For over a year and a half, on the southeast corner of Lake Okeechobee, Sofia Valiente has befriended, lived among and photographed the residents of Miracle Village, an intentional community of over one hundred convicted sex offenders.
A Conversation with Dr. Terrence Roberts and Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe
My commitment to non-violence is not shaped by the actions or attitudes of others. It is my firm conviction that membership in the human family demands that I treat my family members with respect, that I do unto them what I would have them do unto me.
A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue
For the past year, five Vanderbilt researchers and historians, myself included, have collected oral histories related to this site—a Union fort largely built by enslaved and free African Americans, many of whom died during its construction. We’d gathered the stories of descendants of the laborers who built the fort and the soldiers who protected it. That Saturday, we’d unveil our work, though unveil felt like a grand word for what we’d amassed—largely two fifteen-minute video interviews. But there it was, printed just beside our project’s name on the event poster. FORT NEGLEY DESCENDENTS PROJECT: NASHVILLE'S BLACK LEGACIES OF THE CIVIL WAR. The name is clunky, a little wordy. But it has to hold so much.
An installment of Chris Offutt’s Omnivore column, Cooking with Chris.
Big Bad Breakfast’s official slogan is “Lard have Mercy,” and I own one of their souvenir t-shirts. Recently I began to consider the words more carefully. Could it be sacrilegious? How does the Lord feel about lard? Would God be annoyed that his power of mercy is used to peddle apparel? No, I concluded. The phrase is intended as funny, and one thing is certain: God has a sense of humor. Otherwise, where did ours come from?
In his striking interior and exterior glimpses of the funeral industry in the rural South, Tim Hursley’s photos feature shots of errantly parked hearses, casket showrooms, ranks of carved granite, and portraits of rusted silos and warehouses that look, too, by nature of their juxtaposition, like rows of planted headstones.
A featured short story from the Fall 2018 issue.
Our distant ancestor Harriett Moss made a living painting portraits of dead children. But before her career began in earnest, she sketched only cows. It was her husband, Thomas Moss, who painted from corpses, memorializing deceased sons and daughters for their families. People often said Thomas had the constitution for the work because he and Harriett had not been able to have children of their own. While Thomas traveled the countryside—following up with commissions, measuring cadavers that he would reanimate in two dimensions—Harriett was left alone at their farmhouse.
A Points South story from the Fall 2018 issue
“I just have this fear every day that somewhere there’s another load going to the landfill of the only known copy of something that helped change American music,” Darden told me. So he started the Restoration Project, which aims to “collect, digitize, and archive” all of the recordings available from “gospel’s golden age,” roughly 1945–1975. Because there is no reliable discography of extant gospel recordings (creating one is another ambition of Darden’s), Darden and other scholars have trouble even estimating how many songs that may turn out to be.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
“Be careful you’re not romanticizing it,” my husband said a few days later as we talked through the experience. I knew what he meant, but it made me feel lonely that he and I did not agree; I thought this could be the moment when my beliefs allied with a South African’s, but it wasn’t.
In A Southern Myth, Yarbrough’s photos grapple with the persistent tropes, misconceptions, and pressures of belonging in the South, and assume a photographic language where “‘myth’ is used as a poetic device to narrate a struggle for both the artist and the region to maintain a sense of identity.”
A short story from the Fall 2018 issue.
He saw no need to damn a place just on the face of it; he figured there must be a flower blooming somewhere in West Memphis, though he had seen no sign of one, and that maybe East St. Louis had a park where children played tag-you’re-it together while old men read newspapers from benches and spoke of last night’s ballgame.
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
Why was my great-great-grandfather always referred to as “Robert Singleton, the Civil War veteran who lost his leg at Murfreesboro, then went on to become Clerk of the County Court” rather than “Robert Singleton, whose life was saved, twice, by the black man his family had enslaved”? Moreover, what did all of this say about the America Papa so revered?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
I felt many days like I was no one and like nothing mattered and that I couldn’t write myself out of it. I wanted to be someone or something that I couldn’t be. Now I was a guy from Brooklyn in Mississippi. When I sat down to write Gravesend, all of that came into play. I thought of the way we bring the place we’re from with us, no matter where we are. I could’ve called the book Gravesend and not had a single scene set in my neighborhood. I carried the streets with me.
