First Kiss
Back in 1958, when I was fifteen years old, I made the most critical and important decision in my youthful life. I made the choice any all-American fifteen-year-old farm boy would have made. It was… »
Mule Breeding
“Why don’t you get a tractor? You could get more done.” “Don’t need more done.” “But you could get it done faster.” “Faster than what?” “Faster than that mule goes.” The Yankee machine man really… »
What Are People For?
A review of What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990) “We should love life,” Dostoyevski once said, “more than the idea of life.” It is this concreteness, this rootedness, that seemingly… »
Southward Returning/Sanctuary
Southward Returning To you, Virginia, Tennessee, To Georgia’s red roads, to the past That binds the delta and the sea, Your Southern sons return at last. No more the always going forth From ruin and… »
Nationally Acclaimed, Locally Detested
The Tricentennial celebration of New Orleans has stirred much interest into different facets of the city’s history. The search for the quintessential old New Orleans novel yields few results. The rich culture of New Orleans makes it one of… »
I Heard A Voice
They were standing at the ledge. Their view mirrored a panorama of buildings and smoke stacks. Great edifices, heaving asymmetrically, skewed with monster cylinders venting plumes of expended energy. The farms, the land, scarcely discernible,… »
Donald Davidson Revisted
Mel Bradford has argued that no individual has exerted more influence upon the development of a profession of letters this century in the South than Donald Davidson. The poet, essayist, and social critic is well… »
Making the Southern Canon
A review of Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. Ed. by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Greenwood Press, 1987. A few years ago, before I had been sold upriver to Clemson, some… »
The Sensory Poetry of Dubose Heyward
Dubose Heyward once described himself as a “synthetic Charlestonian.” Having been part French Huguenot and part English Cavalier, he was a direct descendant of South Carolina’s Thomas Heyward Jr., a signer of the Declaration of… »
Save the Souls of the Lords of Gray– in Eleven Stanzas
Oh! Save the souls of the Lords of Gray. Donned their swords and scabbards. Rode into cause valiant to pray. Ever still they cease from marching forth; Holding their cause against a vile North. Men… »
