Another memoir at #8–Willie Morris’s North Toward Home, written in 1967. I read this in the summer of Black Lives Matter and there are plenty of jarring moments as Morris describes growing up white in segregated Mississippi. But he makes it out, first to Texas and then to New York City, and when he does […]
Sarah Broom earned rave reviews in 2019 with The Yellow House. It’s a memoir of one Black family’s experience in New Orleans East, built around the frame of a shotgun house that did not survive Katrina. It’s a dreamy sort of book, and by that I mean elusive. But the storytelling and the characters are […]
“With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be. America is an old house.” (15) 2020 has been the year for a lot of divisive debates, but one of the most interesting for students of history has been the one about dates. Is the United States fundamentally a […]
In 1929, William Faulkner had a keen sense that it was all falling in of its own weight. When he published The Sound and the Fury, now recognized as an American classic, it confused folks more than wowed them. The first section, written from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the intellectually-challenged son of a white […]
While the Washington football team and the Cleveland baseball team were both undergoing public struggles about the appropriateness of their nicknames, my own favorite baseball team, the Texas Rangers,was called out by several national columnistsfor a similar soul-searching. Theodore Roosevelt, (yes, THAT Teddy Roosevelt) made the case for both sides back before there was even […]
Kathy McGinty, a Safety Officer at Johns Hopkins Hospital, gave permission for Heartlands to publish this essay, which powerfully connects all the ways we can’t breathe right now. When the pandemic of 2020 hit the United States, I could not imagine what a startling change it would bring. Working as a Physical Therapist Assistant in […]
The challenge is that we’re inconstant. I am inconstant. I walked in two marches on Saturday here on the Eastern Shore, partly because I haven’t had the words to put to my feelings about my country in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands (and knee) of the Minneapolis police. I had the […]
Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped, derives its title from an arresting Harriet Tubman quote that appears in the book as an epigraph: We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the […]
“I think he got parvo. I think he picked it up out the dirt.” …”Maybe he just sick, Skeet.” “What if it’s in the dirt? What if the rest of them get infected?” —Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward It took some chutzpah for Willie Morris, at the age of roughly 33, to believe that his […]
My piece on visiting Appomattox Court House is up on the blog of StreetLight Magazine. Click here.
