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A Tear for Bois Sauvage: A Review of Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
It’s not often that the ending of a book makes me moist-eyed. And I can’t ever recall when the acknowledgements did that. But there it was in the final sentences on page 289 of Sing, Unburied, Sing, the 2017 National Book Award-winning novel by Jesmyn Ward: “In closing, I’d like to thank everyone in my →
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Freaks & Monsters – Being an Artist in the South – My interview with Nick Norwood concludes – Part 3 of 3
Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, is also a great poet. Like McCullers, he writes about what he knows – the American South and its eccentricities. In previous segments of this essay we talked about the universal themes in McCullers’ work and her sense →
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What Goes Without Saying – Some Thoughts on Charlottesville
Let me begin with the ‘ought to’s. It ought to go without saying that what happened in Charlottesville at a gathering of white supremacists and white nationalists was an ugly display of our divisions in this current moment. It ought to go without saying that an ideology that believes the white race is superior to →
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Love, Character, and Ordinary People: A Visit with the World’s Greatest Tour Guide
“That’s where the bomb hit,” Shirley Cherry says, pointing to a nondescript spot on the porch of the old Montgomery, Alabama house. The little girl standing on that spot jumped and moved as if it all might happen again. Perhaps another bomb thrown by a racist terrorist upset about the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott might →
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What I Learned From a Day with Emmett Till
In the video, Johnny B. Thomas, mayor of Glendora, Mississippi, looks out over Black Bayou. This is where the body of Emmett Till was dumped following his brutalization and murder in 1955. In a voiceover, Thomas says, in effect, “Things haven’t changed here. A lot of the problems that were here then are here now.” →
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James Baldwin’s Moment and the Danger of Racial Innocence
James Baldwin is having a moment, 30 years after his death. First, Ta-Nehasi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book that drew its inspiration from Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, topped The New York Times’ bestsellers list. Then, a documentary about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Academy →
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Five Reasons to Look Forward to Ministry in 2017
Tired of counting the reasons the sky is falling? Me, too. The traditional metrics for mainline ministry (church membership, finances, number of organists) may be on the decline and the angst about how the nation’s Great Divide will impact the church continues. But let me give voice to the hope that is within me during →
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Going Underground on the Eastern Shore – the new Harriet Tubman park
One of the dynamics that happens in marginalized places, (and I’ll count the Eastern Shore, where I live, as one of those), is that the people who live in them can internalize that marginalization and begin to believe that nothing significant ever happens there. Or we latch on to narrow stereotypes of what the region →
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A Heart in Darkness – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad By Colson Whitehead Doubleday, 2016 320 pages South Carolina seemed enlightened, until you realized that, beneath the comforts and opportunities, the plan was to sterilize the black race out of existence. North Carolina used less subterfuge, resorting to a grisly ‘Freedom Trail’ of hanging black bodies as a way of dealing with →
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