More on: the south

for Granny For as long as I’ve witnessed the affliction of light washing over your skin like this, as you stand hunched over the pink lip of the sink, scrubbing, Sunday spilling through these small windows of time, lighting up the kitchen like some pancake-flipping ghost, your face has always been peppered with moles. Pray…

IN its December 1977 issue, when Jimmy Carter’s presidency made national media rediscover the South, Esquire magazine published Walker Percy’s non-interview with himself, entitled “Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself.” Chiefly, he grumbled about pesky interviewers who kept asking him over and over again what he thought of the South, of…

OUTSIDE A FINE New Orleans restaurant in the early fifties, a married man asks an unattached woman, “Have you ever driven south of here?” and she says, “South of here, I didn’t know there was any south of here. Does it just go on and on?” Then, without agreeing upon their intentions, the two take off—for…