A Points South essay from the Summer 2019 issue
As an evangelist, I have showed “Miracles” to many people by lying about what it’s actually about. Generally, I describe it as a sort of joke, a curiosity. I don’t tell folks that when I first heard Frierson sing about being “only human” I was lonely and confused, and I listened to it so much that the music morphed into a personal manifesto about redemption, as if he had boiled down the obsessive and impossible task of purity into a formula. On first listen, how I feel about “Miracles” would seem ridiculous.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2019 issue.
I’d go to the bar early to watch them sound check—I loved the “check, check . . . check one-two-three, check one-two”—and then I’d sit with Matt while he ate his free meal and ask how he was doing so I could report back to our parents. Was he eating okay? Was he happy? Did he have enough money? He never had enough money and there was always something lost, a jacket or a wallet or his keys, which made me nervous. I had never lost so much as an earring.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Every football coach I ever had saw it.
“You got heart, kid,” they’d say, and I’d grin,
all the way to the end zone.
A Letter from the Editor, Summer 2019.
At the Oxford American, we receive many pitches for stories in the category of “pilgrimages,” or “literary road trips,” or “retracing X’s steps.” I understand the appeal: the traveler can see with her own eyes what inspired her heroes, place a work of art or literature in its proper context, imagine an artist’s life were he still living today.
A Points South essay from the Spring 2019 issue
I hesitated at the sight of the banner so close to my home and was suddenly wary. Weary. I saw the flag and without thinking thought it code: Patriot. MAGA. Make everything white again. Even with all I know about the history of Black people in this country, I’ve never been afraid of the flag. On this day, however, I felt how I feel when I see the Confederate flag: Unsafe.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
I thought they were zany, quippy, tender, uproariously profane. In the crosstalk and hubbub, in the backstories of these women I would learn later from my colleagues, in the atmosphere of the prison itself, there were suggestions of brutal violence. In other words, it was exactly like Orange is the New Black.
A featured short story from the Spring 2019 issue.
I understood that he had a crush on me, because there is no service that deserves a greater-than-one-hundred-percent gratuity, but the money seemed harmless when it came out of his wallet, like something he’d found and was simply leaving for me to deal with. And after a month of this, I realized that I was making fifty extra dollars a week because of this man. I wasn’t attracted to him, but I was fond of him, I guess because he gave me fifty dollars a week for remembering that he liked Heinz 57.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
What it all represented to me was a way of living and thinking that seemed astoundingly unconstrained by convention or expectation. Each of these scenes and bands was highly specific, daring, and individual. Most had no chance to reach a mass audience, and hardly fell over themselves trying to amend that state of affairs. For a small, shy, quiet girl with some roiling ideas about art and politics, their examples were a relief and a revelation.
In his project, Piedmont, Graham Hamby comments on the cycle of land development—creation, disrepair, and abandonment—with photographs of painted murals, abandoned storefronts, and spare landscapes.
A feature from the Spring 2019 issue.
Hancock’s art, which includes paintings, fabricated toys, a theatrical performance, and a graphic novel, defies categorization and pulses with an almost religious intensity. Much of his work has followed the denizens of his alternate reality called “The Moundverse,” where beastly, beautiful Mounds are often attacked by skeletal, sadistic Vegans. There’s a goddess figure named Undom Endgle, who represents the power of Black women as “bringers of color and light,” and TorpedoBoy, a heroic figure in razor-covered cleats. Hancock employs a constantly shifting aesthetic that suggests he can create literally anything.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
We compliment his lovely plumage. “Color doesn’t matter,” Laurel says, even though this is the only quality that strikes a newcomer at all—how pretty that dusty gray one is! What a fine burgundy comb! Foolish are the uninitiated.
With painstaking clarity, Dalton captures scenes from Louisiana bayous, small-town Alabama, and urban centers of Texas, documenting a pervasive sense of isolation across the South and the hope that defies it.
