More on: Appalachia

“Literature…can hold up those things that mainstream society doesn’t believe: that Black people are there. One of my jobs is just holding that up to the light so that everyone can see that they’re there.”

Inherited but Never Inhabited Story and the Garden   MY GRANDMOTHER MARY ALICE kept her big, tissue-paged Bible beside her party-line telephone and flipped through it, reading here and there, as she listened in on the stories being told along the Edmond Road. Even now, many of my kin keep Bibles by them the way…

WHEN MY FATHER’S PEOPLE came down from the Appalachians to work in the mills and mines of north Alabama, they brought with them a desire for strong drink, loose women, and visitations by the Holy Ghost. A census taker who interviewed some of these Covingtons noted that they were illiterate, and then also checked the…