved them away. She and her children climbed into the truck and surrounded the sofa. They pushed. “Not heavy,” she said. The sofa shifted slightly toward the loading ramp. Her shawl slipped off again, but this time she untied it and draped it over her shoulders, like an athlete drapes a towel. The woman said, “Thank you.” The men, so ox-like and unsmiling, might have seemed presumptuous, a little crude, even threatening perhaps, advancing uninvited onto her lawn, but still Alvin thought it was a shame she didn’t have someone to help her get along in a strange place, tiny as she was, with three kids.

For months, the neighborhood watched as the woman came and went at odd hours in the familiar uniforms of food service and checkout counters, with her long hair pulled tight into a bun at the back of her neck. When they sometimes found her at the end of a line, bagging their turkeys and toilet paper or wrapping their hamburgers, the people of the neighborhood wanted to say something to her, if not welcome, then hello, maybe, or what do you need; but she would thank them and look away before they had decided; and then, they would doubt that it was her at all, but perhaps one of the many other dark people whose faces under fleeting scrutiny looked, quite frankly, alike.

The neighborhood watched when, a year later, the mother and son stood again on the lawn, this time with a garden hose and scrub brushes, washing splattered eggs off their windows and bricks. Much to the neighborhood’s surprise, Slug emerged from his hermitage next door to cut down the deer skin that was strung like a lynching from the low branches of the Nasraddins’ oak tree. News of a bombing in a government building had goaded the restless college and high school boys, who, for love of country and trouble, patrolled these neighborhoods in their pick-ups, rattling windows with speakers bigger than their engines, and shouting: “U! S! A!” and “Arabs, go home!” Fatima’s boy, for days afterward, lurked on the front porch with a baseball bat, or lingered at the gate. He silently dared the white faces in every passing car, and when no one took his dare, he battered the knobby, exposed roots of the oak tree instead.

By the end of the second year, the neighborhood had accepted the Sudanese in that they had lost interest in the family altogether. From time to time, Della still sent a prayer around for the woman Fatima and her three children. She knew the name Fatima only as the holy site of Virginal apparitions somewhere off in Europe, Italy or France maybe. To Della, that a brown woman could be so named was another sign that all the world’s people more or less worshipped the same god. When she called Claude’s wife, Pearl, to deliver the prayer list, Della said, “They just like us, them Indians. They love Mary and Jesus, same as us.” Pearl said, “I don’t think they’re the same.”

Last year, when Alvin slaughtered the last of his rabbits, Della put in a busy morning of head smashing and fur scraping, and then sent him around the neighborhood, a gut-reeking summer Santa with a bag full of carcasses and orders to visit the Indians. Alvin knocked at Slug’s door first, encouraged by the blue television light flashing on the curtains. He saw a shadow, movement across the room, and knocked again. He waited, knocked, prepared himself for the shock of Slug’s disfigured face should the door finally open; but it never opened.

When he rang the bell at the Nasraddin house, all at once he heard many bare feet running on linoleum. A dense uneasiness pressed on the door from the inside, but here too the door stayed shut. Alvin thought maybe he could just leave a rabbit on the front steps, and as he was fishing in the bag for a nice big one, the chain clattered, the door opened. The woman Fatima, swathed in a purple cloth that dragged the floor, said, “You are bleeding?”

There were spatters of blood on Alvin’s coveralls and, though he’d washed his hands, red on his elbows. “No, ma’am. I’m Alvin Guilbeau. I brought you a rabbit.”

Fatima shook her head. She smiled and waved him inside her house. The shy little girls, eyes wide and wet, peeked around her purple cloth.

“I raise rabbits. Me and my wife, we can’t use them all,” Alvin tried. “So I give them away.”

Behind his mother, the boy, about thirteen by then, leaned against the wall dressed in tight yellow sweatpants and a red t-shirt. He had grown since Alvin first saw him out on the lawn shoving hopelessly at furniture. His shoulders were wide, his chest thick. He was almost as tall as any man. “Mama,” he said, “he brought us a rabbit. Arneb.” His voice was still a boy’s voice, but it had an oscillating croak. He grinned a wicked grin at Alvin, then said to his little sisters, “Do you want a bunny?”

Fatima said, “No, no,” and shook her head so vigorously that long fuzzy hair exploded out of its bun. She blurted Arabic at her son, but he only smirked. “No,” she said to Alvin.

“It’s cleaned and skinned. Fresh,” Alvin said. Alvin reached into his bag again, yearning to prove they were pretty rabbits, but Fatima swung her purple cloth around and scurried to the kitchen. The two big-eyed girls were marooned; they drew closer together. Over her shoulder, Fatima communicated something to the boy in what sounded to Alvin like angry coughs and gurgles.

“She says we cannot eat that meat. That’s what she said.” The boy’s English bubbled and flowed, smoother and more proper than Alvin’s.

“It’s clean,” Alvin said. “Y’all don’t eat meat, maybe?”

“We eat meat,” the boy said. His eyes took in and then avoided the blood on Alvin’s coveralls. “That’s what she said to tell you.”

Alvin was deciding whether or not he should be offended when Fatima returned, her purple cloth pinched into a sack in front of her. “Thank you,” she said. She jutted her chin at Alvin’s bag. “Open,” she said. He did. She stood over it and let the cloth drop, dumping several pounds of candy over rabbit meat. “Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” Alvin said.

“Sorry. We cannot eat this meat,” she said. “Stay for tea?”

“No, no, thank you,” Alvin said, backing toward the door. “I got to go give these rabbits away.”

“Come for tea.”

“Thank you.”

“Tell your wife,” Fatima said, smiling, thanking, waving, closing the door.

Alvin stopped on the sidewalk and dug a caramel out of the bag. He unwrapped it thoughtfully, popped it into his mouth and continued down the block, wondering what in the world people eat, if not meat.

All the way to Slug’s, flashlights in hand, Alvin and Claude scoped a route to Alvin’s garage that would avoid attention. They met no one on their two-block trek. One or the other of them knew almost every resident within a four-block radius, many of whom would be invited to share in this lucky blessing from the Lord, but it was the passers-through, like the students from the college, who might make trouble, or the policeman, a neighbor’s grandson, who rolled down the block every now and then to check on the old folks.

Claude and Alvin turned the flashlights off near the Nasraddin house and paused at the chain-link gate to look and listen. Light from Fatima’s windows overflowed the curtains and pooled in a narrow moat around the brick walls. Alvin clicked on his flashlight and made a quick sweep of the yard, but the beam only fell upon a droopy fig tree and a rusted barbecue pit.

The sound of an opening door sent Claude and Alvin ducking to the ground. “Y’all signaling planes out here?” The voice was familiar, if garbled.

Alvin shined the beam on Slug’s porch where Slug stood, one hand holding him up against a column and the other lingering self-consciously near his chin. Only one eye, the left, reflected back under one silvered, bristling eyebrow. Half of Slug’s head, from brow down to chin and back over an ear, was taped up in brownish bandages, and Alvin thought of the cartoons he’d watched with his grandchildren: the sweating, pink pig who dabbed with a handkerchief and wiped his face right off, then thrashed around, grabbed blindly, a bewildered pink blank until the cartoonist leaned in with a giant pencil and gave the pig back to the world. “You looking good, Slug. You feel good?”

“Jesus,” Claude said.

Slug pulled down one corner of his mouth to straighten it out. “I feel alright. Can’t do nothing ’bout it anyway.” The words melted, dribbled down the steep slope of his mouth and drained out.

Slug’s front room was tidy, tidier than Alvin expected considering how long the man had been hiding out with no company except his son, who drove two hours every other weekend from Alexandria to haul his father to specialists in New Orleans, another hour away. But the house did not feel clean. Dust coated the furniture, evidence of a life in stasis, like gangrene in an occluded limb. Slug’s house had always been neat, thanks to his fastidious wife, but a fishing magazine might be left here, or an empty glass there. Alvin saw nothing to indicate that Slug did more than mope from room to room, or sit contemplative, or brooding, or resentful, in his armchair. The only thing not coated in dust was the TV remote control. There was a sour-and-bitter odor hanging around Slug, of clothes left too long in the washing machine then scorched in the dryer. Alvin noticed wetness on the bulge of bandages over his ear. He tried to focus on Slug’s speckled blue eye, yolk-yellow all around like a crushed robin’s egg. “You doing everything them doctors tell you to?”

“Ca connaisse pas rien, those fool doctors.” Slug’s look dared Alvin or Claude to say otherwise.

“Okay,” Alvin said. Slug would know about doctors.

“Y’all want that cow or not? She’s in those Indians’ backyard,” Slug slurred. “The boy didn’t see her and he shut the gate.”

On the way to the back door, Slug tied a lasso out of a ten-foot rope that was waiting on the kitchen table. When Claude turned on his flashlight, Slug swatted at it, nearly knocked it out of his hand. “You gonna scare that little lady,” he said.

The men crossed Slug’s dark, tangled lawn with their flashlights off. Something wild and quick jetted back to its den in the hedgerow at the rear end of Slug’s property, and in answer, from beyond Fatima’s chain-link fence, came a snort. Alvin felt the heavy presence of the animal all of a sudden. It was startling and near—all the more real for being unseen. He remembered: cows have horns, hooves, heads, tails, and they are so damned big. Ever so slowly, a very large and pale silhouette developed against the darkness like a photonegative. Grabbing up a wad of grass, Slug clucked and cooed, and the silhouette trudged closer. The big white head swung up and took the grass from Slug’s open hand. He rubbed the wide space between her eyes, pinpointed one spot with his thumb, just right of center. The cow shook her head and puffed out a wet breath.

Each holding a handful of grass, the three men edged down the fence toward the gate, and the cow followed. The lights in the Nasraddin house were still on, and shadows moved against the curtains, the two little girls jumping on the sofa. Once the men were nearer the gate, Slug widened the lasso and slipped it around the cow’s neck. Alvin lifted the gate latch, but the gate hung badly on its hinges and as Alvin dragged it open, it scraped against the driveway. The cow stomped her feet. Slug bent his knees and held on to the end of the slack rope as the cow backed away. Alvin could only see the blank side of Slug’s face, impassive as the moon. The rope tightened. “Grab it!” Claude yelled. The cow swung her head from side to side. Pulling against them, she let out a loud and awful moo.

The little girls in the house stopped jumping and poked their heads between the curtains. The men dropped the rope. The cow retreated to the back yard.

With her boy behind her, Fatima stepped out of her front door waving a baseball bat. “Who’s that?” she said. “I will call the police!”

Alvin turned a flashlight on his own face. “It’s Alvin Guilbeau.” He presented himself to her in the light of the open door. “You got a surprise in your back yard.”

She let the bat drop to her side and said something in her language to the boy, who then disappeared into the house. Tonight, instead of a long sheet, she wore a maroon fast-food uniform with yellow stripes on the sleeves. There was a turquoise shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Her feet were bare. In the air, Alvin smelled spices he’d never heard names for and remembered, for the first time in many years, the Indian markets he’d seen during the war, the cyclone of dark people in bright colors.

“Chère, you seen the news report tonight? You got one of them cows in your backyard,” Alvin said. Fatima shook her head slightly. “A cow,” Alvin said. He gestured at the back yard. There was, to Alvin, a shroud about the faces of people who spoke languages other than his. Even when silent, they wore a vagueness about the eyes; their body language spoke in impossible accents. “Cow,” Alvin said again. “Cow. Cow.” Fatima readjusted her shawl, and seemed to teeter between frustration and understanding.

When Slug and Claude rounded the corner, tempting the animal with grass and leading it by the rope, all at once, the vagueness lifted from Fatima. With the baseball bat hanging to one side on her hips like a billy club, she swaggered down her front steps. The little girls watched from the window.

“I saw on the television!” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Khalid!

The boy appeared again, his arms crossed over his chest, trying very hard to fill his doorway, to be the man of his doorway. “She wants you to have some tea.” His voice had entirely changed. Alvin and Fatima both pointed at once, and the boy gasped.

“We should call the police?” Fatima walked boldly up to the animal and motioned for her boy to do the same. Alvin watched the mother and son as they patted the cow’s haunches. While the boy whispered to the creature, Alvin wondered if the Nasraddins could be trusted.

“Come inside, use the phone,” Fatima said. She gestured toward the door with her baseball bat.

“You don’t want to call the cops,” Claude said. He sounded, Alvin thought, absurdly menacing. The boy pushed between his mother and Claude, and his smooth, brown face radiated outrage as clearly as any man’s. Fatima only looked from Claude to her son and made pensive birdish noises between her lips, unable to decode the language of a threat, or maybe just not threatened.

“I don’t think we should call the police,” Alvin said, “tonight.”

Slug said, “Let’s wait and see.”

“What should we wait to see?” the boy said. He glared at Claude. “We will call the police.”

“Khalid!” Fatima wrapped an arm around her boy’s waist and drew him close to her. She spoke to him in their language, and Alvin saw a mother like any he had known, who could calm her son, and entreat, and explain, and who was confident in her own wisdom. “We will not call tonight,” she said to the men.

“So she’ll call tomorrow?” Claude said. “The cow can’t stay here.”

“It can stay in the yard. We can close the gate,” Fatima said, “until tomorrow.”

“No, ma’am,” said Alvin. “We need to take it to my garage.”

“Why take it? I don’t mind.”

Slug emerged from the shadows. He tugged at his mouth. “Ma’am,” he said, “Ma’am. We don’t want to call the cops at all.” He spoke very slowly, took care to make each word clear. “Miss Fatima, one cow is a lot of meat.”

Khalid yelped. “You’re going to eat this cow!”

“Y’all welcome to some of it,” said Slug.

The boy bubbled over with Arabic. He flung his hands around, pressing closer and closer to his mother, and trailed off into English. “They’re crazy!” he said to her. “They want to eat it!”

The woman said, “If you want to share, my son must kill her with a knife.” Even her laughter rippled with foreignness; the men could not translate it. By way of explanation, she only said, “Khalid is a big boy,” and laughed again. The boy seemed both astonished and very embarrassed. She patted his arm.

In the humans’ confused silence, the cow tore at grass and swished her tail.

Fatima poked the bandage around Slug’s ear not so gently with three fingers. “You need to change this,” she instructed.

“Maybe so, yeah.”

“You are not listening to the doctor.” She addressed Alvin next. “Will you come tomorrow for tea? Will you bring your wife?”

Before he meant to, he said, “Yes, ma’am.” Fatima turned back to her house. Khalid started to follow, but Fatima threw out the baseball bat to stop him. “Help them, Khalid,” she said. She gave him the bat, and went in to her little girls.

The boy walked along the animal’s right shoulder and stroked her swaying neck. Her hooves thudded on the grass, clopped on the pavement as they passed through yards, across driveways, and behind houses. On the cow’s left side, Slug and Claude each sulked in his own way, for his own reasons, as Alvin walked ahead, leading the cow by the rope and listening for cars.

Claude said, “You got your daddy over there in India?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“Ain’t none of your business,” Slug said.

In one back yard, the cow took control of the men. She dragged them over to a garden of mustard greens and devoured half of a row before haunch-swatting and rope-tugging finally coaxed her on. The boy dropped far behind. He took swings with the bat, at dirt, trees, and telephone poles.

“I got to see India,” Alvin said. “During the war. They let the cows roam the streets.”

“I seen on TV,” Claude said, “how they make the women walk behind the men.”

“I don’t know about that, but I seen the cows for myself,” Alvin looked around for the boy. “I guess his momma’s used to having cows all over the place.”

“I’m telling you, they don’t even let them show their faces, those women.”

“We aren’t from India,” Khalid shouted from the darkness behind them. “We’re from Sudan!”

By the time they came to Alvin’s house, the boy had disappeared. They led the cow into the garage and tied her to one of the beams overhead. She lifted her tail and dumped a heap onto the concrete floor. With a shovel that he took down from the rafters where it balanced along with rakes and fishing poles, Alvin shoveled the crap into a paper bag so that he could use it later to fertilize the muscadine vines that crawled up a lattice at the back of the garage and covered the only windows.

“She’s crazy,” Claude said. “We ain’t gonna let a boy kill that cow.”

“Aw, she was pulling our leg. Don’t get all worked up,” Alvin said.

“You don’t know what she’s joking about or not. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was dialing 911 right now.”

“Bouche ta gueule! She won’t call no cops!” Slug was at the garage door, his one eye peeping through a crack for any sight of the boy. “You know that little lady,” he whispered, “she went to school for law in her country.”

“Is that right,” said Alvin.

“And her husband. He was some kind of politician. They didn’t like what he had to say over there. They shot him dead.”

“Aw, no.”

“So don’t you ask that boy about his daddy no more.”

Slug slipped out of the garage, into the darkness, and crept homeward like a possum, along walls and fences and hedges.

Della, in bed and asleep by eight o’clock, long before Alvin came in, and awake again at dawn, long before Alvin awoke, had no idea when she went out to the deep-freezers in her housedress and slippers for a package of boudin to boil for breakfast that she would find a cow in her garage. When she saw it there, smelling like a circus and totally composed, she turned immediately back toward the house and just as she opened her mouth to yell, Alvin rounded the corner, still in his pajamas. He started at her in French before she could argue. He told her about Slug and the Sudanese, and he made her see that it would be just like at Pepere’s farm on autumn Saturdays, when their children were still babies. God knew what He was doing, sending that trailer-truck flying in November instead of July. The flies had slacked off. The air was light and thin, perfect weather for slaughter. The neighbors would come and ask for this or that part, the brisket, the ribs, the sweetbreads or the brains, and there would be no fights about it, only merry hacking and sawing and yanking at skin. She would stuff her red sausages. Pearl would make liver gravy. Inside, their house would be close, wet with the boiling of sausages and the heat of a crowd sweating from homemade wine. “Besides,” he said, “if we don’t slaughter it ourselves, they just going to haul it off, cut it up, and send it right back to us at three dollars a pound. That cow came to us. She’s ours.” He made it sound like a good idea.

By noon, thanks to Della and the Catholic sisters of the prayer line, word got around that God had delivered unto the neighborhood a fat, unblemished cow, and they planned, sure enough, to eat it. Although some of the ladies had concerns, they had to admit the price of beef had gone up, and their little bit of social security certainly did not allow for steak and brisket every night of the week, and furthermore, if so-and-so down the block was in for a piece of the cow, then they should be too. Della passed along all her prayers, for Slug, for her children and her grandchildren, who never called or wrote or prayed for themselves, and for Fatima, her little ones, and that angry young man of hers. “And pray,” she said finally, “pray tonight we don’t get caught.”

It took little for Alvin to convince Della to visit Fatima with him in the very early afternoon. Della did her hair and powdered her face, Alvin tucked in his shirt. They found a jar of fig preserves in the back of a cabinet, dusted it off, and wondered if the Nasraddins would say they could not eat figs.

The boy answered the door, slouching in his jeans and sweatshirt. He said nothing, only stepped aside to let them in. The little girls played dominoes on the carpet. The littler one said, “Hi.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but the bigger one shushed her and started to pick up the dominoes. The boy led them into a tiny green kitchen, where Fatima stood before the stove stirring milk in a saucepan.

“You are Mrs. Guilbeau?” Fatima smiled. Della and Alvin smiled back. “Sit down,” Fatima said, and gestured to the kitchen table. Della and Alvin sat.

“Your house is very nice,” Della said. She searched the walls and countertops for anything unique to a Sudanese woman’s kitchen, but saw only the usual things: clock, potholder, sugar bowl, flyswatter. Della wondered what strange foods had been cooked on that stove and stored in that refrigerator. She wondered especially what might be in the freezer.

“Do y’all like figs?” She had been holding the preserves all along.

“What is figs?”

Della held up the jar for Fatima to see.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She said something to the boy in her language, and he went to the pantry and took out some bread. Meanwhile, an itch grew in Della to talk about the cow, cows, any cow; it seemed frivolous to talk about anything else.

Alvin said, “We weren’t sure if y’all could eat figs.”

“Just meat sometimes we can’t eat,” the boy said.

“You can eat beef?” Della asked.

“Sometimes.” The boy started to leave the kitchen, but his mother spoke again, and he sat down at the table across from Della and Alvin. Fatima set four cups and saucers on the counter. To Della’s surprise, five ordinary little tea-flags dangled by strings from the lip of the saucepan from which Fatima poured. Fatima served the tea then sat down next to her son.

She smiled at her guests and sipped from her cup. They smiled back and sipped from theirs. The boy kept adding sugar to his. He frowned and sighed.

“My father had cattle in Sudan,” Fatima said.

“Is that right,” said Alvin. “For milk?”

“Some for milk, some for eating. We always had food.”

“You were blessed,” Della said. “All those people starving.” She did not know for sure if there were people starving in Sudan, but she thought it was a good guess. “When I was a little girl, we didn’t have nothing for a long time. No cows. No chickens. Nothing. That was the Depression.”

Alvin said, “No, ma’am, we didn’t have much.”

Della held the cup close to her mouth and blew at the surface of the tea, wrinkling the milk skin which she then dabbed with a forefinger, lifted out of the cup, and deposited on her saucer. Fatima graciously handed her a napkin.

“We wish you and your children would join us tonight,” Alvin said. “There’s going to be plenty.” He sounded to Della like the door-to-door peddlers of peculiar religions who would show up every spring to invite them to revivals.

Fatima looked to her son, who had not drunk his tea but was staring down into it. “You see?” she said.

“I thought you were joking.”

“Khalid does not know where meat comes from.”

“I know where meat comes from.”

“He’s a good boy,” she said, “But he does not remember Sudan.”

The boy pushed his chair away from the table and left the kitchen. A moment later, a door slammed somewhere in the house.

As best she could, Fatima explained about meat, what Muslims could and could not eat, and also about something she called ummah. She kept using that word to describe the people among whom she now lived, and this word sounded more lovely, and because of its newness to their ears more important than the words they might have used to describe themselves and their gentle loyalty to each other. Behind her halting English was a persuasive warmth and insistence, a tenor that made every word seem lawful and good. She had been a lawyer, Della could see, and what a shame, she thought, that in this great country such a gifted woman had to wrap hamburgers.

In the World Book Encyclopedia, copyright 1955, that they’d bought for the children, volume by volume per ten-dollar purchase from the grocery store, Alvin read that Sudan is the largest of all African countries, and its capital, a town called Khartoum, sits on the banks of the Nile like Baton Rouge sits on the Mississippi. There is a North and there is a South. The North has cities and deserts. The South has swamps and mosquitoes, and months of nothing but rain. These people are poor. Poor, poor. Some parts of the year, they starve, even though certain tribes horde millions of cattle, sheep, goats, and camels, for social prestige, and because there just aren’t enough trucks to haul them anywhere.

The name “Sudan” comes from the Arabic expression “bilad as-Sudan,” “Land of the Blacks,” which seemed to Alvin to mean that the Sudanese are as likely to look like your run-of-the-mill African American down at the Wal-Mart as they are to look Indian, that is, from-India Indian. They are Muslim. There are some Christians, in the South, who have been Christians longer than the French have been Christians, longer than the French have been French. How about that. There are some who believe in spirits, water spirits, tree spirits. The Muslims are moving in on them. When boys become men in Sudan, Alvin read, when they kill an enemy, their backs and arms and faces are cut in stripes of scars. A picture showed a young man in a white gown and turban with three dark hatch marks across his cheeks. Cicatrization, it was called. Ci-ca-tri-za-tion.

Alvin’s eyes gave out just before the section on the History of Ancient Nubia. He closed the encyclopedia, he closed his eyes, and saw Fatima and her little girls with distended naked bellies, propped up by walking sticks. Sand spun around them like sleet. Or maybe there was no sand. Maybe their bare feet were sinking into an island of mud and swamp grass. Mosquitoes and deerflies swirled around them like slow sand. They were part of a circle of many people Arabs and Africans and some lean-looking and dusty white people. In the center of the circle, a black man, shriveled, desiccated—by sand or by mosquitoes—held Fatima’s boy by the shoulders. The boy, Khalid, faced his mother and sisters. Alvin saw Khalid’s wide back bisected by the skinny and dark line of the old black man. The man withdrew a straight-bladed knife from the toolbelt-thong that hung cockeyed on his hips. One smooth stroke across Khalid’s shoulders, and blood swelled and overflowed. While the circle of men and women and children hooted and laughed and raised fists over heads, Khalid was perfectly still. Alvin wished he could see the boy’s face. He seemed so very young.

Alvin went to the garage and opened the long, flat wooden case where he kept his butchering tackle. He surveyed the contents: fillet knife, boning knife, a cleaver as heavy as a hatchet, a carver, a simple and gently curved butcher knife. None of these would slice through a cow’s thick neck, not neatly, not painlessly. The cut would have to be smooth, straight, decisive. The boy’s hand would have to be steady. Not one of them could handle a thrashing cow.

Then he thought of the thirty-inch blade from his riding lawnmower, and spent the rest of the afternoon sharpening it, in the back yard so as not to upset the cow. Round and round, on one side and then the other, Alvin honed the blade against the whetstone. There could be no nicks or dull spots. He knew from cutting his own hands so many times that the dull knives hurt worse, while he never felt the nick of a sharp one at all. So he sharpened and sharpened, took a break for a glass of wine, and sharpened some more.

The boy came early in the afternoon. “Mama sent this,” he said. He had an armful of old newspapers and a nearly empty roll of butcher paper. Before sending him home, Alvin took him out to the garage. With the garage light on, they both looked smaller, the boy and the cow, big but not quite fully grown. Maybe they could handle her. Maybe the boy could handle her. He had thick arms, and she really seemed to be a placid cow.

The cow pissed, loud as a rainstorm on the concrete floor, and Khalid jumped back from her. “She almost splashed me,” he said. Then he said, “Gross,” and the word sounded silly and even more American dressed up in the boy’s lilting accent. Alvin had heard his grandchildren say it hundreds of times, about ponce, and chicken livers, and the orange-yellow fat of crawfish tails, among other things. It was a silly word, in any case. “That’s gross, yeah,” Alvin said. “I’ll hose it off tomorrow. Come here, boy.”

He handed Khalid the lawnmower blade to make him understand. He said, “You remember that blood on my arms, huh? You think you can do that, what your mamma wants? You think you can, boy?”

Khalid balanced the blade on his flattened palms with his fingers stretched back, away from the edge. He looked incredulously at Alvin. “You know she was joking,” the boy said. “They don’t do this in Sudan.”

At eight in the evening, the neighborhood began to gather in Della’s kitchen where she sat steadfast on a stool by the stove, stirring hot praline goo with one hand and doling out wine with the other. Claude and Pearl came first, with a loaded shotgun and the A-frame gibbet, which the men quickly installed in the garage. When Alvin saw the shotgun, he motioned for Claude to follow him to the back yard. He pointed to the long, sharp blade lying across an old sycamore stump. Claude said, “For them Indians, you’d do that?”

“They’re from Sudan,” Alvin said. “She’ll call the cops if we don’t let the boy do it.” This was a lie, of course, and Alvin hated to tell it, but he knew that no diplomatic somersaults in French or English, no Arabic invocation of community could justify such a strange decision to Claude. Claude picked up the blade and strummed it with his thumb. “Be careful,” said Alvin. “It’s sharp, sharp.”

“It better be sharp,” Claude said.

There was a small crowd gathered in the driveway when the neighborhood policeman pulled over to the curb and rolled down his window. “How y’all?” he called, and cracked good-natured jokes about drunken old Cajuns until his own grandmother came out of the house and pressed a bottle of homemade wine and a tin of pralines, still warm, into his hands. “Go bring that to your wife,” she said, and then, without a twitch, “Y’all still looking for them cows?”

“They still can’t find some of ’em,” her grandson said.

“They done got ate, I bet you.”

The policeman drove away and his grandmother came back to the group laughing from her rolling belly. “Us coonasses been stealing cows since the dawn of time,” she said. “That’s part of our culture, that.” Most of them laughed, but some, Claude especially, speculated in French that the brown woman had called that cop after all, that he was reconnoitering and most certainly would be back.

By nine o’clock, Alvin and Della’s house was teeming, the table crowded with food. Many had brought the Saturday paper, which featured on the front page a photograph of yesterday’s accident: a dead steer roped by the neck, dangling from an overpass. They would use this page, they decided with glee, to wrap up their takings this evening.

From time to time, Alvin checked on the cow. She had been quiet all day, but now with so much commotion just outside, she huffed and stomped her feet. Alvin, who could not stand to see an animal suffer, cooed at her in French and patted her flaring nose. He had not given her anything to eat or drink—she would clean easier that way—and wondered how thirsty she was, exactly. When he held a mixing bowl full of wine under her nose, she sniffed it, tested it with her tongue, then drank up every drop and flipped the bowl looking for more. Alvin gave her more.

At ten o’clock, the crowd, pressed elbow to elbow in the steamy kitchen, quieted down. The ominous booming from the students’ passing cars shook the windows and pulsed in the chests of the old people like tribal drums. There had been no word from Slug or the Sudanese. Della called Slug’s house but got no answer, and none of them could spell Nasraddin to find it in the phonebook.

Had they been in their own homes, rather than here in Della’s kitchen, those who lived across the street from the Nasraddins might have looked into Fatima’s brightly lit living room and seen her winding bold cloths around her daughters, combing out and braiding their long hair, before she finally took up a roll of bandages and, with blunt efficiency—as though grooming her children, packing groceries, slaughtering cows and disinfecting old men’s lesions were all the selfsame gesture—ministered to the ruined face of her neighbor as he sat on her couch and hid behind his hands to spare the little girls. The spies then might have pulled shut their drapes quickly, embarrassed, when they saw Fatima glance out of her own window, searching the shadows for her son, who had not returned from Mr. Guilbeau’s that afternoon.

And had the people all over this neighborhood been watching from their windows, as they were accustomed to do after nightfall, flipping on their porch lights and peering out at their street, hands cupped around eyes, they would have seen a figure moving in and out of the orange light of streetlamps and trespassing fearlessly into one yard after another. What a shock they’d have had when the face drew close to their windows, as close as they had ever imagined ominous faces in the night, and gazed at them; no, not at them—beyond them, into their homes, at their plain and barely valuable things. And the old couple who lived in the gray brick house on the corner—what would they have done, what would they have thought, when the expression on that face changed suddenly from curiosity to anger, when the young man at their window reared back the baseball bat he carried and swung it with a grown man’s strength into the glass?

Under the light of a single bald lightbulb dangling from a rafter, the neighborhood gathered into Alvin’s garage and formed a broad circle around the cow. They watched Alvin offer her another bowlful of wine. They watched Claude cross to the center of the circle, shotgun in hand.

It had gotten around, what the brown woman wanted. Everyone knew, and agreed to allow it. There was beef in this world, they reasoned, before there were guns; people must have killed cows somehow. As the night grew later, though, they began to believe that they had been fooled, not through spitefulness on Fatima’s part, but rather through their own provincial ignorance of foreign places and customs; they hadn’t gotten her joke. They had been propelled by momentum into this circle and this ritual that was at once familiar and very strange, but now as they saw Claude aiming the shotgun after all, their momentum flagged. Claude set the shotgun aside. He said to Alvin, “Somebody will hear it. If that cop comes by— What do you want to do?”

Alvin took the lawnmower blade from where it lay on top of a deep freezer. “If you hold her head up, I’ll do it. She won’t feel a thing.” One of the men suggested his teenage son hold the gun aimed at the cow, just in case, and this seemed like a reasonable compromise.

Claude held her gently but firmly by the jaws. Turning the blade this way and that, switching it from hand to hand, Alvin walked around to one side of the cow, and then the other. He draped one arm over the cow’s neck and poised the blade under her throat, but he could find no leverage. He stood back and considered, as Claude hummed and massaged her broad buttery jowls. The teenager stood poised with the shotgun on his shoulder. They all prayed he would not shoot Claude by accident.

“Hit her in the head with something,” the teenager said. From the dark perimeter of the circle, his father said, “Hush boy.”

“I can’t watch, me,” Della said. She cringed back with all her body.

Alvin stood further back. “Somebody look for that cop,” he said. Della rushed to the door and opened it just a crack. “Oh!” she squeaked. Hearts pounded and fluttered all around the circle. “Oh!” Della said again. “Oh chère! I didn’t know you at first. Come in!”

When they saw Slug, most of them for the first time in several years, the people of the neighborhood were less surprised by the bandages and deformity of Slug’s face than by the young man who came in right behind him, hanging onto Slug’s sagging belt.

It was Slug who had gone looking and heard the shattering glass, who had found Khalid in a dark house picking up and examining all the small, un-incriminating remnants of desk drawers and bookshelves. Somewhere in the circle now, the boy realized, were the old couple whose check stubs and prayer lists he had handled, whose refrigerator he had opened and closed, who would immediately believe it was the work of those college boys, drunk on a Saturday night, when they later found their window broken and things upset. Khalid let go Slug’s belt and stood up straight, seeing no one and nothing but the cow and the blade cocked under her throat.

Fatima followed, with her two little girls, all three draped in bright fabrics. A silk veil covered Fatima’s head and black hair. To the neighborhood, which had seen her only in uniforms—tired, bagging groceries—Fatima seemed in these foreign clothes strangely like the Virgin Mother.

Slug’s one eye winked at all of them as he looked around the circle. When his eye landed on them, they wondered, each in turn, why they had not knocked louder at his door, or longer, why no one had insisted on driving him to doctors, or cleaning his house, or helping him change his bandages.

Like an altar boy presenting the Bible, Alvin held the blade out to Khalid. “Take it,” Slug said, and Khalid picked up the blade.

Alvin lunged for a mop bucket near the door, and positioned it on the ground under the cow’s head. They all knew it would never contain the blood. Alvin took the shotgun from the teenager, who stepped back into the circle, pressed close to his father. Alvin aimed, just in case.

Claude cupped his hands around the cow’s jaws again. He pulled her head up so the skin on her neck stretched flat, taut. Slug and the boy stood by her side, on the right. The boy was losing his color. He held the blade feebly. It trembled in his hands.

The neighborhood watched the boy move his lips, but no words came out. The mother said, “Khalid—Bismillah Ar-Rahman.” The boy tried again. His face blanched.

Slug laid his hand over the boy’s. He hugged the boy against his chest, pressed him tightly to stop his quaking. The cow snorted. She stepped back and nearly broke free of Claude’s hold. They all heard the shuffle and click when Alvin set the shotgun.

Slug and the boy cocked the blade at the cow’s neck. She pounded one hoof and took a deep breath that swelled her, and as she started to moo, Slug and the boy leaned forward together. Slug said, “Y’all say a prayer.”

The blade wrenched across the tight white line of throat, like a bow on a silent fiddle. Claude stroked her cheeks while blood gushed from her neck, saturated his jeans, and pooled in the bucket at his feet. The bucket filled and spilled over, and the pool spread fast, outward and outward to Slug and the boy who had fainted in his arms, to Alvin, to Della, to the woman Fatima and her wide-eyed girls, to the circle’s perimeter, to the feet of the people who watched and remembered the country farms, the spoken French, the good of home-stuffed sausage. The blood spread out toward the garage doors, and under the doors, out to the driveway, into the street. Enough blood, they all thought, to flood the neighborhood.

The American mythologist and comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell relished telling a story about Black Elk, an old Sioux medicine man. Keeper of the Sacred Pipe of his people, Black Elk’s life spanned the era from his participation in “Custer’s Last stand”, the great Ghost Dance, and the massacre at Wounded Knee to the era of fully established European settlement  of the old West. Toward the end of his life he spoke of the defining vision he had been given as a boy. As John Neihardt quoted in Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk had found himself standing on a mountain top, “…the central mountain of the world….seeing in a sacred manner….the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together, like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.”

The mountain was, of course, a local mountain, Harney Peak, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. But Black Elk knew what the local place represented: “…anywhere is the center of the world.”

In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell declares, “There, I would say, was a true prophet, who knew the difference between his ethnic ideas and the elementary ideas that they enclose, between a metaphor and its connotations, between a tribal myth and its metaphysical import.”

Twenty-first century Christians of the American South tend to be far more, if you will, “tribal” than Black Elk. The religious vision of this person who was the Medicine Man for his tribe was genuinely “universal”. His vision was certainly grounded in the reality he knew – his time, his place, and his people, but when the sacredness of that hoop was recognized it extended ever outward to take in the whole of all people and places and times, and of all stars and planets and space, so the navel of the universe is understood to be everywhere. Southern Christians, on the other hand, are so strongly identified with their particular southern culture that their faith is taken as part and parcel of it. When this happens, when religion and culture are wed, “tribalism” is unavoidable. The result is that southern Christianity tends to be expressed rather more narrowly than would ever pass muster in a universalized understanding of the Christian faith.

Campbell challenges Christianity, and any religion that hopes to speak to the people of an evolving new age, to grow beyond what he terms “the tribal” into that which is more genuinely “universal”. This is a challenge for any and all Christians to take seriously and address sincerely.

Meanwhile, too many southerners seem determined to ignore any such challenge; southern culture and southern religion go together and that is going to be hard to change. There seems to be an identifiable dominant southern religious perspective (catholic and protestant) and an identifiable dominant southern culture, and they are taken together – or rejected together. Which, one may wonder, comes first, the chicken or the egg: the political, social, and philosophical worldview of the southern culture or the religious perspective of the southern churches. Obviously, each shapes the counterpart. Indeed, one can get the sense of an attitude that others – far and near – should either conform to their “way of life” and religious belief or leave the true believers alone to act according to the preferences of the local tribe.

Campbell begins The Outer Reaches of Inner Space (his last book) with his thesis that the world is moving into an age in which reliance on “the tribal” features of a religion will not satisfy even “the tribe”, that is, the peoples that are heirs to a religion that originated in a particular people, culture, and place. He believes that such tribalism was a necessary stage in the development of each religion up to this time. He agrees that religious tribalism played a healthy, even necessary role in the controlling, socializing, and harmonizing of the primitive bio-energies of the human animal for the purposes of health, progeny, and prosperity — first of local tribes and then communities and finally civilizations.

However, Campbell warns, the time is past when this tribalism will work. It was helpful to health for Jews to religiously refuse to eat certain foods that were dangerous in the Middle East of the era, but what is the universally religious meaning today in refusing to eat pork? It just separates Jews from all others. What religious value is there today for Muslim women to hide all but their eyes with cloth, except to declare a separatist religion?

According to Campbell the desire to hang onto forms of tribalism has become counter-productive. The need to offer religious myths, metaphors, doctrines, and practices that are universal instead of localized has become a pressing demand; it is also a new opportunity. The necessity and the opportunity are mandated in large measure by the rapidly growing globalization. We find fundamental assumptions about reality being joltingly overthrown and many already replaced:

“The image of the universe will no longer be the old Sumero-Babylonian, locally centered, three-layered affair, of a heaven above and abyss below, with an ocean-encircled bit of earth between; nor the later, Ptolemaic one, of a mysteriously suspended globe enclosed in an orderly complex of revolving crystalline spheres; nor even the recent heliocentric image of a single planetary system at large within a galaxy of exploding stars; but (as of today, at least) an inconceivable immensity of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters (superclusters) of galaxies, speeding apart into expanding distance, with humanity as a kind of recently developed scurf on the epidermis of one of the lesser satellites of a minor star in the outer arm of an average galaxy, amidst one of the lesser clusters among the thousands, catapulting apart, which took form some fifteen billion years ago as a consequence of an inconceivable preternatural event.”

 Campbell’s insight begins with the recognition that each lasting and widely accepted religion had its origins in a local and specific situation, one that proved formative for a “tribe,” an ethnos, a genos, a “people.” However, those that will endure must mature so as to be more universally valid across cultural boundaries. This leads to a demanding conclusion: A religion is true in proportion to the extent it speaks universal truth, with relevance and full respect for different cultures and for the world’s diversity.

Note that this cuts two ways. When a religion remains “local”, in the sense of being culturally bound, it fails to meet the standards of truth for those in different locales. And, when a religion insists that the whole world must conform to the mores, traditional perspectives, and values of a certain culture in order to be faithful to its vision of the truth – whether in doctrine or ritual – that religion is instead subversive of universal truth, and it is certainly less believable beyond its self-imposed cultural boundaries. This, surely, is one of the reasons Christianity is losing committed, church-going-members at a rate that must be recognized — throughout Western culture and even in the Bible-belt.

Most Americans, not only Southerners, are subject to the judgment of associating their faith with “the American way of life” (roughly referring to an institutionalized collection of beliefs about America that are considered “sacred”.) This has been designated as “civil religion”, which is another way of talking about “tribalism”. Americans are prone to confuse civil religion with the way they are called to interpret and exercise their faith. It should be obvious that the confusion of civil religion with the strong tradition of Christianity and Judaism that calls society to justice in the name of a just God can be problematic. Americans on both sides called on the name of God during the Civil Rights Movement. This confusion reflects the sort of reduction to “tribalism” against which Campbell warns us.

For Southerners this American tendency to civil religion is on steroids. One result is that the range of religious affiliation tends to be narrower for Southerners. (Check that out by asking anyone who does not fit within the expectations.) It has long been a given that a Southerner is to be Christian, Protestant, and Conservative; more recently it is acceptable to be a conservative Roman Catholic. These religious commitments are likely to be joined to common assumptions about the social and cultural issues that are at controversy in the nation as a whole, at any given time. (Taken together, the way religion and culture have influenced one another has led to something approaching a regional voting block for conservative politics. In the last election, the southeast was colored blue only on its eastern edges, in Virginia and Florida.)

The wedded assumptions of religion and culture that contribute to the mistaking of Southern civil religion for universal religious claims are produced by many well-identified factors. Culturally, account can be taken of the history that is unique to the region of the old Confederacy: economics, esteem for the military, prominence of hunting and deference to guns, regard for self-reliance, American exceptionalism and so forth. Religiously, considerations include the higher level of church-going commitment than in other regions, highly individualistic piety and theology, understanding of sin that puts more emphasis on personal behavior then social morality, and so on. And of course, certain traits are shared in the southern religious and cultural ethos, such as authoritarian rigidity. However, the leading religious feature is widespread fundamentalism and the central cultural dynamic is white dominance and privilege.

None of the cultural and religious factors listed, and few that distinguish Southern civic religion from other parts of the nation can be considered “universals” in the sense that these are religious claims to be made to all peoples of all cultures around the world. Joseph Campbell would call for Southern prophets who can see that “…anywhere is the center of the world,” to appreciate, “…the difference between ethnic ideas and the elementary ideas that they enclose, between a metaphor and its connotations, between a tribal myth and its metaphysical import.” In an age that is not going to cease moving into globalization it will be important for the Southern way of life to take this as an opportunity, an opportunity to grow beyond what is merely tribal into that religious commitment that is more genuinely universal.

Black Elk lived until eighty-six years of age and became rather famous  as a sage, widely traveled and broadly recognized in North America and Europe. The Medicine Man of his tribe, Black Elk also became an ordained deacon and a missionary of the Christian Church. He accomplished a mature integration of his Christian faith and the Lakota tradition. What he recognized was that the Christ is intended to be for everyone; the church proclaiming Jesus as Lord represented for him the realization of everyone’s tribal hoop as universal. He did not abandon his culture or his tribe, but he included them in the fullness of what the church claims about creation and the coming kingdom of God.

When you work on a book, there are stories within stories that come to you, and—you can’t help it—they pull you in. That’s how we found ourselves in front of a two-story white stucco building in Hollygrove on Live Oak Street. It took us a while to find it. The uptown neighborhood of New Orleans wasn’t developed until the early 1900s because of its low-lying, swampy location, and it is cut up with drainage canals. We came to photograph Oscar Washington, the bandleader and snare drummer of the New Wave Brass Band and his uncle, Melvin Washington, at their family church. We had been working with Oscar on a book about how music gets passed on in New Orleans, and he told us that, for him, it all began at the St. Anthony Divine Spiritual Temple, where his uncle and musical idol played the drums. “Everybody in my family came out of that church. My daddy’s mother, Delia C. Washington—God rest her soul, I know she’s looking down on me right now—was an usher there.”

When we met with Melvin at his house to talk more about it, he said, “It was like an inheritance. I guess it come from the tree. The roots. When the tree sprouts up, all the roots down there. It was a family of drummers . . .” But if it was the men in his family who played the drums in R&B bands and the military, it was his mother, Delia, who transformed it into a religious experience. He said, “I had a praying mother, a really praying mother.” He paused, looked at us, and asked, “Should I go further?”

Melvin Washington, Photo by Bruce Barnes

We were encouraging.

“Well, my faith, was a spiritual faith, and . . . this goes deep.”

St. Anthony was founded in the early 1940s. Melvin explained, “The first church was on one side of the pastor’s house on Cherry Street. Then he bought the lot over there on Live Oak Street. It was built by the congregation. People donated their time and labor. My daddy donated the steel and laid the foundation for the church to be built on. I was a little boy. I used to pick up one cement block at a time and give it to Deacon St. Cyr to help build the church.”

The building is gutted from Hurricane Katrina, and empty now, but in its heyday Oscar remembered that inside they “had altars with big human-like statues of Jesus, his mother, St. Anthony, and a big old statue of Black Hawk. I was told Black Hawk was the Indian chief and he was the protector. People would pray with their hands on the statue.”

We asked more about Black Hawk, and Melvin said, “It’s all right to share it, but would you understand it?” He was aware of a lot persecution behind how people worship. In the spiritual faith, people call the Holy Spirit to directly communicate with God and see into the future. “A lot of people say ‘telling your fortune.’ They didn’t use that word, they used prophesizing. Prophesizing means to predict—the past, the present, and the future.” When we asked him to tell us more about Black Hawk, he told us we should look him up in history books—we would find him there.

Black Hawk was a Sauk Indian, a member of a tribe that settled up north on the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois after being displaced from their land in Wisconsin by the French. When thousands of acres of their land were taken by the federal government under questionable circumstances, he led a series of battles in the 1830s to get it back. Although unsuccessful, he went on to write an autobiography that lived large in the American imagination. In the mid-twentieth century, his warrior spirit continued to be evoked in spiritual churches around New Orleans. Oscar remembered that on Thursday nights, people came from all over town to their temple for the Black Hawk services. “With limousines! I mean it was a big thing at the time—a very big thing.”

Perhaps it was more than a coincidence that the name of their pastor was Bishop Wilbert A. Hawkins.

*

If Black Hawk drew people from around the city, it was Bishop Hawkins who hosted them and the spirit. When we asked more about him, Oscar explained, “There were very little flaws in him that you saw because he was a gentleman. He went about his business in an orderly manner. When you got him to laugh and smile with you that was a plus because he was always all about business. He had an office up on top of the church. People would have appointments just like a doctor. They would go there on a Saturday to see him and he would pray for them. He would burn colorful glass candles and give them incense to burn in their house.”

The description is similar to what is found on the literature of spiritual churches in New Orleans. In his work on Black Hawk altars, Stephen Wehmeyer writes, “Through spiritual ‘work’ involving prayer, candles (‘lights’), holy oils, herbs, and the manipulation of saints’ statues or other sacred images, the clergy and congregants of the Spiritual Churches make a way for themselves in the . . . dangerous and hostile terrain of urban New Orleans.”

Bishop Hawkins’s powers were known well beyond the city. Melvin said, “People would come from Chicago, Detroit, California—all over the United States—to this little church on Live Oak Street. And he would prophesize to them. When I was a little boy, during segregation time, they had just as many white people as black people. It was very amazing, yes.”

He was a healer, but he was also a musician. In the spiritual church, healing and music often worked hand in hand. Oscar said, “Pastor Hawkins was the key musician in the church. He was magnificent. He played the organ with the bass pedals, and he also played the drums and the clarinet. He was total.”

In the New World African religions, just as in the Old World, the syncopated rhythms of the drums call on the spirit. When the rhythmic pattern, which is played by a drummer, is just right, the spirit comes strong, fast and furious, and often lasts a long time. This syncopated music is the cradle of what connects the spirit world with people. If it is touching all the people, the pastor and musicians will hold it as long as they can.

Oscar Washington, Photo by Bruce Barnes

Oscar explained, “God says he wants you to praise Him with a joyful noise. When they started playing the music fast, fast, you felt God’s presence. It is like something shot up inside your bones. The congregation will shout and jump around like bees swarming.” Oscar remembered what would happen to Delia. “When the spirit would hit my grandmother, her daughters would say, ‘Oh Lord, look at our mama!’ She would spin around, doing her holy dance with her feet going up and down. God has gotten inside of her and she felt that power.”

Melvin agreed, “It’s just about the same way when you are playing instruments. Something touch me—something gets all in me—and I feel a difference. It’s using me. It gets in my feet. It gets in my hand, and it looks like it takes control of my body, and I could play all night. You have to feel it, but like they say, it’s better felt than told.

“And to feel it, you have to be prayed up. You don’t just get on instruments and think you’re going to feel it. And when I say prayed up, seriously . . . like your poor parents poured their heart out to God for different challenges they had to make in life. You may not know it, but that’s what a lot of these parents had to do. Poured their heart out to the almighty Maker. That’s what my mother did when the disaster of my family happened.”

*

When Melvin was in high school, his father left, and he took on some of the responsibilities his daddy left behind. “I just took the role of . . . his shoes. I didn’t know they were so hard to fill, but I found out. That’s how I started playing music outside the church. I was playing anywhere I could make a nickel.” A few years later, at a hall on the other side of the Mississippi River, he was playing with an R&B band. Cigarette smoke was cloaking the room, and the crowd was calling for the same Ray Charles song, “What’d I Say” over and over again.

A voice came to him: “How can you serve two masters?” He remembered, “Everything—the sound—was blinded out. I stopped the music. I stopped the whole band, and everybody looking at me to start playing again. The other musicians thought there was something wrong with me and I told them, ‘Look this is my last night playing with you all.’ ”

After that night, he only played gospel music.

It was a time when, Melvin explained, “Only two churches had drums—the Spiritual and the Sanctified church. The Baptist church? They’d put you out. They’d run you! It was just the organ and the piano.” It was hard for some people to digest because it was so African in its sense and origins. People who considered themselves to be affluent in society weren’t sure they wanted to embrace drums in church.

But gospel musicians were aware of the different styles and could hear them because different churches hosted gospel programs, and they were broadcast on radio stations all the time. St. Anthony was popular because of Bishop Hawkins and Melvin’s growing reputation from backing traveling gospel groups when they were in town. He said, “The piano player for Ebenezer Baptist Church, Ms. Geraldine Wright, used to come back to St. Anthony—that’s where they seen me playing. She was a gospel singer at this large Baptist church, and the pianist with the Calvacade of Gospel Stars.” She put together a program at Ebenezer with her group and the choir and asked Melvin to back them up, going so far as to have the pastor, Reverend Landrieu, come pick up the drum set.

At the evening broadcast service, the opening hymn was “Jesus on the Main Line (Tell Him What You Want).” Melvin remembered, “When I start playing, look like I put life in the whole church. When they heard the high-sounding cymbals, the whole congregation stood up. The choir was singing and they were clapping.” And then something happened that had never occurred before.

“They did the holy dance in the middle of the floor!”

The deacons of the church said it was a bunch of noise, but Reverend Landrieu asked him to come back to play on Sundays. It didn’t take long for it to become the sound of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. And it was repeated around the city. They were all scrambling to get drummers to play that sanctified beat.

*

As Melvin was making a career for himself as a gospel drummer around the city, Oscar’s dad—Melvin’s older brother—moved out of their home in Hollygrove and started another family. Oscar reflected, “Everything happens for a reason, but when you are young, it is hard to distinguish those things because you don’t know about them. All you know about is love. That is it. When love gets broken, then you are in turmoil.” But throughout the rest of his childhood, his father’s family stayed with him. After school on a Friday, he would go over to his grandmother’s house in Hollygrove. “That is where I spent my weekend. Five o’clock in the morning on Sunday, I would walk with her about four blocks from where she lived to the church for sunrise service. Dark, dogs running out there barking at us, but she kept a grip on me to where I couldn’t break loose or run. It helped shape my life—even now and for the times to come. I had an overall vision about, ‘This is the way you were taught.’ ”

Melvin Washington, Photo by Bruce Barnes

After beating on the gumbo pot for years, Oscar started to play drums at St. Anthony, learning to keep a 2/4 backbeat, which is known as the sanctified beat. He said, “When you play the drums, you are the heartbeat. You are the driving force. You keep everything motorized.” He had to hold the time with the organ, the piano, the tambourines, and the syncopated rhythm of Bishop Hawkins’s preaching. Hit the bass drum—boom. Hit the snare—ka.

Now keep it going—boom-ka, boom-ka, boom-ka, boom-ka—as the congregation sings what it is about to do:

I don’t know what you come to do! I come to clap my hands!

I don’t know what you come to do! I come to stomp my feet!

I don’t know what you come to do! I come to praise the Lord!

I don’t know what you come to do! I come to dance and shout!!

Oscar explained, “I had to adapt to that because I was not that skillful. It wasn’t that easy for me then. When I get a beat or so behind Pastor Hawkins would pick his hands up and let me know, ‘You got to keep up. You got to stay in time. You are losing the time!’ I had to push myself to stay up. He was demanding. By him being such a musician that he was? He wanted it out of you.

“As I got better, I started to feel like I was being taken over by something. A supreme being got inside of me and was making me drum at an ease. I knew where I was going—I was right there with the band. I could stay at this pace and I won’t lose no time because something is controlling me. If you want God to move inside of you, you want to feel him, this is the way that happens. It is such a powerful thing and you are definitely involved whole-heartedly. I was in that zone to where the band can get on my shoulders and they can walk. I can carry them.

“The only way to be possessed is to give it up. You are not losing control, but giving it up. Bishop Hawkins’s services encouraged his congregation to open their heart and soul to the spirit. He knew when you did, it became the great equalizer. The spirit is going to be honest with you. You don’t get it unless you are honest with it, too.” As Delia Washington told Melvin years ago, “You give some, and God make room for you.”

As the city started making room for the drums of the spiritual church in other places, the number of churches started to decline. Bishop Hawkins died in the 1970s, and the congregation he had gathered around the St. Anthony Divine Spiritual Temple spread out. Melvin was playing in Baptist churches. His sisters got married and became Catholic, and their mother followed them. Oscar’s maternal grandmother started her own spiritual church, the Faith in God Spiritual Temple, in a corner grocery in Central City, and Oscar played the drums there on Thursday nights before going on to play with Doc Paulin’s Brass Band and starting the Pinstripe Brass Band.

The legendary Black Hawk services back in Hollygrove faded. We wanted to know more about them, but Melvin admitted, “That’s the part I keep pulling back. Let me see if I can call it up in my memory box.” He wanted us to know, “We didn’t worship Black Hawk as a god, we entertain his spirit, because he lived on this Earth once before.”

*

At St. Anthony Divine Spiritual Temple, it’s dark. They “put the lights out” for the Black Hawk séance. Except for a cross lit up in the center of the altar, the church is illuminated with candles.

Bishop Hawkins enters the room from the front door of the church, wearing a biretta hat with a black cape over a black robe, and walks over the chairs to the front of the church.

The organist is playing softly, and the choir sings the old hymn: “Remember me, remember me, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh Lord, remember me.”

Bishop Hawkins turns to face the altar. Melvin says, “He is down on the floor and raises his hands up to the altar to pray—to ask the Lord to give him the spiritual power that he can back up Black Hawk’s spirit so that he may get the message out. This is not a formality, but this is real. The spirit is using his body. The spirit would reveal through him what danger, happiness, or sadness is coming to you.”

The music ascends again. Melvin starts to play the drums, joining the organ and the piano. Everybody sings loudly:

Meeting tonight, meeting tonight, meeting on the old campground

Ohh meeting tonight, meeting tonight, meeting on the old campground.

Ohh, it’s Black Hawk tonight, Black Hawk tonight, Black Hawk on the old campground

Ohh, Black Hawk on the old campground.

Melvin said, “That was his number.” It’s an old slavery-time song that was sung to let people on the plantation know they were having a service. A campground was often a secret place, out in the woods or at somebody’s house. It continued to be played in tent revivals and was incorporated into the Black Hawk services.

In the middle of the floor, Bishop Hawkins starts to dance. The spirit takes control of his body, and spins him around, his cape flaring. Melvin explains, “He would go around in a circle, just like how the Indians dance their religious dances. He wouldn’t be dancing the blues or nothing like that. It’s a holy dance.”

Melvin remembered, “The music would die down low and they’d sing it low. Oh, it go further now, it really go deep.”

The spirit of Black Hawk whispers to him as he dances down the aisle, calling out people in his congregation, to tell them what’s happening in their lives. “And everything he prophesized,” Melvin says, “came to pass.”

St. Anthony Cornerstone, Photo by Bruce Barnes

An earlier version of this article was published on October 13, 2011, in “How Risky is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts” on the Psychology Today blog.

They’re BIRGing big time in San Francisco. The 49ers are hot, the Giants just won the world series. Not so much in New Orleans, still reeling from the “bounty-gate” scandal, and where people are CORFing all over the place after an 0-4 start and a tough loss to the 49ers. This may seem like rooting for the home team, but it’s actually about something WAY deeper than sports, that bears on everything we do as social/tribal animals. We may like to think that “it’s just a game”, but rooting for our teams is tied to nothing less than our very drive to survive.

From Sacramento to San Jose to the Golden Gate, happy sports fans in the Bay Area are Basking In Reflected Glory. The cry is “WE won.” And from Lafayette to Pensacola, suffering Saints fans are Cutting Off Reflected Failure. They moan about how the Saints lost with “THEY lost.” Note the pronouns. Winners are celebrated in the first person “WE”. They BIRG. Losers CORF, and distance themselves from failure with the third person “THEY”. We associate with winners, and disassociate from losers.

The phenomenon was first formally noted by Robert Cialdini et. al. in a famous paper in 1976 “Basking in Reflected Glory: Three (Football) Field Studies.” Cialdini and colleagues kept track of the apparel of students in psychology classes at seven major universities on the days after football games. On the days after the local team won, far more students were dressed in the tribal—oops, I mean, the team’s colors—than after a loss. And when asked to verbally described the results of the game, far more students said “WE won” after a win, and “THEY lost’ after a defeat.

What’s up here? Clearly these people weren’t consciously thinking about which pronoun to use. This behavior, and language, comes from someplace deeper, more instinctive, more ancient, more tribal…someplace that I would suggest is tied to nothing less than the deepest instinctive imperative of all, to survive. After all, we are social animals. We depend on the tribe for our safety and well-being. When the lion attacks, as a group we’ve got a shot. Alone, we’re lion chow. When our tribe is doing well (economically, militarily, public health, whatever…), our chances go up. When it’s doing poorly, our chances go down. So it feels good to belong to a winning tribe, and not so good—threatening, in fact—to belong to a group that’s losing.

Think about all the ways we support the tribe. We subconsciously choose our views on many issues so they match the views in the groups we most strongly identify with, a theory called Cultural Cognition. We vote for our tribe (political party). We fight to the death for our tribe in everything from gang wars to wars between nations (tribes). In fact, if you look at a lot of the wars and mass violence in recent history they were about nothing BUT tribe; Protestants v. Catholics in Northern Ireland, Serbs v. Croats v. Muslims in the Balkans, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.

Sports are only less violent surrogates of precisely the same human need, to belong to a tribe that’s doing well because as the tribe’s chances go, so go yours. Think about the trappings of sports; the teams are your surrogate warriors, wearing tribal uniforms, the battle grounds (stadia) decorated with tribal flags (banners) and tribal emblems (often fierce animals or warrior figures), the fans painting their faces in tribal/team colors and wearing tribal/team clothing, chanting tribal chants (team songs), fighting long-standing tribal rivalries). The warriors (your team) fight to defend YOUR territory (HOME field,), and you root and cheer and do all sorts of superstitious stuff that you think will affect the outcome on a playing field you in fact have ZERO influence over, and your emotions and actual body chemistry go up, or down, depending on the outcomes. And if everything goes as hoped, the season ends with a championship capped by huge civic rallies in which everyone chants and screams “WE won!”

No. The athletes won. You watched. But it feels like YOU won, because you need to feel like your tribe is successful and dominant, because that literally makes you feel safer. (And if your team lost you go out and trash the city like fans in Vancouver after the Stanley Cup loss last year, or countless other fans in countless other ‘defeated’ cities. Or, worse, you violently attack fans of the other team…or the other tribe.)

As this is being written, the “WE won” BIRGing may be shifting to New York, where the New York Giants are in first place and the New York Knicks have one of the best records in the NBA, while Tennessee fans may soon be doing their BIRGing about basketball and CORFing about football. The stories about all this will run in the sports section, which will somehow separate these ‘pretend’ wars from the other things that separate us into groups, and create conflict…real, violent, destructive conflict. But BIRGing and CORFing is not much different from the polarized closed-minded antipathy people on the right and left feel toward each other, the virulent and often violent hatred people in the orthodox branches of various faiths feel toward people outside their sect, not much different from the antipathy Kikuyus in Kenya feel toward the Luo tribe or the violence between Pashtuns and other tribes in Afghanistan or the angry feelings people in so many nations have toward the people in other countries.

Auburn and Alabama Universities. Hatfields and McCoys. Palestinians and Israelis. They each have their own story line, but at their heart these conflicts, and BIRGing and CORFing, are all part of the same phenomenon. They represent the social human animal’s need for tribal affiliation and cohesion, a belonging which is vital to nothing less motivating than survival itself.

(Go, Patriots! “Kill” the Cowboys.)

Back when my kids were young, I let others draw circles around me. The circles became so constrictive, I could not respire past the breaths I lent my daughters or husband or needy friends, cats or dogs or guinea pigs—once a pair of finches, even, swallowed by our yellow cat. I was living a slow death of spirit and could not get out of the spiral. Growing up at the hands of alcoholic parents did little to prepare me for championing myself. I had no family who understood—no hero stories of great-great-grandpa or survival tales of auntie so-and-so. I didn’t know how to tie a knot at the end of my rope. Odd that I was made the hub of my young family, the spokes and the axle too. I had nothing to draw on and certainly no sense of belonging. I was lost, and I absolutely knew it.

Times can be tough when you’re an artist raising kids. You either move or be moved, so at the outset of this depression, I bolted into action—branched out to new things—even took my young dearies out for a day of local culture at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, where the North Carolina Indian Commission was holding its (then) annual Native American Intertribal Powwow. I guess I expected we’d buy baskets or trinkets or some little doodad for the children—I can’t even imagine now. Back then, I had no sense of belonging to any culture other than chaos really. Baskets or trinkets would have fit just fine in my disposable world. I was lost and I knew it. I just didn’t know how bad.

*

In Dorton Arena, the intertribal drum had space for about fifteen men. The crowd hushed as they gathered around it, sprinkled a dry leaf substance on top, and then said a quiet prayer. Their wool-tipped sticks were padded nicely on the end, and I wondered why: their synchronized strikes, sharp and loud, convinced me they’d break the skin, stretched taut over the drum. How’d they get such a huge skin, anyway? Where’d they get those pretty shirts with all the ribbons? What words were they were singing? And then, it happened: the pounding, the great reverberating heartbeat—the heartbeat, the heartbeat, the heartbeat.

The bass vibrations pushed against my chest with force. Within seconds, I had to sit. Within minutes I was tearing up, and so signaled my girlfriend to watch the kids. I tracked my way up to the rafter seats in the nosebleed area, where I began weeping uncontrollably, without a hint of why. Silly me, I thought. Not a tissue in my purse. No mascara left. What will people think?

They drummed for an eternity. I eventually gave in to the fact that I couldn’t stop listening to the drum or the keen wailing of the men’s high voices. Later I learned they were performing a traditional Calling Song.

During intermission, the then chief of the Coharie Nation (Sampson County, NC), the beloved Tom Carter, God rest his soul, shook my hand and welcomed me home. I met Chief Bass from the Eno-Ocaneechi and John Blackfeather from the Ocaneechi; Chief Yellow Feather from a branch of Tuscarora outside of Williamston; the beloved elder Spotted Turtle from Pembroke; my spiritual mentor, Earl Carter, firekeeper of the Lumbee People; and the beloved Ray Grant and his wife, Jeannie, the givers of my private Cherokee name. I became overwhelmed with the welcome. Everything was coming too fast. I fell back and had to regroup. What was this all about? I thought I was losing my mind. So did my proper engineer husband. So did my little dearies.

*

The little lady in charge of genealogy at the State Archives in downtown Raleigh took a long look at my blue-green eyes.

“You’ll never be able to find your colored roots,” she said.

Her voice lay flat on my heart, bad-stacked kindling at the base of a fire. Her disorderly grouping of sentiment pissed me off.

I said, “Wait. Look past the color of these eyes. What do you see?”

Her sigh unfolded. She dared touching my chin with her index finger. “Let me see this profile then.” Right side, left side, front. “Well, maybe . . . I don’t know,” she said—horse trader in disguise. “Try Cherokee by Blood. Then check Slaves, in fiche.”

And so my chase began. Weeks grew into months as I gathered the names of my elusive coloreds, among them Elluck, my third great-grandfather, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee (1850–52), and Lizzie and Hack, my second great-grandparents, listed on the slave records as young mulattos on the Lewis plantation in Wayne County. Some are buried with their feet opposite all others in the graveyard—their colored soles to the west, facing the place where ancestors go.

It didn’t take too long to discover that mine is the blood of many nations. I am a triracial native North Carolinian. My people are on many records besides the federal censuses: the Johnston County Colored Marriage Register (1870), Wayne County Slave Indexes and Co-Habitation Records, the Cherokee Rolls (1850 and ’52). People in my family have lived from Paint Town in Haywood County to Little Washington in Beaufort County.

I walk carefully among all people because they may be related to me. As a matter of fact, Kathryn Cooper, a Cherokee Italian friend of mine, with whom I had the great pleasure of working on the NC Native American Women’s Prison Project, during which we held the first-ever in-prison powwow in the United States, told me once, “We are all related.” I believe her with my whole heart.

 Times can be tough when you’re an artist raising kids. I know this firsthand. Imagination can go wild. You begin thinking in calico colors. You make tear dresses and elk-skin dresses and ribbon shirts for the men. You tie the ends of fringe for your shawl and say a prayer with each tiny knot. You learn to dance the Women’s Traditional and maybe the Crow Hop if you’re feeling spry. You learn to fix fry bread for your elders. If you’re lucky, you go close in to the sacred fire. You learn some of the language and use it when you can. You get involved with interring remains. You meet the chief of the United Band of Keetoowah Indians from way out in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He teaches you how to go to water. One of his seven council members helps you with the correct pronunciation of your name. You help put old bones back into the earth. You are never the same, never the same, because now, you belong.

Here is what I know: I belong to a Calico Nation. It is a band within the tribe of us. You, out there, are all my relations—and these words? They are my heartfelt give-away gift to you.

***

Excerpted from the novel Trading Moons by Jan Parker

~ AUTUMN (A-ye-li), 1870 ~

~ Elluck:

Me and Emeline tow our six children with us on the way to get married at the Shortfield courthouse. We could not have picked ourselves a better September day. The morning breeze is slick and cool, the way they sometimes are in autumn, yet we are warmed by the slanting sun. It glows upon Emeline’s face, and I swear I have never seen her a bit prettier. She says she ain’t ever seen me more handsome, and I am not ashamed. No, I even strut like a proud peacock then, for Emeline is heavy with our seventh child. We will name him Jimmy if it is another boy, Janie if it is a girl.

I will have to report that the old Magistrate, the one filling out our papers and writing down our names, does not look like a happy soul. It seems he don’t like the dirt under our nails, which we could not budge, no matter that we tried. We are farmers, and we tend the land. Nor does he like our raggedy clothes. Shoo, he should be glad we’ve got some on, and when I tell this to Emeline, she giggles at the thoughts of us, buck-naked in this public place. I laugh with her. She is my girl.

“You are my girl,” I say to her in the entrance hall of the courthouse. The twins are happy, too. They go to hollering and chasing their echoes in circles. This makes the Magistrate mad, and he flitters his papers in the air, like they should be making the only sound.

Emeline smiles up at me nonetheless. She don’t care. She rubs that big old belly of hers and grins. We love one another well, and we love our children, too. We’ve made it through a lot, so why get mad at this one little white man with sausage fingers and a tongue that wanders when he writes? He’s only trying to do a perfect job, and I ain’t getting riled up over it, no sir, not today. Things could be a whole lot worse.

For instance, my picture could be up on the Fugitives’ list posted out front, for committing murder on Tudor Coats, way back in the mouth of that shallow cave. It’s a wonder it ain’t posted, too, seeing as how after the war, we moved to the same county where his daddy has a farm. Old Josiah Coats, now don’t get me started on him and his sad story. I have my own festering blues: inside, I cannot seem to climb out from under the mantle of killing a man. I could not bear the added weight of old Josiah’s sadness too. I mean, look at the way he lost his wife to a broken heart and all. Today is our wedding day. I will be happy, like Emeline. I’m too old to waste such a wonderful day and too young to be so sad.

~ Bettie:

Thank the Lord we’re out of that stuffy courthouse and are sitting by the banks of the Neuse River. I watch my lanky brother’s upper body fall across his bent-up knees. He looks like an old rag doll, letting out one long sigh after another. I am tired of it.

“You don’t fool me a bit, Sandy Johnson. I know what’s up with you. Thirteen year-old fellas do a lot of that heavy blowing.” He looks at me sideways, his long neck craning. I turn to the left and yell, “Hey! You twins best get away from that muddy water. I mean it!”

Sandy makes an ugly face at the back of my hair and juts out his chin. Without turning back to him, I say, “I see you, Sandy Johnson. Don’t forget I got eyes in the back of my head.”

He hates that I got eyes in the back of my head. He don’t like nobody knowing his business. Well, too bad—I already do. I seen him staring over at the Big House a while back, pining for Eliza Lewis to come out. I believe he’s in love with her.

“You got it bad for that gal, ain’t you little brother?”

He sounds out another sigh. The big old baby. Well, I shake my head and holler to the twins again, because I know Mama and Daddy ain’t watching them or none of us. They’re too busy swapping moon-eyes, after the wedding. All this love stuff’s about to make me sick. Folks just ought to cut to the chase, if you ask me.

“Why don’t you go call on her? I’m sure it’d be all right with her mama. Lord knows, she’s seen a lot worse than you, knocking at her door.”

“Bettie, don’t go talking ugly about Eliza or her mother.”

Sandy picks up some sticks and chunks them in the river. I’m sure he’s the dumbest boy on the face of the earth. He can see no more down the road than a rotten rabbit. Why, everybody knows Eliza’s mother owns and operates the only Big House in Shortfield. What’s wrong with saying so? Nothing.

So, I ask Sandy if he is chicken or what, and he says, “No, I ain’t no chicken, Bettie. I—I just don’t know where to begin.”

I shake my head. “Everybody knows that, Sandy. All you do is slick back your hair and go see her. You knock on the door, and they let you in. You kiss her, you marry her, she has your babies. She makes the oldest of the children take care of all the littler ones, while you and her make more. Pretty soon you die, and that’s the end of that. What’s the big hold-up? It ain’t like you’re building a damn barn.”

He winces at my cussing, which pleases me greatly. I do it again. “Damn,” I say teasing him. Sandy draws in his long neck, stands up and walks away.

I swear, lately it seems like my brother ain’t got any fight left in him. Everybody needs fight. Helps level the odds.

~ Sandy:

Bettie don’t understand it all. Oh, she thinks she does, but she don’t. Sometimes, I have to sit on my hands to keep from choking that big fat neck of hers, she riles me so bad. Good thing for her I promised the Lord never to use these hands of mine for evil again. No, Bettie don’t know the half of it, not according to me anyway, not according to the next oldest child, me.

Here’s another fact for you too: more than anything, I would love to call on Eliza. To me, she is the prettiest thing between heaven and earth, with them yellow-brown curls, cinching up close to her head and them blue-green-gray eyes, the kind that haunt you for days after you have fell into the light of them, and her buttery brown skin that sometimes appears to be goldish if you want to know the truth. This makes me think she ain’t of one pure blood, but perhaps many.

Folks call her mother high yella. I heard it means half-dark, half-white. So, do I care? No. I ain’t no federal census-taker. Her daughter’s beautiful to me, no matter. I love Eliza and want to marry her. I want her to have my children, too—oh, but Lord, what am I talking about? I am just thirteen! Why would I want to settle down this early in life? Besides, who in the world would want to have somebody like me as their man? I am the skinniest thing you ever seen, and my neck sticks out like a board, which makes my head look like I’m always bout to ask a question or throw up, one. My nose takes after Daddy’s with its bold hook, and the onliest kind and wayful thing about my features is like Mama says: I got a smile that lights up Heaven.

Me and my future wife’ll probably have to raise our family in the swamp like wild folks, since I don’t know how to build a house or even a little shack. Shoot, I ain’t got the money to buy no house-making boards or nails or shingles, no way. My Daddy ain’t showed me nothing about that kind of thing. He’s too busy hiring folks to work in Mr. Wilbow’s fields, including me, because I am handy with shovels. I am so handy with shovels, Daddy even gave me my own. I keep it shiny and clean and tote it with me nearly everywhere I go, though it is the heaviest thing I have ever put upon my shoulders.

Daddy says we’re lucky Mr. Wilbow don’t mind taking on Indian folks. He took Daddy on, as if he was a white man, and I’m glad of it too, for we was way less well-off than I like to remember. Shoot, we had no decent clothes, nor supplies of food, but now, my daddy works so hard, he has become Mr. Wilbow’s right hand man. He is foreman of the whole three-hundred-acre farm, and he farms it like he knows what’s what. I stay sorely amazed at my father’s ways.

Daddy tells me the best thing I could do is apprentice myself out to the highest bidder, save up my little money till there’s a big pile of it, and then go calling on who ever in the world I want to. Well, of course, that’s Eliza. But wait, I think. What if somebody starts calling on her while I’m gone? What if she starts up with another man? That would be a dread event to me, a blow to my open, loving, kind, Eliza-adoring heart.

All these weighty ideas hit upon me like hundred-pound feed sacks, so I sit back down on the banks of the Neuse and rest. The noise Bettie and the younger ones make, them splashing at the edge of the river and laughing, seems like the distant noise of a county fair, like as you come up on it from afar. Everybody’s having great fun. All except me, gripes my aching heart.

I lay back against the trunk of a great old willow, one that’s seen its better days. It gives off the smell of river snails and is held together by a single, thick, hairy vine, growing up from the bottom and way up into its limbs, exactly like I would do with Eliza, if I could. Oh, how I’d dearly love to be winding through her life, like a vine.

But here I am instead, heating my brains to the boiling point by thinking on Eliza. I tell myself to cool down, rest against this old tree for a while. I tear my eyes away from the gentle roll of the Neuse and glance back over to the picnic blanket, where my Mama and Daddy lay, all squished together on the blanket like bread and butter. They are kissing in love, and I cannot tear my sights off them.

Before I know it, my own tongue has slid outside my mouth and is making waves in the air, practicing for the day I too, might kiss a woman. My head is turning from side to side, like Daddy’s and if this in itself won’t bad enough, all of a sudden, my Little Man gets a mind of his own. I look down and see the problem of his standing tall. I fold up my legs together tight and hope no one has noticed, especially Bettie. I hate she has eyes in the back of her head, and I hate the way she laughs at me.

The truth is, we love our tribes. We give the names of tribes to some of our most iconic and adulated teams—the Cleveland Indians, the Florida State Seminoles, the Atlanta Braves. We regularly organize our most important work activities into teams, and indeed, grouping a few dozen unrelated individuals into operational units is common in our educational, recreational, military, and even spiritual expression and organization. Think also of the esprit de corps of the army company, or of the Jewish teen describing her latest beau as “MOT” (member of the tribe). We observe that teams and tribes are ubiquitous in modern society, whether based on activities, beliefs, or, perhaps most significant, on genetic linkages that are very old. Indeed, scientists are finding increasing evidence that these self-selected group organizations are to be found in all societies and may very well be central in the emergence of our species.

Students of human nature have tended to initiate their studies by considering a person in the island-like solitude decried by John Donne. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasized the individual in the state of nature and celebrated the noble savage and the tabula rasa, while rejecting the concept of private property. He reminded the reader that “you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” These romantic views are contrasted with the conservative Thomas Hobbes, who claimed that the state of nature must inevitably be a war of all against all. In such a condition there would be no arts, no letters, no society . . . just “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

For much of the early twentieth century, the individualistic, alpha male concept dominated the vision of primate social organization. Highly congenial to the authoritarian hierarchy of Western culture, this theory was relatively uncontested by available scientific data. Following World War II, astonishing breakthroughs by Jane Goodall with chimpanzees, and observations by numerous other students began to differentiate the characteristic lifestyles of the various primates. Sharp contrasts and anomalies were observed within the individualistic, male-dominated power hierarchy. Female hierarchies were noted. Murder and warfare were seen. Tool use was observed. A wide array of differing group-focused social and family organizations were discovered in both human and nonhuman primates.

Tribe-like groupings, while still poorly understood, seem to go back at least seven million years after the chimps and ape-men diverged from gorillas. All of these primates, and, indeed, other species, demonstrate examples of altruism and empathy in the wild and in captivity. Preoccupied by the idea of the self-centered alpha male, the quasi-scientific field of sociobiology emerged and found its most crystallized expression in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976). I mention this contested work because it illustrates the enormity of the disagreements and debates among scholars over the competing theories of the selfish gene on one hand and genetically transmitted altruism and tribalism on the other. These battles were intense, extended, and vituperative. During the narcissistically preoccupied 1970s, the proponents of the selfish gene view seemed dominant. But by the late 1990s, more thoughtful scholars, headed by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, seem to have carried the day in winning acceptance of the adaptive phenomenon of group selection and tribalism in the elaboration and transmission of altruism. Indeed, only in the past few months has one of the great mavens of modern biological science, Edward O. Wilson, finally validated the role of group selection as a crucially important element in human evolution, mitigating his previous support for sociobiology. This conflict between the selfish versus group elements in human nature helps us understand the enormous resistances generated by these studies and how deeply they go into the core of Western conventional wisdom.

Another interesting development has opened new vistas in the field. Recently, scientists have progressed in studying the longevity of ancient humans. Using new techniques of tooth analysis, they have learned that for the first several million years of early human existence, survival slowly increased, but life spans beyond the age of fifteen or twenty were rare. Individuals surviving until the grandparental age of thirty years old represented less than 20 percent of society. There was little opportunity for much more closely related family contacts to share practical information and hand down generational wisdom—the components of tribal wisdom—simply because people did not live long enough.

Then, only about forty thousand years ago, things changed dramatically. Longevity rapidly increased, with 60 percent of the population surviving to grandparental age. This change was accompanied by the appearance of the unmistakable signs of modern humans. This included body decorations, grave sites, religious artifacts, musical instruments, and advanced tools. Although the complex factors behind these new developments have not been exhaustively studied, the evidence strongly suggests that cultural changes (and not biological mutations) were responsible. In any event, it is clear that longer lives led to more people, more children, more invention, and better transmission of important technological and geographic knowledge. Grandparents were now around to help with child care, contribute their own children, and help with the invention of the innovations of the Upper Paleolithic. There was a marked acceleration in the rate of evolution, due to the efficiency, interconnection, and creativity made possible by the role of grandparents.

Tribes, however, preceded these relatively recent changes. In their earliest form, they shaped the lives of the Common Ancestors perhaps six or seven million years ago. They initially amounted to little more than a mutual tolerance of other breeding groups in the immediate area and seem to have come into existence as a result of another profoundly significant ape-man development: pair bonding. Charles Darwin had correctly predicted that as more “missing links” were found, the specimens would have smaller canine teeth. He reasoned that human ancestors, unlike baboons, did not require large canines to fight off sexual competition because their groups were somewhat stabilized by the appearance of pair bonding. As predicted, fossils of a teenaged female were found in 1995 and dated to 4.4 million years ago; in addition to evidence for a bipedal gait, the girl also had very small canines, signaling a major change in lifestyle. As Frans de Waal notes: “Of three main characteristics of human society—male bonding, female bonding, and the nuclear family—we share the first with chimpanzees, the second with bonobos, and the third with neither . . . our species has been adapted for millions of years to a social order revolving around reproductive units—the proverbial cornerstone of society for which no parallel exists in either Pan species.”

Tribes integrated with the increasing complexity emerging from pair bonding. It is likely that recognition of fatherhood and other kin recognition was supported by the bonded groups and led to the recognition of wider, in-law or extended family relationships. These innovations contributed vast potential and complexity to the formation of tribes and played a role in larger populations, greater survival, and increased opportunities for cultural innovation. Thus, the unique acquisitions of “cooperative breeding,” strong pair bonding, and the emergence of increasingly complex and cooperative tribes were decisive in the emergence of Homo sapiens.

Yes, we love our tribes, especially because they help make us who we are.