An installment in John T. Edge’s column, Local Fare.
She was a genius, I’ve come to recognize, at recasting defeats as glorious spectacles. Faced with small-town ignorance, fearful of what small-town boredom might wrest from her, she did her best to divert and subvert. Looking back, I see my best self in her flagrancy. And I glimpse what my worst self might have nurtured, had the darker times in Clinton defined my life.
A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue.
I wasn’t sure how to explain to a rising high-school junior why I’d followed her and her classmates to Belize. I’d met Pierre-Floyd a few months before during a tour of Frederick A. Douglass High School, the Ninth Ward charter school where she works, and she’d told me, in passing, that she planned to take twenty-five kids to Belize. Pierre-Floyd said she’d been the first in her family to graduate from college and she thought a high school trip she’d taken to Ghana had helped her earn a degree. She wanted to give her students the same experience.
A short story from the Spring 2020 issue
I tell him goodbye and go wander around the beauty section in Dillard’s. I find the perfume like what I’m wearing on display and I spray some more on. I find a new color of Estée Lauder lipstick that I like and put that on too. It’s called “Bold Innocent.” A woman behind the counter with shiny skin tells me how pretty my complexion is. She wants to give me a free beauty consultation, but I tell her I’m shy and walk away. I don’t like strangers to touch me.
Little Richard, now eighty-two years old, has reportedly been living the last several years in a penthouse suite at the Hilton hotel in downtown Nashville (the Hilton will neither confirm nor deny that they have a guest named Mr. Penniman). I knew someone who knew someone who had his cell phone number, and in June, I cold-called him.
A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue.
History is, in part, the memories we choose to protect and reinforce, to ensure their longevity and influence. In Thibodaux’s protected memory, sugarcane has endured, plantations have endured, Confederate heroes have endured—but not the massacre.
A photo essay supplement to our spring issue
In spite of this palpable, omnipresent sense of loss, or perhaps precisely because of it, the Juancun community in Atlanta has devoted themselves to engaging the city’s larger Asian-American population, in an attempt to share what they feel remains of their cultural identity.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, Greiner has photographed the area around Baton Rouge for his series Land’s End, reimagining the landscape as a potential new coastline, a projection of what Louisiana might look like following another catastrophic storm or the long-term impacts of climate change.
An essay originally published in the Oxford American’s Spring 2010 Southern Food issue, guest edited by John T. Edge.
On making “hit” chocolate in Nashville.
Poems from the Spring 2020 issue.
In bedsheets, we are gravel thrown
from the wheels of a pickup; we are making a mess
of our bodies, so our lives will be less so.
A Points South essay from the Spring 2020 issue
When we weren’t whizzing through intersections, I was trying to read road signs, thinking that their letters, dimly lit by our headlights, would give me some kind of orientation on this ground, relative to other places I knew. The signs were not helpful; this was ground you had to feel to know. I don’t think I could find it again.
A featured short story from the Spring 2020 issue.
She stopped short. The dogs would have passed without noticing her, but Seth had to give them a parting yap. In a second they wheeled around and came straight at her, and for all the rest of her days she would recall the awesome beauty of that movement, like they were drilled, no break in stride or even demeanor, just that smooth silent pivot and their eyes locking on.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Inspired by William Faulkner’s fictional setting of Yoknapatawpha County, Dason Pettit’s photographs capture an almost mythical, not quite fictional version of Oxford, Mississippi.
