Thomas Jefferson, Pharrell, and more notes on the state of Virginia
Now, when strangers ask me where I’m from, I say, “Virginia Beach. We gave the world Pharrell. You’re welcome.” Pharrell was the black cosmopolitan force that proved my home wasn’t country. He was a living rebuke of what Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, his only book, in which he says you would “never . . . find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”
A Points South essay from the Summer 2019 issue
I have wanted to visit this house for years. Like many North Carolina kids, I grew up with the broad strokes of Thomas Wolfe’s story, the prolific, small-town genius who became one of the most revered writers of his generation. I lived in North Carolina for most of my life, but I never took the opportunity to visit. Not enough money, not enough time, too much to do: that’s an old story, I know, and a true one. It is also true that we seldom value the places where we live, not enough anyway.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
She’s an 1897 Steinway Model A, with flowerpot legs and a music stand that rises from the keys in a tangle of filigreed wood. When I first arrived, we glanced at each other across the room for a while, me with idle hands, her with tantalizing hinges. I couldn’t resist. I hoisted open the heavy lid.
In his ongoing series I’m Right Here, Jake Harrison Miller explores his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, through thoughtful stills and surprising portraits of neighbors, family members, and strangers.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2019 issue.
I’m too old for bedtime stories, too old to be writing words like these, maybe too old for love songs. But for me, bedtime songs, my body, and my truck are physical links between New York and Mississippi, between a home I was given and a home I made.
A poem from the Summer 2019 issue.
and I forgot to eat
I’m banqueting on a spice
that’s not on this table
Zora Neale Hurston’s lessons in writing a love story
At one point, sitting in the Beinecke Library, I closed my eyes and let my fingers fall on random sentences of Hurston’s masterwork. Word for word, sentence for sentence, Their Eyes Were Watching God was damn near flawless.
In Amanda Greene’s series, Humid and Tiresome, the artist delights in finding surprising objects in unexpected places.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2019 issue.
Holy Mother Lode. I rose straight up out of the driver’s seat and fairly levitated for the next six minutes/miles. New Grass on the radio is rare and precious enough, but where was I headed that very morning? Up to Bristol, Virginia, and then a winding ramble northeast to speak about writing, heading to Roanoke via one of my favorite roads: U.S. Route 11, a.k.a. the Lee Highway. Cosmic? You bet!
An installment in John T. Edge’s Points South column, Local Fare.
Costumes transform their bar into a theatrical production, Feizal said to me that day in the jungle room. “You watch someone put on a Big Bird suit and then you ask, what will the Big Bird do? You give two banana costumes to two guys and then stand back to watch what happens. Pretty soon the dude at the bar in the banana costume sees the dude in the booth in the banana costume. They hug. And they start buying each other drinks.”
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An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
To him, my life as an eager, emerging writer was entertaining—inspiring maybe—and our excursions were his break from mind-numbing corporate life. For me, it was fun to test my knowledge of the dining scene and be celebrated for it.
