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.

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 Letter from the Editor, Fall 2018.

I was struck by a phrase written by Jelani Cobb for the New Yorker, which characterized our former president as “a man who grasps history as the living context of our lives.” This is a seemingly obvious principle, perhaps one many of us learned in grade-school social studies. It’s a theme President Obama has returned to throughout his years in public life. During his 2008 “race speech,” he memorably invoked Faulkner’s famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s a theme that resonates across this issue. 

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. 

A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue

My suitcase is full of batik and baby cologne. One bar emulates the American South. The cover band plays Journey.

A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue.

The dock at Mountain Lake is everything a dock should be—whitewashed clapboard, punctuated by an airy pavilion with a red roof—but if you jumped off it, all you’d hit is earth. There is no water here. No puddles even. Just soil, sandstone, milkweed, sassafras, and the occasional pine sapling. Skirting the periphery of the lakebed, a belt of rhododendron holds back the woods. Jutting into a meadow as it does, the dock resembles a hitchhiker’s thumb. Well, I’m not needed here anymore. I might as well move on. 

A Points South story from the Fall 2018 issue 

In the evenings, after the day’s rain, my grandfather drove through Starke counting cars in the lots of other motels, doing the math and feeling like a winner. For guests visiting family members held in the nearby state prison, home of Florida’s electric chair, he offered a special rate, either out of sympathy or, envisioning the stream of customers who would return once a month, good business sense. (Probably both, my mother says.)

A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue

I've come to have a friendship with a raven in Paris. I call him Cleitus, a name that I picked up from a Dukes of Hazzard episode or Greek mythology. The fact that it could be either reveals much about my raw ingredients, the stuff from which I am made. 

An installment in John T. Edge’s Points South column, Local Fare.

Time at Helen’s raises questions, small and large. Other than great barbecue, and my respect and affection for the woman who owns the restaurant, what calls me to Brownsville? And, more broadly, what drives middle-class Southerners to seek pleasure and solace in places often referred to as joints and shacks?

A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.

Prine radiates a sense of well-being, along with a sort of amused nonchalance toward potential disaster. This is a good thing, because the Coupe, as it turns out, has no passenger-side safety belt. Or rather it has the shoulder belt, but the thing on the seat into which it is supposed to latch is missing. I noticed this awhile back, and it worried me for a few minutes. But then I thought, If you’re going to buy the farm it might as well be in a ’77 Coupe de Ville with John Prine.