I’ve been thinking about this image a lot lately.

Called “Two Minute Warning,” it was taken on “Bloody Sunday,” 7 March 1965 by the great James “Spider” Martin, a photographer for the Birmingham News who encamped with the Movement in Alabama for a month in early 1965, from the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion in February to the end of the March to Montgomery on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th.

The famous image is of an encounter poised on knife’s edge, and I scarcely need to spell out why it is so especially relevant in January 2026. The power-dynamics within the image are all-too familiar at the moment: the image is weighted to the left side, suggesting the disproportion between state power and non-violent resistance, i.e., the tactics of “massive retaliation” favored by white segregationists and, mutatis mutandis, the current US Administration. This uneven weighting of the frame means that the middle section of the photograph is not exactly the middle, but slightly to the right. But it is that section—the locus of potential action—that carries the uneven weight of the whole image. The few yards of empty space of US 80 between Alabama State Troopers on the left and marchers from SNCC and SCLC on the right presage an encounter of historic consequence. Beyond those few feet of asphalt, anonymous onlookers and amateur photographers stare imploringly across that vacant margin. Unknowingly, they look into Spider Martin’s lens as if some answer might be found there. All the spectators pictured in the background are all white, hands in pockets (both like and unlike Lewis himself), gazing across the protective barrier of Alabama State Trooper vehicles (except, of course, for the two intrepid photographers, who look into the scene in a different way.) They also seem to interrogate us, the viewers of the image: will we be anonymous spectators, too? To what illusions of protection will we choose foolishly to entrust our own hopes?

That empty space holds, in that moment, a terrible tension. What will unfold in those few feet of US Highway in the ensuing two minutes will determine, forever, the lives of those depicted here. But it will also determine, forever, the future history of the United States.

The contrasts in the image highlight the jarring oppositions between belligerents in a contest for an American future: forward motion on the left, holding fast on the right. White on the left, Black on the right. Violence and non-violence, power and powerlessness, force and persuasion, oppressor and oppressed. What took place two minutes later (or less, since the Alabama authorities felt no compulsion to keep their word) we all know now. Standing beside John Lewis, Hosea Williams knew already: he casually but portentously holds his nose as if in anticipation of the noxious fumes of tear gas to come, or at the stench of moral rot in the air. The story is so familiar because so predictable, so characteristic of a chronic American impatience with non-violence. We often tend to think history is driven by some blind force of inevitability, but Bloody Sunday did not have to turn bloody. It was a choice.

Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Patrol—haughty index finger raised at the marchers, his billy club poised suggestively as a totemic instrument of masculine power—called out to the marchers, telling them to turn back. It is now one of those great ironies of history, intelligible really only in retrospect, that the wrong group was being told to turn back. The distance between the toe of Cloud’s left Oxford shoe and the right toe of Hosea Williams’s measures the distance between American possibility and American reality. Each inch marks the possibility for a metanoia, a turning-around, each inch an opportunity refused. It is not the marchers who needed then to turn back and disperse, but the State of Alabama. Dr. King had written two years earlier from Birmingham City Jail that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” About 1500 years before that, St. Augustine wrote that the lust for domination is so comprehensive and self-destructive that it ends up dominating those who practice it—so much so that one would voluntarily choose his own bondage to that lust, over genuine freedom from it.

The most arresting figure in the image is that of John Lewis, then barely twenty-five years old, in a necktie, tan trench coat, and backpack. The future nineteen-term Congressman from Georgia’s 5th District was in 1965 the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He would suffer a skull fracture shortly after this iconic photograph was taken, and would bear scars from the incident for the rest of his life. His outfit for that day in Selma became so iconic that Lewis wore a recreation of it for appearances at San Diego Comic-Con from 2015-2017, when he led a march of over 1,000 children from the room where he spoke to the stall in the book hall where he signed copies of the three volumes of his graphic novel, MARCH.

Like any truly great photograph, there is enough in this one image to go on for hours or days, which would be worth doing. But what has held my attention for the last year or so has been the backpack that John Lewis is wearing. I know that whatever power of spirit enabled John Lewis to hold his ground in the face of certain doom, wailing billy clubs and swirls of tear gas, was an internal motive force, the very definition of fortitude that was for Lewis a habit of life and not simply one exceptional moment of heroic courage. The backpack he wears is a testament to his practical foresight: he expected that he would be put in jail for a while, so he packed something to eat, something to read, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. But for me it is also a kind of avatar for the encouragement of others that he must have needed to carry with him in order to withstand the brutal onslaught that he knew was to come. I wondered what was inside that peculiar and consequential piece of luggage. In an interview for Time in 2017, Lewis talked about that backpack:

But he did not mention to Time what those two books were. Surely, I thought, they held some clue as to what Lewis was thinking about then, some idea of the intellectual universe his particular star was orbiting in at the time. I thought they might provide insight into some of the ideas that drove him—and other marchers as well—to put their lives on the line. Ideas that might still be beneficial to us.

If he withheld it from Time. he did reveal to others which two books he took for the journey: The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter, and an unnamed book by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. It is a curious syllabus for a protest march, but this particular intellectual intersection may be a lot more fertile than it may seem.1

In interviews, Lewis did not specify which of Merton’s books he carried with him in his backpack. I have read differing accounts that identify the book as New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), or as his memoir The Seven Storey Mountain (1948).2 In theory it could even have been Seeds of Destruction (1964), whose subject matter aligns more with the circumstances of the Selma movement.3

But it’s the intersection of the two books I can’t quite get out of my head, and—if they were that significant for Lewis—probably shouldn’t. While it’s logical to put Seeds of Destruction in conversation with The American Political Tradition, it is more provocative, if counterintuitive, to put the latter in the same room with New Seeds of Contemplation. What could the contemplative life have to to with American politics? I am generally a believer that whenever one is tempted to ask, “yeah, yeah, but what does this have to do with X?” the answer is almost certainly “not nothing.”

The weirdness of that question and of the juxtaposition of the two books may be a clue as to what is missing from contemporary political imagination (and theological imagination). That we would instinctively want to segregate the contemplative life from American politics is one very good reason why we should consider imagining them together.

Hannah Arendt famously identified one fundamental quality of fascist or authoritarian regimes as their will to dehumanize its subjects. She wrote that “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.” Dehumanization, it is worth pointing out, is not just a feature of totalitarian regimes but is “perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy.” It is much harder to dehumanize someone whom you imagine to be created in the image and likeness of the living God than someone you imagine simply to be as a something, mere matter, or a ‘monster.” So perhaps they are not that separate at all: the contemplative strain in political imagination could, at least, prevent us from such functionalizing of human being.

I have sometimes described A Deeper South as the result of having found myself standing in the middle of an intersection at the moment of a head-on collision between Flannery O’Connor, St. Augustine, and James Baldwin. But intersections and potentially generative intersections of this kind are far too provocative and life-giving to be kept to oneself. And Lord knows the present moment calls for something—anything—in the direction of a more concerted effort towards putting together things and people that do not seem on the surface to belong together. An effort, that is, towards the recognition of shared human dignity during a regime for whom the very concept of “humanity” is an inconvenient obstacle.

Which is why I want to introduce a new shared adventure: BACKPACKING with A DEEPER SOUTH, a six-week online gathering in which you and I get into the same room with Thomas Merton and John Lewis and Richard Hofstadter. What might come of such a get-together? Who the hell knows? But I do know that it will not be boring or a pointless waste of your time. I am certain some unexpected guest will make a surprise appearance and join the conversation. I can almost guarantee that Augustine and Baldwin and O’Connor will show up; they always do.

Starting Sunday February 8, probably 8:00ish ET, we will meet once a week via zoom to talk together, and see each other’s faces. I will share the details later,4 but for now know this: I really want you to consider joining this conversation, because I strongly believe that the current discourse around American political culture—especially as it involves religious, particularly Christian, life and thought—is woefully under-resourced. American Christianity, such as it is, is deep in the shitter right now, which may be for the best. The latest manifestation of the culture of death in the form of American Christian Nationalism is hopelessly moribund. It’s the equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade knock-off painting of Jesus laying hands on Donald Trump.5 Why settle for Thomas Kinkade when you can have Caravaggio?6

I believe the broadly catholic Christian Tradition (which is both what I know least poorly and the faith to which I adhere) has much, much more to say about this present moment than just the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes—so eloquently complex in their deceptive simplicity—are enough on their own, I know, but as my friend Stanley Hauerwas says, “because it is so basic, we can lose any sense of the extraordinary nature of Christian beliefs and practices." I do not want us to lose that sense, especially right now. It does not make any difference to me if you are Christian or not: we all have something to learn from 2000 years of reflection on the extraordinary simplicity of the Christian mystery and its implications for this, and every, moment. This conversation demands all people of good will and in good faith, not simply people who identify or used to as Christian. I know for a fact that Rav Abraham Joshua Heschel has a very important part in this conversation as well.

I do not have the answers to anything, but I have an idea of where to find out what the good questions are. So I am inviting you into a vision of how to be an engaged citizen and also (possibly even because) a serious religious or even spiritually-minded person7 through conversation with Thomas Merton, John Lewis, Rav Heschel, and others. If you are interested in joining, please send me a message or email me:

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I mean:

We are definitely going to be talking about St. Francis, too.

(There’s an Easter egg in there for you if you make it to the end.)

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On the other hand, there is one outfit that, for me, represents the gold standard of bookshops, the veritable Valhalla of printed matter: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.

There are many reasons to praise Square Books, but chief among them is its location in the very heart of a quintessential Southern college town that also happens to be a literary mecca, thanks to its most famous writer-in-residence, Old Count No ‘Count, William Faulkner. It’s also a magnificent place in which to lose yourself for a couple of hours. Contemplating the huge wall near the entrance devoted just to Mississippi writers is sufficient to reduce to dust whatever idea you may have had of Mississippi as a cultural backwater. No other state can boast such a roster of literary giants, nor such a distinctive literary tradition. Pound for pound, Mississippi is the most culturally generative state in the country, and second place is not even close. If you could draw the world of bookstores like the map of a Southern city, Square Books would be the courthouse.

The work that Square Books does on you begins as soon as you walk in the door. It is clear you are here not simply to purchase (or merely browse) product. You are here to be changed. The titles on the shelves exude gravitas, but the store utterly lacks the pretentiousness which it could legitimately claim if it wanted to. But it doesn’t. The motto of North Carolina could just as easily serve as the motto of Square Books: esse quam videre, “to be rather than to seem.” Its excellence consists in part in that it knows what it is, and knows it has nothing to prove to anyone. It simply is the most wonderful bookstore in the world, because it exists neither for appearances nor for honors nor for magazine spreads, but for the human creatures who make up the reading universe, especially those in Oxford, Mississippi. Unlike your average chain bookstore, it is not all things to all people; it is a very specific business in a very specific place with a very specific history.

The entire Square ecosystem—which includes the HQ itself, a kids bookstore, a rare bookstore, a used bookstore/events space, and Thacker Mountain Radio, a weekly variety show on public radio featuring musicians and authors—is built on a love of books, the people who read them, and the people who write them. The business of Square Books is driven by nothing more than a genuine desire for people to read.

Which brings me to the very best thing about this place: the people. Since its founding in 1979 by Richard and Lisa Howorth, Square Books has been instrumental in cultivating and nourishing a thriving and talent-rich literary community in Oxford. If, as I mentioned last time, booksellers were canonized, General Manager Lyn Roberts would unquestionably be a candidate for sainthood. I could go on and on about this place, but you really should make a pilgrimage there for yourself, if you can. Suffice it to say that there are a hundred reasons why I chose it as the first stop on the ADS Book Tour in 2024. I am honored to present Square Books to you as the first ADS BOTM. Shop away, friends!

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Oxford may have gone on to its heavenly reward, but there remain among us those way-stations of paradise in this world, where pilgrims may find our rest from the incessant deluge of intellectual flatulence that it is increasingly difficult to escape in this vale of sorrows.2

I’m going to get right to the point, but if you want to read my rationale and the backstory, it’s further down.

I am a huge fan of bookshop.org, one of the best things ever to hit the internet. It is an online bookseller that supports independent bookshops. Imagine buying books online from people who love and know a lot about books instead of some billionaire who neither reads nor needs your money. Local booksellers do both, and the brilliance of bookshop.org is that a portion of every sale goes to a local bookshop, and the site has raised over $42 million in support of these beloved institutions. So you can support local booksellers even if you can’t visit them in person.

And what’s even cooler than that? A Deeper South is an affiliate of bookshop.org, which means we have our own storefront on the website. You can buy any book you want through the ADS Storefront, and proceeds from ever sale will support both ADS and one special bookstore.

So next week, we are rolling out a new feature at ADS: Bookshop of the Month!Each month, we will spotlight one bookshop at the ADS Storefront at bookshop dot org. If you haven’t already, subscribe to The DETOURIST to hear who the first ADS BOTM will be!

There is also a special section devoted to the books that have shaped and continue to shape the ADS journey. You can browse the titles and order any of them for yourself, if you want. I am updating this list all the time.

The beginning of the ADS journey coincided with the demise of the South’s greatest bookstore in 1997, which seemed to presage doom for the independent bookselling business—and maybe the Atlanta I knew and loved along with it. That was before the internet really got going, and since then the prospects for bookshops have seemed more dire by the day. The news across publishing has not been good at all for several decades: local newspapers have been gutted, national newspapers consolidated and bought out by billionaires, the print magazine industry rendered practically non-existent apart from in grocery store checkout lanes, book publishing increasingly monopolized by a handful of corporate behemoths, small independent presses’ budgetary limitations now requiring authors to become marketing whizzes, the general attention span of the once-reading public dwindlinmg to mere nanoseconds, and on and on. And I haven’t even mentioned amazon.

In 1997, John Hayes and I began to witness the “doughnut hole effect” in Atlanta and other major American cities, through which ordinary life had virtually vacated the urban core for the exurbs and suburbs. I did not see then how this outward trend was connected with patterns of white resistance to integration going back decades, including the design of interstates themselves and the white flight they facilitated.

At the same time, habits of regular commerce were becoming homogenized, as the exchange of goods and services shifted from city centers to interstate exits and the new communities that grew up around them. In the late 1990s what was disappearing were those expressions of local character in the form of small businesses like Oxford Books, Aleck’s Barbecue, and many other casualties of Atlanta’s rapid outward expansion, its transient population, and its chronic amnesia. Atlanta was quickly becoming No Place, a commercial center without any real identity. And the same thing was happening all over the country, especially in the South.

But then a funny thing happened. Once people realized what we had forsaken, we began to realize what we had in the first place, and willingly given up for something that seemed better to us at the time. Some people began to understand that a world built entirely around cars might not be that great after all, that walking to your local pub or grocery store or cafe is actually a real advantage, and that pedestrian life is in fact pretty essential for the creation of community. Many people realized that there is a connection between the built environment and human social health—to say nothing of how good walking is for your physical and mental well-being. We realized that buying books at a Barnes & Noble in Marietta is not a qualitatively different experience than buying books at one in Spokane or El Paso. Which, of course, is the point for that McDonald’s school of capitalism: you visit any one of these chain stores anywhere, you know what you are getting.

It turns out that a lot of us don’t exactly want to know what we are getting, or at least don’t want more of the same identically repeatable experience that American capitalism excels at.

Slowly, life began to return to the city centers. And bookstores have been a huge part of that trend. In 2024, the American Booksellers Association reported a 31% increase in new bookstore openings compared with the previous year. Last year, 247 new independent brick-and-mortar bookstores opened for business. And only 37 closed (a 61% decrease from 2023). It would have surprised me in 1997 to know that thirty years in the future indie bookstores would be experiencing something of a revival.

I can confirm from my own wanderings around the Southeast that this is true. Atlanta now has a new independent bookshop in Virginia-Highland, to go along with the stalwart A Cappella Books in Decatur. New Orleans can boast an outstanding new Black-owned bookshop in The Faubourg Marigny. A new independent, community-owned bookshop opened in the heart of downtown Durham, North Carolina several years ago, which would have been inconceivable in 1997. There are thriving bookstores in Birmingham, Memphis, Charleston, Augusta, Chattanooga.

I hold it as a sort of religious duty to patronize the local bookshop whenever I am in a new place (if there is one). And there are some truly outstanding ones in the South, including what is arguably the best bookstore in the country. I wish I could visit them all, all of the time. In the meantime, there’s bookshop.org.

P.S. They also have an app if you like reading e-books, and they have an amazing service for listening to audiobooks, but I’ll talk about that more later!

But my last attempt to start something new here in late September of last year ran into a different kind of roadblock. Not Pete’s usual ADHD-induced meandering from one big idea to the next; in this case, a much bigger and more deadly obstacle came across my path. The first and so far only edition of Open Tabs concluded with “I’ll be at The Brooklyn Book Festival in New York this week, so if you’re in the area, holler!” In retrospect that was an auspicious and even foreboding closer.

The following day — Thursday, September 26 — I flew up to New York for a book event with several other authors as a satellite event of the Brooklyn Book Festival. I wasn't sure it was even going to make it out, because it had rained so torrentially the night before. Another, bigger storm was coming and the last thing I really wanted to do was to leave my family to fend for themselves in what could be a major disruption, but probably wouldn’t be, since this is Asheville and that sort of thing doesn’t really happen here.

That of course, is how almost everyone in Asheville thought until September 27. After the Brooklyn Book Event on Thursday night, I returned to my hotel room where I witnessed scenes of unfathomable devastation in Asheville and in western North Carolina. My wife and four kids were still at home in Asheville without power, water, or Internet, basically cut off from the rest of the world. And that’s speaking only in terms of communication; for several days thereafter, Asheville itself was literally cut off from the world geographically. There was no way in and no way out. I-26 and I-40 were both latticed with trees for miles in every direction. Near the western and northern borders with Tennessee, there was no I-26 nor I-40 to speak of at all. Whole segments of them had washed out and fallen into the Pigeon River and the Nolichucky River.

In my solitude at a chain hotel in Brooklyn, I spent most of my free hours either watching The Weather Channel or taking advantage of my suddenly-not-taken-for-granted Internet connection to learn more about what was happening back at home. Paradoxically, although I was hundreds of miles away from home, I knew more about the scene in Asheville than my family who was stuck there did. At one point, during one of those rare windows of opportunity when a working cell signal was to be had, my eldest son called me frantically on the phone.

“Dad, Dad,” he said.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Where are your old pipes?” he asked. “We are dressing up as pirates and we need them!”

At the time, they were in a state of suspension, unaware of the magnitude of what was unfolding outside. They could hear the sound of not-that-distant trees cracking and falling, but when I was able to get through to Charlie that Friday, he reported — in his classically understated fashion — that they “just had some rain.” Without the standard modern conveniences, they were returning, if only for a little while, to a more humane mode of existence, playing games by daylight and retiring with the sun. Only when they were finally able, on Saturday, to venture out, did the scale of devastation become manifest.

Back in New York, I exchanged messages with people who had relatives in western North Carolina they couldn’t locate. I ventured out across the Brooklyn Bridge in an ominously saturated weather-scape, but the impact of Hurricane Helene was not apparent on anyone up here. When I checked into a new hotel across the Hudson in lower Manhattan, the receptionist asked where I was from.
Oh, that’s such a beautiful area, she said. Not right now, I thought. The news about Helene, insofar as it was on anyone’s minds that morning, obviously didn’t land on the average person in New York the way it did on me.

For the next several days I carried it around like a kind of secret, incommunicable datum of information, but in reality what was gestating within me was more like an actual existential crisis. And for once that Saturday evening crisis was not the University of Georgia football team getting clobbered by the University of Alabama, in a game that I was not really watching nor even caring about, as I sat alone again in a New York hotel room. (Although in retrospect, the totally unnecessary provocation that concluded the book event the previous Thursday turned out to be a portent, when one member of the audience punctuated the Q&A session with a closing Roll Tide!)

That comment alone might have been enough to question the point of anything. I had, after all, come all the way up here on my own dime for a book event, in support of my so-called career or my “vocation” as a writer. As the Dawgs got hammered in the background, and as the floodwaters only seem to rise higher and higher on my 15-inch laptop screen, I started to ask myself, what the hell am I doing with my life? Yes, the book was important to me and the fruit of many years of labor. But what could possibly be worth the price of leaving my family at a time when I should have been with them? Not that they needed me; they were perfectly fine on their own, probably even better off not knowing what was going on outside the rest of the region, to say nothing of being free of my own unwelcome sense of drama and disorder.

After four days stranded in New York City (for the second time in a year), I finally made it out on a flight to Atlanta, borrowed my dad’s car, hitched a rented U-Haul to it and loaded it with supplies, and drove back on the dark, barely-cleared highways back into Asheville, listening to Kris Kristofferson, who had just died the day after the storm. From the South Carolina line north, the margins of the interstate narrowed with the encroachments of a sideways forest, rough-cut trunks extending up to the edge of what little traffic there was. Hundreds of fresh circular wounds, beaded with still-running sap looking for a non-existent vessel, silently faced into the roadway.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, I talked to many artists. To a person, every single one of them was confronting fundamental questions about themselves, where they were in the world, and what they were doing with their lives. I wasn't the only one facing an existential crisis. But it sure as hell seemed at the time that writing was not in my future in any capacity. What good had any of this done me or my family? It came over me like a mudslide: what are you doing with yourself?

For good while after that, I decided to hang it up for good. I deleted most of my social media accounts, quit reading the news, stopped accepting new subscriptions here on Substack. The events that I had slated for October and November were all canceled, and a future I had imagined for myself suddenly no longer existed.

There is another dimension to this story that has to do with the book itself and its aftermath—that is, the launch, the book tour, what I learned about what I had written, and especially what I learned about myself during that time. All of these factors mashed up together led me to the inevitable conclusion that that road ahead I thought I had wanted to explore since the fourth grade, was now a dead end.

I am aware that wealth and privilege have insulated me from some forms of misfortune, and have enabled me to live in a neighborhood that was far less vulnerable to destruction than many people who have fewer resources than I do. I also know that hurricanes don’t care about your feelings, or your tax bracket, or your race. This is one reason, maybe, why we like to anthropomorphize major hurricanes, as if to attribute personality, motive, agency, even malice, to them: because it feels less true to speak in the detached scientific idiom of High Meteorology than to say that Helene just does not give a shit who you are or where you live.

The season following Helene’s arrival became for me an intense season of abandonment, of subtraction, of renunciation. I came to believe what a friend of mine had told me a few years before: you’re only really free from your own art when it ceases to matter to you, when you are beholden to it no more, when it has no possession over you, when you are indifferent to it. A year on, though, I think that way of putting it places the artist at the center, when it is the art that wants to become free from its creator’s need to possess it. It is probably more true to say that your art becomes free itself when you (as the artist) admit that you do not understand it.

As a young boy in Presbyterian Sunday School class, the story of Noah and the Great Flood were always delivered with one particular moral endgame in mind: the beautiful rainbow that appears in the end of the story. It will all work out, the message seems to be. Everything is going to turn out alright. Live just long enough, or read Flannery O’Connor, you take your pick: either one will breed this idea out of you eventually.

Even better: witness up-close the aftermath of a devastating hurricane and flood in a part of the world utterly unversed in this particular language of natural disaster. Or imagery: the visual language of major floods tends to be most arresting and provocative when it traffics primarily in high water, new lakes where there once was just sky, rooflines stranded in an apocalyptic seascape, semi trucks and houses swept along in an indifferent current, raging waters eating away at what seemed like solid earth. Less prolific, perhaps, are the images of what comes after.

In those Sunday School classes and the world they constructed for the imagination, the abiding images of the Noah story were also the most highly promoted ones: happily twinned and always-smiling animals, of course (with nary a mention of the staggering amount of piss and shit they must have generated in that ark), the solitary dove touching down from a most consequential flight, or—most of all—the lone ark stuck on Mount Ararat, high and dry (as with the animals, these depictions came with a similar non-interest in the logistics of getting the entire animal kingdom down from there).

It turns out—unsurprisingly, of course—that my Sunday School teachers (God bless them) left at least one very important detail out of their (tragically, as it turns out) sappy accounts of the flood in Genesis. (To be fair, Genesis itself is not exactly forthcoming on the subject, either). What they left out in the prejudice towards the rainbow is the utterly inconceivable amount of shit and debris and toxic sludge and human wreckage a great flood leaves behind. Half a year later, it was not that different in Asheville. There are, even now, vestiges of destruction that will probably never get cleaned up. Hell, the McDonald’s in Biltmore Village just started to rebuild this week. It wasn’t that long ago that a belly-up tractor trailer still festered in its parking lot. And across the street, the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls remains surrounded with a chain-link fence, closed for not-even-God-knows how long. It is its own sort of salutary reminder that certain theodicies—those quaint and pious justifications of suffering and natural disaster are henceforth off limits. That that way of reading the story of the flood in Genesis is and never was any good.

The flood in Genesis may have lasted for 150 days (or more), but the recovery of the earth unquestionably took a whole lot longer, probably decades. There is a valuable lesson here for those with ears to hear: you can have your rainbows, but not without the shit. Grace does not leave you without scars. As O’Connor said, “even the mercy of God burns.”

The week of Helene, the lectionary readings from the Old Testament were from Ecclesiastes. The day of the hurricane’s arrival in Asheville, the text read:

One generation passes and another comes,
but the world forever stays.
The sun rises and the sun goes down;
then it presses on to the place where it rises.
Blowing now toward the south, then toward the north,
the wind turns again and again, resuming its rounds.
All rivers go to the sea,
yet never does the sea become full.
To the place where they go,
the rivers keep on going.

That Monday, the already scheduled reading for our homeschool was from Job 38, God’s unanswerable rebuttal to Job, when

The Lord addressed Job out of the storm and said:
Who shut within doors the sea,
when it burst forth from the womb;
when I made the clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling bands?
When I set limits for it
and fastened the bar of its door,
and said: Thus far shall you come but no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stilled!

At the same time, as all of these crises — some real, some imagined — were orbiting, my own path was suddenly latticed with figures who seem to understand this at a very deep level. A letter from Nick Cave to a fan tempted by cynicism began circulating again. A conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper about grief and gratitude blew into the middle of the road. And at the same time, the once seemingly irresistible forces of my own family history that had silenced or marginalized sorrow had suddenly lost their power. There seemed to be grief on every side, and no way of fending it off. And about this time, a passage from Charles Péguy, who, days before he was killed in the early days of fighting in World War I, had a sort of revelation, maybe a premonition, about the nature of joy:

“We enter here into an unknown domain which is the domain of joy. A hundred times less known, a hundred times more strange, a hundred times less ourselves than the kingdoms of sorrow. A hundred times deeper and, I believe, a hundred times more fruitful . . . . Blessed are those who one day will have some idea of it.”

What Helene has strangely left me with is a palpable, if still elusive, sense of the mystery at the heart of Christian tradition and teaching: suffering and joy are not polar extremes, but so intimately wedded to one another as to constitute one flesh. To refuse suffering is to refuse joy. To reject any of the microfibers of the whole mysterious tapestry of being human is ultimately to refuse the whole.

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It was two decades ago now. The thick, special edition of the Sunday Observer newspaper weighed into the faux-leather of the empty seat between me and my friend Michael. The dateline on the right side stood out with ominous boldness: September 4, 2005.

“Hot off the press” was the expression then, which hung around in common usage for a few more years, until it became an empty metaphor. Newspapers are produced now with neither heat nor pressure, but with cold, digital dispassion.

But not then. In late August and September 2005, writers and photographers for the New Orleans Times-Picayune waged a daily war for truthfulness, at great personal cost. They approached their task with the entrenched resilience of a cavalry regiment. As the waters rose, the local paper hastily moved operations upriver to Baton Rouge, but an intransigent team of journalists refused to evacuate. They holed up on the third floor of the Times-Picayune building on Howard Avenue, bunkered on the floor and kept writing, ventured out in john boats embedded with SWAT teams, shot photographs, sometimes armed. Delivery trucks plowed through three feet of floodwaters and storm surge just to tell a story of people clinging to a water-logged porch post, clinging to life. They gave out papers by hand to people who needed those stories, who grasped at them like fresh water. It was heroic. Almost as heroic as the three men and one woman who dragged five children in a red Rubbermaid storage bin up the river on Broad Street that was not supposed to be there. It was what journalism is all about: honesty, industry, risk, truth. It simply showed humanity at its most desperate and most transcendent, sometimes at the same time, and tried to give words to it. It was the best a newspaper could ever be.

Amidst the worst tragedy ever to strike that great American city, it was also the last gasp of desperation for The Times-Picayune. In a way, the storm was the best thing to happen to it. For years, the paper had been drowning, too. Katrina had strangely saved the newspaper, for a while. Pulitzers were spread around a year later. Seven years after the flood, though, it succumbed to layoffs, budget shortfalls, outsourcing, and publication was cut to only three days a week. Many of the courageous reporters and photographers who worked for the Times-Picayune were gone, and the life of the paper ebbed away. Its inevitable fate was that of many lesser papers, whose local moments of incomprehensible tragedy never came.

But in early September 2005, it seemed every one was reading the newspaper. In other cities, it may have been The New York Times or The Plain Dealer or Le Monde, but the source was always the same. This was before the little devices with the bluish light started to appear. For one final season, people in every city hung on the words and pictures of a small-market newspaper staffed by men and women who pursued stories of devastation and dereliction with ruthless ferocity. They told and showed stories of excruciating displacement, loss, and suffering, but they suffered and lost too. It was their city also. Every other newspaper outlet at the time handed itself over to others, and carried stories from Times-Picayune staff, whose names were, for a moment, known everywhere.

In a jetliner bound from England for Texas I sat in silence that Sunday, interrupted periodically by my own grunts of disgust or gasps of horror or the flight attendant stopping by for “Coffee? Tea? Biscuit?” Occasionally those grunts would expand into a half-formed thought, but not for long. Always reemerging from under the shrill surface of distraction, like the inexorable low hum of four Pratt & Whitney turbofans, were stories of the admixture of bureaucratic incompetence, neglect, and natural catastrophe—and the stories of light in the dark, of the irrepressible human urge to hold fast, to bind up the wounds of a broken neighbor, a broken city. I had the sense of holding in my hands a monument. It was as close as the newspaper ever came to literature, where the veil between storytelling and editorialism became diaphanous, transparent. It wasn’t necessary to layer on critique: the story itself was critique enough. The journalists seemed to write as if, bereft of theory or high-minded meta-discourse and emptied of all technique, they didn’t know what else to do but simply say what they saw but did not recognize.

It’s a strange business, I thought at the end of an article about a woman who stayed on her roof for three days before being rescued by canoe. The newspaper needs tragedy to make money. It thrives on it. Don’t get me wrong: I love the newspaper as much as anyone, maybe more. It’s a beautiful thing. A beautiful, blood-sucking thing.

Rows ahead of and behind me, other passengers were doing much the same thing. That micro-era was, for me, a period of literal suspension, when you believed time must still be going on at the usual pace, but at thirty-five thousand feet, it seemed to stretch out fore and aft indefinitely. I felt afloat, like a man in an inner tube on a lazy river, with no way to slow down or speed up. I was at the mercy of the river, and it was tremendous. In one of those unsolicited thought-games that seem to occur only inside a pressurized tank six miles high soaring just a little bit slower than sound, I wondered: can a man in an inner tube tell if the river is rising and swelling beneath him? Or can you only really tell if you’re standing on the banks, outside the river? But the banks are underwater. What now?

I mentioned way back on day one that I was thinking a lot about this phenomenon we are calling “Christian Nationalism,” and on Tour Ten I was looking for counter-narratives, shapes of religious life that do not conform to this peculiarly American form of civil religion.

“Christian Nationalism” is still very much in the news at the moment, particularly in the figure of one particular member of the current administration who embodies both Christian Nationalism and reactionary defense of Lost Cause Confederate memory, who has decided against all good sense and historical scholarship to return the Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery. That these two ideologies would so powerfully collide in one person is not at all an accident. More on that later.

For a while now, I have been uneasy with the term “Christian Nationalism” itself as a label for this particular phenomenon. As I have said before, I do not want to let Christianity off the hook tout court, since Christians of many denominations bear some responsibility for either creating or enabling it. But something about the term seems inapposite.

“American Biblicist Nationalism” would be a better, but not perfect, term for the phenomenon we call “Christian Nationalism.” That phenomenon is based on a particular, selective, and very American way of reading the Bible, but is not recognizably Christian in a meaningful sense.

A good way to test if a movement or ideology is Christian in a meaningful sense is to ask, “does this movement or ideology need to refer to the person of Jesus Christ?” or, “does the storied person—incarnation, ministry, Passion, and resurrection—of Jesus substantially inform this movement or ideology?”

Or, “Can the vision of Christian Nationalists be communicated accurately without mentioning the story of Christ?” Even more simply, “does Christian Nationalism need Jesus?”It’s clear to me, at least, that the answer to the last question is emphatically “No.”

Hence “American Biblicist Nationalism:” it needs the Bible but it does not need Jesus Christ.1

I know I have not typically engaged directly in the political fracas de l'heure, but it’s hard not to these days. The South and its history—and by extension the history of the nation—is increasingly up for grabs in an approaching sesquicentennial year and under an administration intent on making national history conform to the pathological insecurities of its leader. You will have read lately of the President’s intention to review all exhibits under the purview of the Smithsonian Institution in the interest of “getting rid of woke” from the reservoirs of national memory. See for yourself the initial inventory of offending items, published by the White House two days ago. It’s chilling.

It’s all of a piece with a protracted campaign of cultural warfare going back half a century at least. What was once “political correctness” became, in the last decade, “CRT” and now, because apparently we live in an age too lazy to identify its bogeymen with anything more than three or four letters, simply “WOKE.” As a rule, the Brand Names for these au courant avatars of cultural fears tend to be as long as the amount of time their enemies devote to thinking seriously about the phenomena they supposedly represent.

This ongoing controversy about national history—roughly summarized as a contest between the 1619 Project and the “1776 Commission”—is especially within the wheelhouse of The Detourist and A Deeper South, since the importance of an honest mode of national self-reflection has been one of my main themes for nearly a decade now. One could describe the Trump Administration’s intent “to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions" as propaganda masquerading as history, except that it’s not even making a pretense of masquerading. It is a nakedly propagandistic attempt to tell the story of ourselves that we would most like to believe. But not all of our selves.

It’s not the only recent news item that intersects with my work here. Last week in a speech in Peachtree City, Georgia, a mostly-white planned community established in 1959, thirty-six miles south of Atlanta, Vice President J.D. Vance said that “I don't know why we accepted that it was reasonable to have crazy people yelling at our kids. You should not have to cross the street in downtown Atlanta to avoid a crazy person yelling at your family.”2

I am not especially in favor of crazy people yelling at my kids, especially when they are yelling from behind a podium emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States. It’s hardly necessary to point out Vance’s prodigious ignorance—everyone knows that no one walks in downtown Atlanta. But in seriousness: panhandling is not a new problem in downtown Atlanta, and it certainly didn’t begin with the previous administration. And forget that most residents of Peachtree City are not likely to drive to downtown Atlanta to go out to dinner; the barely-coded rhetoric is familiar enough by now. But the moment reminded me of one hidden life.

I once met one of those “crazy people” on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta, my hometown. His name was Mustafa. He had been in prison for stabbing his sister’s boyfriend in the neck. While in prison, he learned to make rosaries as a form of penance. He used these heavy black cubic beads, as if each bead were a box densely weighted with grace. I bought one of them from him for $20, and it is one of the most beautiful objects ever to have found me.

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Just as we did seven years ago, we stop first at Buona Caffé a block from John’s house for coffee. The last time we did so turned out to be an auspicious and even prophetic beginning to a transformative journey towards the Mississippi Delta. It went like this:

2018: Heading east out of Augusta on Central Avenue, we are not a block into the trip before I need to stop. I know it could be a while before we see another decent cup of coffee, so the early pit-stop at the Buona Caffé in Augusta seems well-advised.

I leave the car running, because it's already hot as it's supposed to be in Georgia in July, and pop inside to place my order with the barista.

Now, I have a background in theology and an amateur interest in southern history and a bit of an obsession with the poet Dante Alighieri, and John is a professional historian who's written on race and religion in the south. While he's brewing the previous customer's beverage, the barista asks what brings me to town. I try—for the first time over the next two weeks—to explain this strange journey we are on. It comes out like a very poorly-rehearsed elevator pitch, all ragged-edged and semi-coherent, but he manages to get the gist.

I'm a seminary student, he tells me, doing a thesis on race and religion. It's on Howard Thurman, King, and Thomas Merton, he says.

No way, I say. Hang on a sec, I tell him. There's someone you need to meet.

I drag John out of the minivan, which already sounds like it's overheating. Back inside the Buona, John tells the barista he lives around the corner. We really should chat, he says, and they make plans to do that when he is back in town.

I give the barista my card, and scrawl onto it the name of the hastily-made instagram account we made for the trip because that's who we are now. We say thanks for the coffee, and promise to be in touch.

Not much later, on US 1, John interrupts his dramatic reading of the WPA Guide to Georgia to respond to an alert on his iPhone (also who we are now).

"Hey, he followed us," John says.

"Who?" I ask.

"Dante," John says. "The guy from the coffee shop."

"His name is Dante?"

"Apparently."

"And we are just getting ready to go on a quest deep into the Southern inferno?"

"His name is Dante."

"That does not seem like an accident."

2025: We are barely inside the front door of Buona when an African-American woman at the round high-top in the window recognizes John. Her name is Karen. She hasn’t been to Buona in the longest time, she says. But she was supposed to meet someone at a place across the street, and figured she would pop in here for a coffee. Karen is a jazz performer, a vocalist and pianist, who organizes the jazz portion of a local arts festival in September. I tell her my son is a jazz trumpet player and multi-instrumentalist. A connection is made. Possible plans are hatched. A small world is created.

I text Henry to tell him about the festival, and ask him if he knows Karen’s brother, a well-known jazz trombonist. He does. The already small world constricts even more.

We talk with Karen about Helene, a disaster that dramatically affected both Augusta and Asheville, which are both still struggling to right themselves. It is a kind of living absence we hold in common. Both cities are still marked by scores of uprooted trees, clay-clotted root-balls exposed ass-up. It is almost indecent; trees are not supposed to be seen this way. It’s like accidentally catching someone in the middle of changing clothes, or seeing a peacock from behind.

nothing can be possessed except the struggle

tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets

These molecular forces are at work at the present moment in the Buona, a cafe named with the Italian word for “good.” A particular favorite of the great Italian poet Dante, along with fortuna, which he understands as a kind of divinely-ordained power. If Dante had needed genie-souls, he would probably have treated them as emissaries of fortuna. But he did not; he had Virgil.

In my case, I have John, who leads us down a side road off of US 25 north of Millen to a wide rectangular expanse cut into the dense pine forest. At one end is a sparsely populated graveyard; at the other a newish church building. It appears constructed out of cinder blocks or something similar. It does not look especially historic.

It is what is in between the current church building and the graveyard, however, that has drawn us here. There is nothing in this interstitial zone, just a close-cut grassy space marked by regularly-spaced cinder blocks. At one end, on the side nearest to the road, is a historical marker, which tells how the church was formed in 1867 as an offshoot of nearby Big Buckhead Church (still standing) when Black parishioners left Big Buckhead, moved down the street, and built their own church there. The most important passage reads:

On April 13, 1919, the church was destroyed by arson during an outbreak of racially-charged community unrest. Fueled by social changes following World War I, the incident was part of "The Red Summer," eight months of nationwide racial violence impacting over two dozen cities - including Chicago and Washington, D.C. Following the 1919 unrest, Carswell Grove was rebuilt. To accommodate the church's growth, an updated church facility was erected in 2008 adjacent to the historic structure. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, the historic 1919 building was destroyed by arson in 2014.

"Memory believes before knowing remembers,” Faulkner famously wrote. “Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” That virtually impenetrable passage from Light in August might be beginning to make the faintest shimmer of sense for me as John points out that, even though this marker comes with the imprimatur of the Georgia Historical Society, it has left out some significant details. The marker was erected the same year we were having coffee with Dante, in 2018, well after the time historical markers started to become less cagey with the more disturbing parts of their subject matter.

The most glaring of those omissions on this one is that the line “destroyed by arson” conceals the fact that the conflagration took place as part of a lynching. It followed the usual pattern: an innocent Black man is accused of a crime against a white person, and a furious mob of white men tear off in search of him. Except in this case, the mob never found their man. Instead they set fire to the church, captured his two sons, and threw them both onto the pyre. This grotesque display of white violence was the initial spark of the Red Summer of 1919, the first in a protracted series of deadly outbursts that would claim hundreds of Black lives and permanently scar American history.

These events are practically galactic in their import. But as I am slowly learning, there are less visible forces in motion here, too. Molecular moral ones. Joe Ruffin, the man initially accused of the killing of two police officers that set this episode in motion, was jailed for a time, but ultimately freed in 1923. His grandson, The Honorable John H. Ruffin, Jr., became the first Black chief judge of the Georgia Court of Appeals. It’s a better image than the mythological phoenix Atlanta uses for its self-image as “risen from the ashes.” In this case, an actual human life—somehow, somewhy—rose out of literal ashes to become an agent for the justice that his own grandparents were denied.

John fills in these crucial details for me in a way the marker will not. The church that he captured in a photograph is no longer there. In its place an empty field marked off by cinder blocks.

All that remains: an absence held in common.

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I mentioned on Day One that on this tour, I am trying to be attentive to “hidden” lives, in the spirit of the famous final sentence from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It’s such a good line that it is worth repeating: “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Yesterday, as Oliver and I were walking the footpaths around Green Bough, I told him about how this quotation was serving as a kind of lodestar for this chapter of our journey. He made a coarse, guttural sound that indicated both that he knew the passage already and that it resonated with him in a some deep internal space. He told me that he had a trio of quotations that he returned to regularly, and often shared with retreatants. One of them was the Eliot passage. Another was from Martin Buber, and the third attributed to William James:

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.1

My own response to this passage was as visceral as Oliver’s to Eliot, I think, except that I had never heard this one before. It’s an apt sentiment for the form of life at Green Bough, which is both a respite from “great institutions” and a sort of laboratory for the examination, in oneself, of “invisible molecular moral forces.”

All of us are living in an age of grand gestures and “big things.” More often than not these “big things” are acted out on social media, which is often a stage for temporarily gratifying moral theater. Grandstanding—whether in political, social, athletic, moral, or religious life—is not really an accomplishment. It feels meritorious to post some dramatic polemical sentence online (I know, because I have done it many times), but doing it is so mentally and morally non-taxing that it is now regularly outsourced to robots.

James’s remark also hit me in a place that had been pretty well obliterated by Hurricane Helene, which forced me to question the point of my life. I will say more about all that later, but the short version is that I didn’t have a very good answer for why I should be spending my time trying to write books and make art when there were so many bigger things that needed doing. Doing “big things” is, after wall, what I had been raised and educated for, but in late September whatever “big success” was supposed to mean was washed away, carrying with it (almost) every fragment of foolish ambition. Worldly success came to seem more elusive but also less interesting (which I realize is a conveniently self-justifying thing to say for someone who has not achieved worldly success). Far more compelling were the small acts of kindness and generosity for which a major catastrophe like Helene creates a nearly endless supply of opportunities, for Eliot’s “unhistoric acts,” James’s “tiny,” “creeping” “rootlets” of moral action that bind human beings together in minute, individual relation.

This afternoon in the childhood home of Flannery O’Connor on E. Charlton Street in Savannah, I came across a sticker with a line drawing of O’Connor in a headscarf with a quotation from her Prayer Journal: “Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.” Then barely twenty-one years old, the young O’Connor was referring to her creative work. As soon as they are finished, works of art are given away. Their fulfillment is identical with their dispossession. Works of art only become completed when they become offerings. The same is true, I think, of selves: ours only become who they really are when they are given away.

I say this as if I know from experience because I have done it, but I haven’t, and I don’t. I trust O’Connor knows this far better than I do. We are all, of course, wayfarers en route to becoming who we are. I have been fortunate enough over the last few days to witness in the faces of Fay and Oliver and Steve, in the life and work of O’Connor, and in many others, the odd and unpredictable appearance of improbable joy, not simply because they are people who have had the courage to confront the darkest parts of our common and our particular existence. To confront evil is not easy, which is why robots cannot do it. It is the most serious human challenge there is, and those who take vows of baptism are expected to promise to renounce it, which implies that they are able to identify and confront it.

But more terrifying than confronting evil is reckoning with good. Evil, after all, is merely a privation, an absence, a lack. Good is a substantial mystery, it exists, and it is incomprehensible. In one of her lesser-known works, an introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, O’Connor writes that

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflection with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliché or a smoothing-down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann's, full of promise.

Confronting evil takes immense courage, but less courage than confronting good. Over the last I-don’t-know-how-many miles, I have encountered no significant personal incarnations of this thing we are calling “Christian Nationalism,” not because it isn’t real (it definitely is). What I have encountered more than I was prepared to expect are those “invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual,” “hidden” lives, “faces of good.” It is just possible that we choose to be terrified of the threat of Christian Nationalism—and therefore clueless as to how to combat it—because it is far more terrifying to admit the more ubiquitous, yet less visible, reality of good. The former seems to give us license to do nothing; the latter commits us to participating voluntarily in the ongoing self-diffusion of goodness.

One thing I do know from experience of multiple encounters with them is that genie-souls do tend to induce convergences in a manner totally consistent with the idea that good is self-diffusive and tends to communicate itself. And those convergences, at least potentially, are all over the place.

Yes, Fay says at the round table at Green Bough, they are everywhere.

By the time we cross State Road 57 south of Toomsboro on State Road 112, the gullywasher has subsided, but the clouds still project a general attitude of tumult. About a mile past the intersection, I impulsively yank the van onto the shoulder in response to a large roadside cross, festooned with what looks like bunting and inscribed with JESUS SAVE ME in red, white and blue. Jasmine’s Boyfriend finds a rain-saturated gulch off the shoulder and slowly begins to sink into it on the starboard side. It leans perilously toward the embankment, and the back tire is airborne. Within ten minutes, a kind gentleman—either an angel of the roadside or a genie-soul incarnate—has stopped and pulled J’sB out of the slough.

All four tires once again touching the ground, we resume our search for Freedom, Georgia, originally a roughly 100-acre parcel of land south of Toombsboro purchased by a collective of Black families. Following the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, the families bought the land with the intent of establishing a sort of sanctuary community for people of color, a kind of Mound Bayou for the 21st century, free from white violence. It is somewhere in a general area on the map, but we are unable to locate it. Later, as I dig a little deeper into the Freedom story, it’s not clear it’s still a going concern.

But it’s an inspiring project nonetheless, in a part of Georgia that seems fertile for experiments in intentional community, where genie-souls are unusually active.

A week ago, I participated virtually in a book group discussion of A Deeper South hosted in Athens by my friend Merryll. I mentioned at the end of the zoom session that I was about to set out on another road trip, and mentioned what I thought I might be looking for this time. The following day, one of the group’s members wrote to me with some suggestions about Louisville, Georgia, an hour southwest of Augusta. She mentioned Louise Abbot, who had been a friend and correspondent of O’Connor’s. As it turns out, John and Louise had been in contact with one another for a number of years, and John had played for me some of Louise’s messages on his voicemail, delivered in her inimitably mellifluous middle Georgia accent. She also mentioned a retreat center near the town of Adrian, called Green Bough House of Prayer.

So having abandoned our failed search for Freedom, we continued southwest toward Green Bough. We passed it on the first approach, because it is both unmarked and virtually indistinguishable from any other cluster of homes in middle Georgia. The only real sign that it is not any other cluster of homes is a bank of solar panels in an adjacent field.

Alighting from the van, we are met almost immediately by Oliver, a resident of the community who initially mistakes us for members of the wedding party who will be descending this weekend. What is A Deeper South, he asks. I give a short, semi-rehearsed answer that misleadingly implies that I know the answer myself, but he nods genuinely and slowly in a way that convinces me he knows better what it is than I do. Oliver is about to have lunch, and invites us to join him. Having just had street tacos at a Mexican mercado in Dublin, we pass on lunch but do join him for conversation about Green Bough. We sit together at the circular dining table in the kitchen of what was the original house on the property, where the founder of the community lived for years. It now serves as the mess hall, office, storage. Its foyer is a bookshop with hundreds of titles in theology, the contemplative life, botany, race, and so on. Some of them are very familiar, some are not, but they are all inviting.

The story of Green Bough goes back to its founder Fay, who has just left with her co-founder, Steve, to go into town for some necessities. Oliver walks us around the property along with a recently-adopted puppy, Frankie, and tells us about the regular cycle of retreatants and the loosely Benedictine rule of life that the community at Green Bough—and its many associated oblates who live elsewhere—vow to commit to. Life here follows a liturgical order—morning prayer, the Angelus at noon (signaled by a bell rescued from a decommissioned nearby church and housed in a wooden tower designed and built by an illiterate friend of the community), evening prayer, Eucharist. The charism of the community is a marriage of contemplative Catholicism and Wesleyan practices of the heart, and the chapel of the retreat house features a large cross made by an Orthodox iconographer from Augusta out of recovered floorboards from a local tobacco barn. He walks us to the labyrinth, which began about fifteen years ago with a push lawn mower regularly carving out from the grass a pathway. Over the years the negative spaces where the path of the labyrinth was not have become positive spaces of their own, as volunteer oak, birch, pine saplings have grown up to form those peculiarly life-giving kind of borders that paradoxically limit, direct, and liberate at the same time.

Oliver and I talk as if we have known each other for years. The conversation feels, like the wild and unkempt pasture sections of the Green Bough grounds, saturated with generous light. As we near the end of the path, he answers his cell phone, with apologies. It is Steve. He and Fay have returned. They ask about the visitors with the big van. No, Oliver tells him. I thought the same thing. They are not from the wedding party.

Back in the kitchen, we meet Fay, who is now 83. She greets us with a hug. A major topic of conversation quickly becomes Louise Abbot, a regular visitor to Green Bough and a dear friend of Fay’s. Fay radiates the kind of capacity for joy that perhaps only monastics really know in this way: as the fruit of an unceremonious yet celebratory commitment to a vocation, a discipline of the heart to tenderness and the giftedness of all existence, and learned resistance to the temptation to take oneself too seriously. Chesterton famously said that angels still fly because tehy take themselves so lightly. A place-specific gloss on Chesterton out here, where songbirds flit from birch to longleaf, might be that birds fly because of resistance, the resistance of air.

In the past decade or so, I have often heard the argument that reading fiction can facilitate the experience of empathy for characters in a story, and thereby inculcate in a reader the capacity for empathy with actual human beings. It’s a lovely idea that also just happens to be true, and even confirmed by multiple scientific studies.

But the experience at Green Bough today proved something even better than that. Reading fiction can make you more empathetic, sure, but it can also actually generate new relationships with other human beings. )Non-fiction or poetry can, too, for what it’s worth.) The whole Deeper South journey began with an experience of reading an author who so categorically upturned my way of seeing reality that I had no choice but to continue to seek out within the lived world vestiges and possibilities of her way of seeing.

And here’s the thing. Today was not supposed to have happened at all. A stop in Scott, Georgia is the result of another series of radically contingent events that did not have to come about, much less together. I know Merryll because of books. I heard about Green Bough because of how someone responded to my own book, and when I got there I met an incredible group of people who had also written their own books.

But this isn’t really about books, in the end: it is about the reason people write books in the first place, or write letters to their authors, or host book groups: to communicate an experience of being human to another person, to establish a connection with another through language, to carve out in the midst of the weedy wilderness of this world a meeting place. The relationship between Louise Abbot and Flannery O’Connor is itself—like every intersection of two or more unique routes of human existence—the creation of a potentially infinite set of new relationships. The paths that led from Flannery O’Connor to Louise Abbot, through who knows how many other intermediaries, to Fay to Oliver and to me: it all contributes to a speechlessness the reigns for several miles after we pull ot of Green Bough.

Hours later, we park Jasmine’s Boyfriend at the curb in front of 207 E. Charlton Street in Savannah, the house where more than just Flannery O’Connor was born.

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Flannery O’Connor attended morning prayer and Mass every day at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville. Just after noon today we did the same, along with a dozen or so other people. An elderly deacon presided. As it turns out, today is the feast of St Mary Madgalene—which I did not know at the time, because I am a bad Catholic and a chronically inattentive person—and the deacon preached on Mary’s exemplary acts of trust in Jesus, her almost frantic searching for him, only to find that she is herself first seen and already called by name by him.

In an enigmatic response to Mary’s gesture of affection, her shock of gratitude at being recognized by him, Jesus says to her, “do not hold onto me.” In its Latin translation, Jesus’s famous phrase noli me tangere also names a type of painting depicting this scene, which has a long history in Western pictorial art. Painting the scene was practically a compulsory rite of passage: almost every Western artist whose name we would all likely recognize took a shot at this trope at some point: Fra Angelico, Titian, Hans Holbein, Picasso. It is a powerful and destabilizing scene, in which the urge to hang on to the Risen Christ is explicitly spurned, the true price of love is revealed as dispossession, both of one’s self and of one’s beloved.

Since we have been talking about “Christian Nationalism,” this seems like a good time to note that the same phrase Jesus utters to Mary Magdalene has been used in a number of military flags throughout American history, including the famous Gadsden flag, whose motto “Don’t Tread on Me” is a translation of the Latin phrase. An 1861 flag created in celebration of Alabama’s ordinance of secession featured the words “Independent Now and Forever” on one side and Noli Me Tangere on the other, beneath an image of a cotton shrub. It was introduced shortly after the state legislature voted to secede from the United States, and flew atop the state capitol in Montgomery for a month.

It would not be the first nor the last time that a phrase from the Bible was lifted out of its context and conveniently repurposed for an entirely contradictory end. When Jesus told Mary Magdalene “do not hang on to me,” he meant something very different from “don’t tread on me.” In fact, there is a way to read the mission of Jesus in exactly the opposite sense, i.e, as a self-offering of love to a world that can respond only by trampling on him. This is the vision of Silence, the brilliant 1966 novel by O’Connor’s contemporary and fellow Catholic, the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo. Toward the end of the novel, Endo’s Jesus says that “It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”

But even the most elementary rules of scriptural interpretation have never troubled colonialists or imperialists or slavers in need of a pious imprimatur for their cause. We aren’t talking here about “lacking fingers for nuance,” as Nietzsche once said. It’s clearly a very old and established American tradition to bastardize Scripture for the promotion of nakedly individualistic and/or nationalist interests.

That the Jesus who willingly accepts the cup that is presented to him would ever utter the phrase “don’t touch me” in the sense of “don’t f—k with me” should be obvious. But it is not, to a populace who by and large does not read Flannery O’Connor.

If nothing else, O’Connor’s Jesus was not a figure who could be easily conscripted for just any capitalist or white supremacist cause. But it’s not just other people who do this; everyone does it who says “Jesus was an X,” when X = a cause or identity to which I already subscribe. You won’t ever find capitalists saying “Jesus was a socialist,” or Marxists saying “Jesus was a capitalist,”—at least not capitalists or Marxists who still want to claim Jesus for their team. Most of us do not possess the kind of honesty it would require to admit that Jesus would totally not be on board with my personal or political program is. Whenever we say “Jesus was an X,” what we really mean is, “Jesus was what I am.”

O’Connor’s work consistently presents a Jesus who cannot be so easily enlisted to underwrite our pre-established commitments. He “thown everything off balance,” in the words of The Misfit from “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The difference between The Misfit and the rest of us is that the Misfit is honest enough to admit that the Jesus of the gospels simply cannot be reconciled with his own life as it is, that he either has to change his life or give it over to “meanness.”

As a tribute to O’Connor on the centenary year of her birth, John has been making appearances around Milledgeville and elsewhere dressed as Hazel Motes, the nihilist prophet protagonist of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood. Hayes/Motes has been reading passages from the novel at select sites around the region. You are really selling yourself short if you aren’t following it all on the ADS instagram account.

Much as we did on the first day of Tour Six in 2018, we spent the final hours of daylight today on the sprawling grounds of Central State Hospital, once the world’s largest mental health facility. I have written about it in A Deeper South (pp. 98ff.), but the place has become even more forbidding and decrepit than it was then. The hole in the fence at the Men’s Prison that I crawled through in 2018 is now so engulfed in kudzu that it isn’t even visible. The entire complex is an almost impossibly vast case study of the architecture of dereliction, and of the peculiarly American penchant for blurring the line between hospitalization and incarceration. See for yourself:

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It’s just shy of 11:00 pm, and we have just settled into what appears to be the only remaining hotel room in Milledgeville, Georgia. “Sold Out” is not a term one typically meets with in Milledgeville, but on this particular evening, some strange set of coincidences has apparently driven much of the country to this otherwise not-particularly-congested place, and “Sold Out” is the refrain du jour. Never seen anything like it, we have heard more than once, most recently from the Indian-American Milledgeville native who gave us the present room at a hefty discount, as compensation for the malfunctioning air-conditioning unit, which is currently unplugged and partially dismantled beneath the window that faces the unusually full parking lot.

It’s not the first time that this first day of our tenth tour has felt reminiscent of our very first tour together in August 1997, conducted in a 1977 Ford F-150 also without air conditioning, when the summer air in south Georgia was so thick you had to chew it, and when a perpetual layer of sweat covered you like a mucous membrane to insulate you from the threat of comfort. I have taken to calling this “the sheen,” which is impossible to prevent and useless to fight. Today the climate was similarly thick and chewy, the temperature somewhere in the mid-nineties, but the heat index somewhere in the middle thousands.

The pace was slower than usual this time, by design: after about six hours of meandering west from Augusta we had made it only about twelve miles, but that short distance was disproportionately packed with surprises. That, as we have learned, is the general formula of these road trips: the slower you are willing to move, the more willingly the genie-souls of the roadside seem to offer themselves to you.

Case in point: the first unintended stop was a dilapidated, vine-encumbered, Victorian-looking brick building not far from where we started this morning. The lawn had been mown recently, which suggests that someone has not entirely given up on this property. As it turns out, the building was erected in 1902 as St. Benedict the Moors Industrial School, in the historically Black Laney-Walker district of Augusta. I’ve encountered Industrial Schools many times, most notably (for me) the Okolona Industrial School in Okolona, Mississippi, founded by Wallace Battle in the same year. But I have never seen one named for a saint, and this is a saint I have never heard of.

For a while now I have been fascinated by the history of Black Catholics in the South, not least because they don’t fit neatly into the pre-established demographics we understand far less than we think we do: Black, Catholic, Southern. Their history has been written about by scholars, but it is not especially well-known. They hold the distinction of being able to trigger the Klan for two reasons. They remain enigmatic and provocative in ways that also undermine the received narrative of Southern (and/or American) religious culture that tends to favor a quasi-monolithic white Baptist version of things). They also gesture towards an alternative history that could have been, but was not. I admit I know nothing whatsoever about the causes for the demise of St. Benedict’s, but it had something to do with the confluence of the consolidation of Catholic parishes, desegregation, white suspicion, and so on.

But whatever the story of St Benedict the Moors (and the connected Immaculate Conception Chapel, built in 1906) turns out to have been, it is salutary for having introduced (to me, at least) the figure of Benedict the Moors, also known as Benedict the Black, an Afro-Sicilian Franciscan friar in the sixteenth century, who was born into slavery in Sicily in 1624, and freed at the age of eighteen. Benedict’s life was devoted to humble service of the poor. If nothing else, it has added to the inventory of memory an exemplar of moral virtue, a model of humility, and a life that showed Black Southerners during Jim Crow there is an otherwise mode of being. And not just Black Southerners; also me.

It was salutary, certainly serendipitous, maybe even providential, to encounter Benedict in this way at the very beginning of this trip. I have been thinking a lot recently about the discourse around “Christian nationalism,” about which I have many thoughts, but which has unfortunately dominated and possibly overdetermined the anguished discussion and perception of Christianity in America at the moment. And for good reason. What we are calling Christian Nationalism is driven in part by a culture of celebrity that poisons everything it comes into contact with, including religious life. There is a certain genre of celebrity Christian that is a priori untrustworthy: that sort of highly visible individual who speaks the “right” language and makes the “right” gestures, but whose actual life and the relationships that constitute it is ultimately immaterial to their public persona. A life whose shape could be plausibly narrated without any reference to Jesus of Nazareth. The opposite, in other words, of Benedict the Black. He is called a saint because, like all saints, his life really doesn’t make any sense apart from its reference to the shape of the life of Jesus.

Even the Minister General of Benedict’s order, the Order of Friars Minor, believes that his life is “not sufficiently well known,” as he put it in a letter last year marking the 500th anniverary of Benedict’s birth. But perhaps that is as it should be. His life seems to embody the sense of the famous passage by George Eliot, that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Lives like that—and the communities that shape them—are at least one of the things that I am keeping my eyes and ears out for this time around.

It is now well after midnight, and therefore Tuesday, and I have gone on too long, but that is the way of it. I have much more to share with you, but it’s past your bedtime. Here are a few photos from the day, which I can explain later:

Finally:

Perhaps you think I am blowing hot air when I go on about all these unexpected convergences I refer to, am being fanciful about this “mysticism of the Southern road” and all that. So I will leave you with one final item.

Earlier today, we stopped in Warthen, Georgia, a tiny hamlet known for almost nothing apart from the fact that it is home to the oldest wooden jail in the state, built in 1783, which allegedly held one Aaron Burr for a night in 1807 while en route to Richmond to be tried for treason.

Just before dinner tonight at Bollywood Tacos on Hancock Street in Milledgeville, I get an email from a stranger who has seen Jasmine’s Boyfriend—the Deeper South van—in Warthen, looked me up, and written to me. (I have a number of wild stories of this kind; more on that another time.) It’s good enough to share the whole thing, which I will do if I can get the sender’s permission. But the kicker of the message is when he tells me that his mother’s sister was married to “John S. Candler of Atlanta.” He means not The Judge but The Judge’s grandson, John S. Candler II, my grandfather’s brother. Uncle John. He also names a number of other people that he is related to. The emailer doesn’t (yet) know that I know all of these people, grew up with them, share DNA with them. He definitely doesn’t know what I am just realizing: this random guy I have never met but who saw my van is somehow my cousin.

See what I mean?

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In two days, the road trip that started nearly thirty years ago continues, as John Hayes and I will begin our tenth Southern Tour together in Augusta, Georgia. “The road goes ever on and on,” as Bilbo Baggins sang. Where it will take us, only the genie-souls of the Southern Road know.

We do know, however, that this time around, there will be some new additions, and new ways for you to share in this adventure.

First, if you are a paying subscriber to The Detourist (that’s this website, if you’re already confused), then you will get access to daily written and video updates from John and me from the road. [If you’re not a paying subscriber, then what are you waiting for? Train’s leaving!] Hit this red thing:

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If you subscribe to a monthly or annual Followship, then you will get to see and hear the trip as it unfolds. You will get to be a virtual passenger in the ADS van as we wander the South. You will also get a complimentary copy of The Road to Unforgetting, my collection of photographs from the first nine tours. That’s a $45.00 value, people! We will also be hosting regular live events—sometimes on the fly—at the ADS Instagram account. And since this is The Detourist, we are going to be making a lot of this up as we go, so I don’t know exactly what I am promising you! But I can promise you it will not be dull.

Second, this will be our first trip with the official ADS van, Jasmine’s Boyfriend, possibly the only vehicle in the world with a map on the OUTSIDE of the car. J’sB will be tricked out with some special features, which you will learn about when you join the Followship. Intrigued yet?

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(If you don’t know the J’sB story: check this out:

J’sB will be outfitted with a hifi dashcam so that you will get to hear us ramble about the best chicken sandwich in the world, the frustrating yet iconic design of the Pringles can, the Kantian turn to subjectivity, or even a spontaneous karaoke rendition of “Carolina Mountain Dewe.” But we are also going to dish on the first nine tours, and revisit each one: where we went, what we did and did not see, what we were reading and listening to then, and the people we were and were not then.

Tour Two (1998) has long been The Tour We Don’t Talk About. But that changes in 2025: Tour Two is everything A Deeper South is: amusing, uncomfortable, revealing. We are going to talk about that. Also, 2025 is the centenary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth, so I can guarantee she is going to come up.

To sum up: here’s what a paid Followhsip offers you:

1. Exclusive daily updates in word and moving image

2. A window into the Deeper South story

3. A complimentary copy of The Road to Unforgetting

4. Exclusive discounts on my book, A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road AND John’s award-winning book, Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South

5. Other cool stuff I haven’t thought of yet but want you to have because I love you

For now, please join the Followship. And as always, thanks for being along on this ride. I’ll see you on the Road.

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[As an aside, I know it’s been a long time since I showed up here (the last time was the day before a hurricane devastated my region). I am very grateful that you have stuck around this long, even through this long and unplanned hiatus. A lot has happened in the meantime that I am eager to share with you. For now, ADSX marks the beginning of a return to The Detourist. Starting shortly after the Tour wraps, you can expect weekly posts here. More about that later.]

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Miles travelled: 6,000+
Total events: 13
Bookstore events: 11
Museum events: 2
Slashed tires: 2
One-way flights: 1
Old friends met: lots
New friends made: lots
Coffee consumed: ungodly gallons
Wardrobe changes: just the one, not including:
Minor league baseball hats sported: 7, including one featuring:
The greatest mascot ever: The Pimento Cheese Sandwich
New statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest unveiled during the tour: 1
Unplanned run-ins with my brother at a random off-ramp in Alabama: 1
Being recognized by the manager while browsing in the Greatest Bookstore in the World: priceless.

I’ve devoted a lot of space to long-form essays in the last few years, but since I’ve given y’all a long and dense book to read, I thought I would shift the vibe here to shorter bits and bobs from around the region, and from “the region in my mind,” to borrow from James Baldwin. Jimmy would have been 100 this year, so I hope you’ll join me in observing his centenary with an occasional reading of his work. (In the near future, I am going to offer something in the way of a read-along of some of Baldwin’s work, along with another author or two. ADS is all about unlikely yet generative convergences, and I love putting authors in conversation with one another around that imaginary dinner table in my mind. But more on that anon.)

Also—I am preparing an opportunity for you to give me your own feedback about what you do or don’t want to see here at The DETOURIST henceforth, as we move into a new post-book-writing phase. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts you want to share right now, then by all means 👇

If not, then let’s get to it. Here are some of the tabs I’ve currently got open on my web browser (literally and/or metaphorically), or, a jumble of probably-related items that have been on my map lately.

The Barn
Be warned: if Patrick Weems ever asks you to go on a little drive, prepare to have your world turned upside down.

I thought I had a decent handle on the basic outlines (and geography) of the Emmett Till story until a couple of years ago, when my good friend Patrick suggested we take a drive out to a barn west of Drew, MS. That adventure turned out to be one of the most disorienting segments of any road trip John and I have ever done together.2 After we parted ways with Patrick in Sumner, and headed northbound on Mississippi Highway 3 to Marks from Tutwiler, John Hayes and I listened to a 2021 essay by Wright Thompson about the Barn for The Atlantic, which completely reoriented my understanding of that horrific—and in many ways, definitively American—episode. On private property, unmarked, and miles away from miles away, The Barn is where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in August, 1955, and it has been missing from almost every standard account of what happened to Till that dark night many decades ago. The deeper story of the Barn is the subject of Wright’s new book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, which dropped yesterday. Wright, a veteran journalist whose sports writing for ESPN is some of the best you’ll ever read, is a Delta native who—like me—didn’t learn much about the Emmett Till case growing up. But in Wright’s case, that horrific crime took place in his area code. He brings a very personal and local perspective to this story in a book that is going to bring a lot of attention to a side of a story that has “hidden in plain sight” for decades.

(N.B.: I shot the photograph above at the Barn last August 27, on eve of the 68th anniversary of Till’s lynching. Much more to share about that event in a future posting.)

Murmur Trestle
I am fresh off a trip to Athens, GA last week, where I had the opportunity to attend the opening of Jason Thrasher’s Murmur Trestle exhibit at Ace/Francisco Gallery, celebrating the release of his book of the same name, published by The University of Georgia Press. Jason is a veteran of the Athens music scene, and has been photographing many of Athens’ legions of great musicians for 20 years. Murmur Trestle documents the famous railroad trestle in Athens that appeared on the back cover of R.E.M.’s debut album, Murmur. The trestle was demolished in 2021, but rebuilt last year as part of The Firefly Trail, a pedestrian/cycling rail-trail that, when finished, will span 39 miles between Athens and Union Point in Greene County. Which is nice.

Athens Potluck
Jason’s got a lot going on these days, including curating a show at the Special Collections Library at UGA entitled Athens Potluck. Based on a book of the same name, the show features 33 stalwarts of the fabled Athens music scene from Vanessa Briscoe Hay of Pylon to some of the younger artists who are shaping the scene today. The show introduced me to a slew of Athens musicians I had never heard of, and made me realize that the musical legacy there is much deeper than R.E.M. and The B-52s (although that would be enough!). I’m working on an ADS playlist for some of these artists, so stay tuned. I am generally a slow learner and a late-adopter, and tend to assume that everyone else already knows this stuff, but whether you do or do not, have a listen to a couple of the outfits that are currently in rotation on the ADS jukebox: The Glands and Now It’s Overhead. Also in rotation: Since it is now officially fall, because they are the most autumnal band there is, and just because I love them, R.E.M.

Special Collections
Did you ever get to visit The Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon? Did you ever wonder what happened to it? It closed in 2011, but most of the museum’s collection is now in the hands of the Special Collections Libraries at UGA. (Read Jerry Grillo’s story about what happened to the collection, for Atlanta Magazine.) There is every reason to hope for exciting new things from the collection, under the direction of “rock ‘n’ roll treasure hunter” curator Ryan Lewis.

McDowell St.
Speaking of music: on 13 September, my eldest son Henry and his jazz ensemble, Unit 229, released their debut record, McDowell St. It is a brilliant piece of work, performed by five Asheville high school students who have done something truly countercultural, radical, and beautiful on this record: they performed and recorded this album (which includes two original compositions) live in the studio, in an age when many of the musicians we all listen to often make “albums” with people they never even meet. Unit 229 have an incredibly advanced knowledge of the jazz form, and an ability to converse with one another musically that is frankly astonishing. Oh, I know you never would, but just in case you are tempted to think this is just some high school garage band vanity project, the record was produced by Kevin Moloney, producer-in-residence at Citizen Studios here in Asheville, who started out as an engineer on the first five albums made at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin by a little four-piece outfit called U2.

Check it out:

OK that was a lot.

I’ll be at The Brooklyn Book Festival in New York this week, so if you’re in the area, holler! As always, thanks for being here, and drop me a line!

I want to wish you a thoughtful and reflective day on this bougiest of American holidays. And I’m honored to be able to spend some time with you virtually today.

Read more from me in my new book, A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road.

Starting with the official book launch on Wednesday 22 May at the Margaret Mitchell House in Midtown Atlanta (get your tickets here!), brought to you by The Atlanta History Center, the ADS Book Tour begins in earnest at the mecca of Southern bookstores, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, where I will be joined by John T. Edge on 23 May for a conversation about my new book.

I will be sharing many more details about this adventure in weeks to come, but in the meantime, find a town near you and make plans to come out and join me on the road!

Between now and then, you can pre-order a copy of A Deeper South here, or through your own local bookstore. (N.B.: if you purchase tickets for the launch in Atlanta (which I strongly encourage you to do), the price of the ticket includes a copy of the book, at a discount).

(Don’t see anything in your area? Let us know where you would like to see the ADS Tour stop near you!)

I hope to see you out on the road!

From the foreword to A Deeper South by Rosanne Cash:

Pete Candler “is a quintessential storyteller, in the great Southern tradition of which he describes, but a storyteller of magnificent largesse of spirit: one whose heart is so large that you feel he has forgiven us for pain we don’t remember inflicting, and pain we don’t recall enduring, in both a cultural and personal sense. I don’t know why that is. I only know that his large heart beats through every sentence, but his intelligence and elegant facility with language underscores his writing in a way that your mind can unhinge itself from some very rusty entrenched patterns and grievances.”

Read what the publisher says about the book:

In A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, Pete Candler offers a travel narrative drawn from twenty-five years of road-tripping through the backroads of the American South. Featuring Candler’s own photography, the book taps into the public imagination and the process of both remembering and forgetting that define our collective memory of place. Candler, who belongs to one of Georgia’s most recognizable families, confronts the uncomfortable truths of his own ancestors’ roles in the South’s legacy of white supremacy with a masterful mix of authority and a humbling sense that his own journey of unforgetting and recovering has only just begun.

With the wit of a Southern storyteller and the eye of a photographer, Candler takes the reader on a journey that spans two continents, six states, and countless miles of asphalt. Along the way, we meet the “galaxy’s no. 1 Elvis fan,” stop to ponder roadside markers and small-town monuments, and contemplate what makes the South both distinct from, and emblematic of, the nation of which it is a part. The stories that he uncovers can only be found off the beaten path, away from the curated tourist experiences and mass culture located near the interstate exit ramp. A Deeper South is about Candler's journeys to see the South and understand it, and he invites us to ride along.

Advance praise for A Deeper South:

“Part history, part memoir, and part self-discovery, Candler calls on us to face the demons of our past so that we can truly appreciate the region we call home.”

—Karen L. Cox, author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture

“Candler explores the truth hidden behind the romance of place and digs deep to seek out harsh truths that have been silenced, overlooked, or obscured by willful blindness. This is a book that will help foster a new way of seeing the South.”

—W. Ralph Eubanks, author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape.

“A beautifully conceived and executed piece of historical reclamation.”

—Margaret Edds, former reporter, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and author of What the Eyes Can't See: Ralph Northam, Black Resolve, and a Racial Reckoning in Virginia

“A righteous plumbing of suppressed family histories, a vigorous exorcism of the myths and willful ignorance that trouble the land of his birth, A Deeper South blazes a path through the nostalgia thicket for readers who want to make sense of their inheritances. Candler writes with indignation and empathy, showing us a better way to see the South so that we can better love any place we call home.”

—John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers and host of TrueSouth

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[This week’s episode features a special excerpt from my forthcoming book, A DEEPER SOUTH: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road. Available for pre-order now!]

Following the Civil War, the US government laid down the conditions for the readmission of secessionist states in the Reconstruction Act of 1867. Section 5 of that act required each of those states to draft “a constitution of government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects, framed by a convention of delegates elected by the male citizens of said State, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, who have been resident in said State for one year previous to the day of such election.” In 1868, like other Southern states, Mississippi wrote a new constitution that affirmed in law the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted full citizenship and equal protection to the formerly enslaved. The Constitution was ratified by the people of Mississippi in December 1869, but it did not hold sway for very long.

Suddenly an entirely new voting bloc had emerged in Mississippi: African Americans constituted over 58 percent of the electorate. Within a little over twenty years, white resentment at Republican carpetbaggers and the new legal and political enfranchisement of a race still firmly held to be inferior had grown so intense that a new convention was called. Black people had gotten too much power, white Democrats argued. The 1890 convention was called for a single purpose: to reestablish white supremacy.

“Let us tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the Universe,” declared [Constitutional Convention] President S.S. Calhoon. “We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer.” Indeed, so single-minded were the framers that Judge Chrisman was said to cry “My God! My God! Is there to be no higher ambition for the young white men of the south than that of keeping the Negro down?”

Among the more consequential of the new constitution’s provisions was the introduction of literacy tests and poll taxes at the voting booth, which effectively made it impossible for Black men to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It was a clever tactic, designed to restore white power entirely within the law, and it totally worked. Mississippi’s new refounding document became a model for other states, like Alabama.

One hundred and thirty-four men sat in deliberation over the state’s new, overtly white supremacist constitutional convention. One of them was Isaiah T. Montgomery. The only African American at the convention, Montgomery was truly extraordinary.

Born to enslaved parents on Hurricane Plantation on a peninsula sticking out into Mississippi, at age twelve Isaiah became the personal secretary of the plantation’s master, Joseph Emory Davis, the older brother of Jefferson. Like the eccentric geography of the plantation itself, the elder Davis had tried to develop an unusual system for a plantation at the time: he raised not just highly profitable cotton, but also Indian corn and sweet potatoes. He raised hogs, sheep, and cattle. Davis bucked other trends, too: under the influence of the British utopian socialist, Robert Owen, he wanted Hurricane to be a model of humanistic labor in which the enslaved were given a highly atypical amount of autonomy, and he believed that his workers were best motivated by positive incentive rather than the lash. Davis established a court on the property, “eventually held every Sunday in a small building called the Hall of Justice, where a slave jury heard complaints of slave misconduct and the testimony of the accused in their own defense. No slave was punished except by a jury of his own peers.” Moreover, the plantation’s overseers were not allowed to punish a slave without the consent of the court. It did not always work out. When punishments were administered, they often resembled those one might find on any other plantation in the South.

But it was an undeniably radical vision of plantation management in its day, and clearly left a mark on the young Isaiah Montgomery. His father, Benjamin, ran the dry goods store at Hurricane. When Joseph Davis fled the plantation as Union naval boats moved up the Mississippi from New Orleans in 1862, Benjamin Montgomery took over operation of the plantation until Union soldiers took the Montgomerys to Cincinnati. By 1865 they had all returned to Davis Bend, where they operated something even more radical than Joseph Davis could have imagined: a thriving cotton plantation on the Mississippi River run entirely by African Americans.

Though by 1865 he could no longer be considered Joseph Davis’s property, he still did not own the land he managed—until Davis sold it to him. After Benjamin died in 1877, Isaiah took ownership of the plantation, but after the collapse of the cotton market the project at Davis Bend become no longer feasible. In 1887, Isaiah Montgomery and two other African Americans from Hurricane Plantation left Davis Bend for Bolivar County in the western Delta, where they implemented a kind of self- sustaining, Owenite community for African Americans, called Mound Bayou. It soon became one of the most thriving Black-only towns in the country, and home for Black desire so alluring that even white artists were taken in by it.

Mound Bayou, I feel blue and all in,
Mound Bayou, I can hear you callin’!
All my friends are lucky to be way back there,
If they knew what I’ve been through, they’d stay back there!
Mound Bayou, got to cover ground for
Mound Bayou, that’s the town I’m bound for!
Wish my arms were long enough, here’s what I’d do,
I’d reach and wrap them gently round my Mound Bayou.

Mound Bayou was the subject of a popular song written by Leonard Feather, a noted music critic and composer born into a well-to-do Jewish family in London. In 1942, backed by the British-born trumpeter Henry Levine and his Strictly from Dixie Jazz Band, a white woman from Mississippi named Linda Keene cut a record of the song for RCA Victor. In a classic move now well-known in the history of American music, her version takes the story of an extraordinary town created entirely by African Americans and turns it into a sentimental cliché about a quaint Southern town. The cover art for the album that Levine made for Victor, Strictly from Dixie, features a stylized image of a Black boy eating a watermelon.

That October Keene was playing the Patio in Cincinnati, singing “Mound Bayou” and evoking a wistful, ice-tinkling-in-the-gin-glass nostalgia of the Old South. The Enquirer described the subject of her “special song” as “One of those Shangri-la places where there are no jails, everyone sits around in the sun, and there’s always fried chicken on the table.” It’s safe to assume that most of the clientele in the Patio would have been surprised what they’d have found in the actual Mound Bayou. It is possible that Feather had seen as much about the real Mound Bayou as Stephen Foster had of the Suwannee River.

The actual Mound Bayou has diminished somewhat since its heyday; if someone were to write a song about the place today, it might not evoke the kind of longing for welcome that Feather’s song did.

We first came here in 1999. I am struck then by the extraordinary hand-painted signage that adorns almost every storefront. I shoot stills of Ray’s Bargain Spot, which advertises T-shirts, caps, stockings, snacks, and haircuts. A metal sign hanging out over the sidewalk, suspended by guy wires attached to the roof, calls the place “The Crowe’s Nest.” I try to capture the artful signage, but I do not really know what I am looking at. One poster in the window features the apparently immortal Bobby Rush.

The Crowe’s Nest was started by Milburn Crowe, a local activist and historian who devoted his life to preserving the story of Mound Bayou. His father, Henry, was one of the first settlers here. In the 1960s the Crowe’s Nest became a meeting spot for civil rights activists traveling through Mississippi, who would often stop in to talk with Crowe, eat some ribs, play a little poker, and drink some whiskey.

In 2018, I am looking for the Crowe’s Nest again, not because I know about the history of the place yet, but because of the signs. I remember it from a series of photographs from almost twenty years earlier, which I use as a cue. The building is still there, but all the old signs have been painted over, including the one for the “Crowe’s Nest,” which has been crudely scrawled with a can of spray paint.

Meanwhile, the home of Isaiah T. Montgomery on Main Avenue is less decrepit than it once was. Signs out front and orange fencing around betoken its forthcoming restoration, thanks to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Montgomery’s vision for racial uplift in Mound Bayou shared a lot in common with the ideals of Booker T. Washington, who visited the town, wrote about it as a model of the classically Washingtonian values of “thrift and self-government.” Through the Tuskegee Institute Washington secured investments from white northerners in the settlement. Mound Bayou had effectively hitched its fledgling wagon to the Booker T. Washington express train.

Montgomery himself also seems to have had Washington’s pragmatic but limited aspirations for African Americans in a largely white supremacist culture. In his profile of Mound Bayou, Washington quotes Montgomery: “What we need . . . is an agricultural school, something that will teach the young men to be better farmers than their fathers have been. But, more than that, we need here a system of education that will teach our young men and women the underlying meaning of the work that is being done here.”

Like Washington, Montgomery was learned, eloquent, and inspiring, and regarded my many African Americans as a model for what a self-determined Black life could be. To many white people, on the other hand, he was proof of the aspiring, up-by-your-bootstraps ideology that simultaneously exalted people like Montgomery and ensured that their bootstraps not pull them up too far.

For all the exemplarity of the self-governed community at Mound Bayou, Isaiah Montgomery seems to have accepted the white terms of Black political life. He was held up as a hero to white folks because he was a successful Black man who knew his place.

That may not be how Montgomery himself saw it, but it was certainly one of the reasons why he was elected to serve as a delegate to the 1890 constitutional convention, which would prove the most consequential moment of his life. He delivered a “remarkable speech” to the convention, which drew comparisons between the power of Montgomery’s oratory, and that of Frederick Douglass. He conceded that Black folks had helped to build “the proudest aristocracy that ever graced the Western hemisphere,” but also wondered what it cost:

Sometimes, Mr. President, as I gaze over our broad acres, my heart would rejoice in the progress and glory of Mississippi, but a feeling of sadness represses my exultation, as the unanswerable question arises, How much of life, how much of privation, sorrow and toil has it cost my people? Perchance every acre represents a grave and every furrow a tear. And what have they by recompense?

Montgomery was no radical; he paid dutiful obeisance to the primacy of white culture and offered little legal objection to it. On the contrary, Montgomery described the Franchise Committee’s proposal to levy a poll tax, require a literacy test for voters as “adequate to restore purity to the ballot-box, and render it what the genius of our institutions demand that it should be, a free and untrammeled expression of the popular will.”

Montgomery knew that this would effectively disfranchise thousands of Black voters. He cited an illuminating statistic that plainly exposed the anticipated outcome of the new law:

Present voters, white . . . . . 118,890
This bill will restrict . . . . . 11,889
And leave a net white vote of . . . . . 107,001
Present voters, negroes . . . . . 189,884
This bill will restrict . . . . . 123,334
And leave a net negro vote . . . . . 66,550
Giving a white majority of . . . . . 48,451

If there was ever a moment when Mississippi state politics was on the edge of its seat, this was it. It could go either way. On the one hand, Montgomery could press the case against the “unquestioned white supremacy” of the convention and protest the move, stalling the whole convention and frustrating the white consensus. At this point delegates W. S. Farish, George Dillard, and P. Henry, who had contested the legitimacy of Montgomery’s election as a delegate and proposed that he be unseated, were surely squirming in their seats, their worst fears confirmed. On the other hand, Montgomery could yield, and confirm to all the rest of the delegates that in Montgomery’s election the convention had gotten its perfect poster child: a dutiful and submissive Black person.

It soon became clear which party was going to get their “I-told- you-so” moment. In the interest of “purity,” Montgomery entrusted the ballot to “the virtuous and intelligent voters of the State,” and waxed floridly on the promises of the franchisement clause for a restoration of order: “the grave dangers which called this body into being will be dispelled as the dewy mist of the morning by the rising sunburst of political liberty, which shall bring into renewed life the dormant energies of a new South and inaugurate an era of progress that shall rapidly bring our State abreast of any section in this broad land.”

With that, Montgomery threw his meager political weight but powerful consent—and with it, the symbolic consent of Mississippi’s Black voters—“to lay the suffrage of 123,000 of my fellow-men at the feet of the Convention.”

It wasn’t even a consent made in protest; Montgomery offered “a fearful sacrifice laid on the altar of liberty” in the belief that it would “restore confidence, the great missing link between the two races.” He could have stopped there, but he didn’t. He concluded his speech with a final gesture:

The greatness and chivalry exhibited by your race in springing from the lowest depths of barbarism to the position of dominators of the civilized world needs no commendation at my hands.

To them the world is indebted for the great triumphs of architecture, mechanism, art, literature and science, and for the perpetuation and dissemination of the ennobling principles of morality, Christianity and immortality.

One can only imagine how this must have swollen the hearts of Mississippi’s white delegates on the convention floor, but the New York World detected “a deep sense of relief and surprised wonder” among the audience at the “burning words” of the “dusky orator.” “That which the culture and the polish of Mississippi’s proudest had vainly tried to effect had been accomplished by this once slave—the exponent of a despised race.”

The gaslit parlors and breezy front porches of the white delegates that evening must have radiated with self-congratulatory giddiness at their triumph. For here in the flesh was all the proof that they needed for their own program of white supremacy: an industrious and eloquent Black man just educated enough to know his own place, exactly the kind of Black person a white planter or politician in Mississippi in 1890 could imagine living in racial harmony with, so long as he never forgot or tried to rise above his own station. While Jackson throbbed in the aftermath of Montgomery’s “noble speech,” it did not play as well in DC. Less than a month after Montgomery’s speech in the Mississippi capital city, Frederick Douglass delivered one of his own in the Metropolitan AME Church six blocks north of the White House. He was unsparing in his rebuke of Montgomery, arguing that he “has surrendered to a disloyal State a great franchise given to himself and his people by the loyal nation.” And that was just the beginning. He condemned Montgomery’s assimilationist attempt to kowtow to the white principalities and powers and was complicit in the national backtracking on the promises of Reconstruction. For all his criticism of Montgomery, he reserved his judgment for his act, not the man himself. “Yet I have no denunciation for the man Montgomery,” Douglass said. “He is not a conscious traitor though his act is treason: treason to the cause of the colored people, not only of his own State, but of the United States.”

For Douglass, the consequences of Montgomery’s concession speech would be wide ranging. He feared that the Mississippian’s gesture would be repeated across the South. But most revealing is the concession Douglass made to Montgomery, and his attempt to empathize with the circumstances that led to his great betrayal:

I hear in the plaintive eloquence of his marvelous address a groan of bitter anguish born of oppression and despair. It is the voice of a soul from which all hope has vanished. His deed kindles indignation to be sure, but his condition awakens pity. He had called to the nation for help—help which it ought to have rendered and could have rendered but it did not—and in a moment of impatience and despair he has thought to make terms with the enemy, an enemy with whom no colored man can make terms but by a sacrifice of his manhood.

Montgomery had, unwittingly, perhaps, and unavoidably, abetted the white supremacist revival in late-nineteenth-century Mississippi, and became a kind of prototype for later Black politicians (or aspiring politicians) who, for one reason or another, prove useful to the white status quo, who are celebrated by white Americans as a testament to a post-racial society and are tolerated as agents within the white establishment so long as they don’t say anything or advocate any policy that would militate against it.

We pull the car onto the capacious shoulder of Mississippi State Highway 32 east of Mound Bayou. A crop duster swoops low past the tree line and hovers a few feet above the cotton fields, letting loose a trail of pesticide. At the near end of the field it rises and loops back, and repeats the process. It’s what passes for free roadside entertainment in the Delta, but it is genuinely engrossing, this underappreciated feat of aeronautic gymnastics that happens on the daily here. It’s also archaeology in the air, and a reminder of a connection to our hometown.

Delta Airlines, currently the world’s largest airline in terms of annual revenue and one of the anchors of Atlanta’s New South economy, was founded in Atlanta in 1925, shortly after Asa G. Candler, Jr., offered the City of Atlanta a former racetrack south of downtown for use as an airfield. The forward-thinking and commercially minded Alderman William B. Hartsfield saw the potential in the plan, and the site eventually became Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the main hub for Delta Airlines. But it didn’t get to Atlanta until 1941. Originally called Delta Air Service, the future passenger airline behemoth started out as a crop-dusting operation built to combat the boll weevil, the nemesis of long-staple cotton. The Air Service’s most significant early client was the Delta Pine and Land Company, based in the heart of the region whence the airline derived its name.

The slogan du jour in my hometown is “Atlanta Influences Everything,” the latest in a long line of boosterish catchphrases going back at least to Hartsfield himself. But I am not sure it isn’t more accurate to say that the Delta influences everything.

This week’s episode features a special excerpt from my forthcoming book, A DEEPER SOUTH: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road. Available for pre-order now!

[00:00:00] Didn’t See That One Coming: How Jefferson Davis’s Brother Influenced The Foundation of an All-Black Town

[00:03:06] Mississippi 1890: We Don’t Like Equality After All

[00:06:02] An Experiment in Eccentricity

[00:08:36] Here Come the Whites

[00:11:04] The Crowe’s Nest: The Signs Don’t Say Everything

[00:12:53] Mound Bayou Hitches Its Wagon to the Booker T. Washington Express Train

[00:14:32] “A Noble Speech” Has Disastrous Results

[00:20:00] Frederick Douglass Would Like a Word

[00:22:49] The Delta Is Ready When You Are

Listen to the podcast

626 East Lafayette Street in Ruleville, Mississippi is an unmarked empty lot. There’s a patch of trees, some grass, but other than that, it’s an unremarkable plot of land right in the heart of the Mississippi Delta in Sunflower County.

There is nothing around here to indicate the significance of this spot, but on August 22, 1964, that address was televised nationally, when a woman who lived at this address testified before the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, at no small risk to her own personal safety.

But by this time she had already been shot at, beaten, otherwise intimidated, and had also proven that she was not to be cowed by such attempts to silence her.

You may already know this story, and even if you do, it’s worth repeating because it’s a story of extraordinary and also very ordinary courage, which pits a poor Black woman, a sharecropper against the most powerful white man in the world.

My name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland, and Senator Stennis.

In 1962 Fannie Lou Hamer was forty-five years old. She’d been a sharecropper on a plantation outside of Ruleville for her entire life.

Not far from Ruleville, west from Doddsville on State Road 441 is a community called Eastland. It is named for the Eastland family, who owned a 2,300-acre plantation here (and still does as far as I know) for decades. The owner of the Plantation, James O. Eastland, was Mississippi’s most prominent segregationist. He was a cigar-gripping United States Senator for thirty-five years. Hamer and Eastland were on opposite sides of everything: Eastland, a wealthy white male, landowner, segregationist, white supremacist, and Hamer, a poor Black woman, a sharecropper, integrationist. And by one of those bizarre convergences that are so common to The DETOURIST, Hamer and Eastland were basically neighbors.

Eastland was arguably the most powerful voice for segregation, white supremacy, and the political status quo in the Southeast in the 1960s. And he had a lot of competition: George Wallace, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, plenty of others. Eastland as a senator was an extremely powerful figure in national politics. Fannie Lou Hamer was not, but she had an opportunity in 1964 to testify before the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, and the story of that speech is itself extraordinary, not just for what Fannie Lou Hamer had to say about her own experience, but also for who didn’t want that message to go out across national television.

Although she wasn’t living at Lafayette Street in 1962, there is a historical marker right around the corner from the address that she broadcasted on live television.

At the corner of O. B. Avenue and Elisha and Everett Langdon Street is a fairly unassuming mid-century brick church. It is called William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, and it’s got a historical marker in front of it, because on August 27, 1962, James Foreman from SNCC and James Bevel from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were at this church to try to motivate local Black citizens in Ruleville and Sunflower County to register to vote.

It was kind of a big deal for Ruleville. I mean, Bevel and Foreman were kind of celebrities within the Civil Rights Movement. Fannie Lou Hamer attended that meeting, and she was inspired to register to vote herself.

Four days later, Hamer and 18 other people traveled by bus to Indianola, the Sunflower County seat, to register to vote. And this is how she describes what happened:

It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first class citizens.

We was met in Indianola with by policemen, highway patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time. After we had taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held up by the city police and the state highway patrolmen and carried back to Indianola, where the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.

Now we all know what that really means is that the people on the bus were the wrong color to be eligible to vote in 1962 in Sunflower County, Mississippi. But what Fannie Lou Hamer does not say in front of the DNC is that while those nineteen people are sitting on the bus anxiously awaiting some sort of outcome resolution—Were they going to be arrested? If so, what was going to happen to them? Were they going to be let go?—during this tense moment on the bus Fanny Lou Hamer starts to sing something like “This Little Light of Mine.” It had this powerful effect of calming and consoling those eighteen other people on the bus who were trying, as she said before the DNC, “to become first-class citizens.”

Now the Mississippi Delta is known for music, and a lot of that music became commercial property, commodified into recordings, live shows, and so forth. You may know the story of how McKinley Morganfield was discovered by Alan Lomax, a field recorder and folklorist who recorded Morganfield on a plantation not far from here, called Stovall Plantation. Those recordings launched McKinley Morganfield into a prodigious career as a blues musician. He became better known as Muddy Waters, and is one of the most important figures in American music in the second half of the 20th century.

But that’s not the kind of music that Fannie Lou Hamer was employing on the bus in 1962 in Indianola. It wasn’t intended to be packaged and sold and listened to by white or Black listeners who happened to own a phonograph. It was something more raw, more indigenous, more primal, that comes directly from the experience of Fannie Lou Hamer and her compatriots on the bus, who were immersed in both the Black church and the black soil of the Mississippi Delta, which Fannie Lou Hamer had been working her entire life.

Something in the spiritual that Fannie Lou Hamer sang on that bus resonated so deeply with the rest of the people on the bus that it kept them going. Like mentioning her address on live television, it was a simple act with profound consequences and implications. It led to Hamer becoming, like James Bevel and James Foreman, a celebrity of the Civil Rights Movement. When I say “celebrity,” I don’t mean a celebrity in the sense of someone who participated in the spectacle of American popular culture. No, she was a powerful, moving figure whose story is not a rags-to-riches story. It’s kind of a rags-to-rags story, really. But it is a story of courage and the kind of resilience that maybe doesn’t get the kind of airtime these days that it really deserves.

There is a statue to Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville, but you shouldn’t have to go all the way to Ruleville, Mississippi to see Fannie Lou Hamer celebrated as an iconic, exemplary figure of what it means and what it costs a Black woman to be an American citizen.

But before we get too deep into the Fannie Lou Hamer story, it’s worth taking a minute to just pause and look around and see where we are.

Ruleville is to the west of Minter City (where we were last time) on Mississippi State Highway 8. It’s more or less in the middle of Sunflower County, which is a narrow, mostly rectangular shaped dominion west of Tallahatchie County and Leflore County. Sunflower County is basically bisected by US 49 West, one of the major routes through the Mississippi Delta, and it’s marked by place names that are evocative of the cotton culture and the convict leasing culture, and even the culture of incarceration in the Delta: Cottondale, Whitney, Parchman.

Parchman is of course, home to Mississippi’s notorious state penitentiary, popularly known as Parchman Farm and a staple motif in Delta Blues music. Parchman grew out of the convict leasing practice in the late 19th century, was established in 1901 and has become, let’s say, one of the less celebrated parts of Mississippi.

It is surrounded by vast tracts of open land. I’m sure there’s plenty of barbed wire, but when you drive past Parchman, that’s not what you see. You just see these huge fields of cotton, which are almost like a dare: I dare you to try to escape this place. You go for it. Back in the day, prison staffers mounted on horseback would protect the boundaries of Parchman farm with packs of dogs, which I guess are cheaper than miles and miles of barbed wire.

This is Sunflower County, home to Ruleville, home to Parchman, in which the culture of cotton cultivation, the culture of incarceration, are very closely related to one another—in fact, inseparable from one another. And of course blues music, a lot of which comes out of Parchman.

I had the opportunity to drive through Sunflower County with W. Ralph Eubanks, who is from Mississippi and one of its great living writers. His most recent book is a beautiful piece of work called A Place Like Mississippi, which is an extraordinary study of the state through its literary heroes and through photography. So, naturally, it’s a book I love.

I got to ride around this region with Ralph back in August of 2023. Our destination was a barn outside of the tiny municipality of Drew. Drew is about six miles north of Ruleville on US 49 W. There’s no real reason why you would recognize the name of Drew, Mississippi, unless you happen to be from the area, or from the state, or a huge Ole Miss fan, because that’s where Archie Manning came from, and hence the Manning quarterback dynasty.

But anyway, west of Drew is a barn in which Emmett Till was tortured to death. The barn is one of many aspects of Sunflower County that remain far off the main drag of American self-understanding, but it shouldn’t be that way.

I thought I had a decent understanding of the geography of Emmett Till’s lynching until I read a 2021 essay for The Atlantic Magazine by Wright Thompson. It’s called, “His Name was Emmett Till,” and more than anything else, this essay put the barn on the map for me, and for a lot of other people. The reason why it wasn’t part of the Emmett till story as it has been passed down to us—that’s a long story, but we’ll tell you a lot about our country.

Ralph and I were part of a memorial service that began in the courthouse in Sumner and processed to the barn where Till was murdered. There was basically a church service in a tent right in front of the barn. And each of us was given, in Sumner, a rose to carry with us from the courthouse where Emmett Till was denied justice, all the way out to the barn outside of Drew, which is a good ways away. During this ceremony, each of us, one by one, had an opportunity to lay a rose on the threshold of this barn, where the unspeakable took place.

It was one of those instances where things get totally turned upside down, which seems to happen a lot in the Delta. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d ever experienced something like this, but it was definitely one of the most powerful, in which a place of infamy had been turned into a kind of sacred spot that seems to hold the key to our national well-being in some ways.

As Wright says of the barn, it “both repels and demands attention.”

The barn has been mostly written out of the story Emmett Till, and so has Leslie Milam, the brother of J.W. Milam, who was living on this property in 1955 when Emmett was brought here to be killed.

The Emmett Till story touches everything in this part of the country, whether acknowledged or not. And of course, it touched the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, who lived just down the road from the barn. Stokely Carmichael recounts a story when he was driving Hamer to Sunflower City. He writes,

we had no sooner left the car and started walking down the street when a white man passed us going in the opposite direction. An ordinary-looking white man, bald head shining, wearing khakis, but Mrs. Hamer froze stock-still and caught her breath audibly. Something strange happened to her face as she turned and glared after the man. The change was so sudden that I was startled. Her usually benign expression was gone, replaced by something I’d never seen before in her face and never, ever saw again. This look of revulsion, contempt and anger was so intense that I at first took it to be a sign of physical distress. A heart attack, perhaps? It couldn’t be something totally out of character, like a hate-stare?

“Mrs. Hamer, What happened? Are you okay?” I cried.

She took a deep breath and shuddered. That’s Big Milam, the cracker who murdered that poor boy Emmett Till.”

That was the only time I ever saw anything other than compassion on Mrs. Hamer’s countenance.

On the way back from the barn, after a stop in Drew, Ralph points out to me the one room jailhouse that’s still there. It’s not in use anymore, but it looks as if it could be. And in the center of Drew, the dilapidated buildings of Drew High School.

South of Drew on US 49 W, about halfway until Ruleville, the buildings that make up North Sunflower Academy aren’t dilapidated at all. They’re very ordinary, prosaic looking buildings, but North Sunflower was started as a segregation academy, as a reaction by white Mississippians to Brown v. Board of Education, which demanded the desegregation of public facilities, including public schools. A lot of white Mississippians didn’t want that, so they started their own schools, private schools, like North Sunflower and so many others across the South. Some of which, like this one, still maintain the mascot, “Rebels,” and still use the iconic mascot from Ole Miss, “Colonel Reb,” that prodigiously mustachioed old white planter with a red Stetson hat casually leaning on a cane, looking just a little too comfortable with himself, which has somehow survived in these high schools across the Southeast. Ole Miss hasn’t used it since 2003. But he is still out there, mostly on private high schools known as “seg academies.” And, in fact, if you find yourself traveling the backroads of the Southeast and you come upon a school named “Rebels” with a mascot that looks like Colonel Reb, chances are—based on my unscientific research—100% that that school was started as a seg academy in response to Brown V. Board.

But keep going a few more miles on US 49 W south, and you’ll reach Ruleville. Ruleville is small enough that I can read you the entire description of the place from the Mississippi WPA Guide. It reads:

Ruleville (131 feet alt., 1,181 pop.), like Drew, draws a substantial prosperity from the surrounding plantations. Here is a privately supported Chinese school for the children of the few Chinese families here and in Drew.

And that’s it. That’s all the WPA Guide has to say about Ruleville in 1938. Which brings up one of those more curious features of the Delta: The Delta Chinese. There are pockets of Chinese immigrants across the Delta that have their own kind of micro-cultures. They’ve tended to support themselves with grocery stores, which you encounter in places like Cleveland and Greenville. Maybe less so than you used to, but when you encounter it, it’s one of those things that you don’t really expect. And as you know, those kinds of things are all over the place around here.

The Delta Chinese could be its own podcast episode; it could be its own podcast series. It’s a fascinating demographic mashup of cultures—of Chinese immigrant populations in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow. That’s when a lot of these families would migrate from China to the Delta. As I understand it, it’s due to the fact that labor was always hard to come by in this region, and people who were looking for work from, say, China or Latin America could find it in the Delta.

So, for example, you have Chinese restaurants and Chinese grocers in Greenville, Mississippi, and you have tamales in places like Clarksdale. By the way, what I just told you, I learned primarily from Wright Thompson over a lunch in Greenwood, Mississippi while I was eating an Italian beef sandwich in a restaurant owned by a Black family. So there you go.

But we’re here in Ruleville not to talk about tamales or Chinese groceries. The WPA Guide has already alluded to the fact that plantation culture dominated Ruleville in 1937, 1938, when the Guide was written. At that time, Fannie Lou Hamer was about 20 years old. She was born in 1917, and lived and worked on a plantation with her family outside of Ruleville. W. D. Marlow was the plantation owner, and this being the 1930s Jim Crow, it was a brutal existence.

The people who worked on the plantations in Sunflower County and across the Delta were almost entirely Black, but they had no political power whatsoever. And white planters like W.D. Marlow wanted to keep it that way. So in August of 1962, after Fannie Lou Hamer had tried to register to vote in Indianola, Marlow kicked her off the plantation. And that’s how she ended up at 626 East Lafayette Street in Ruleville.

About a week and a half later, somebody shot into that home sixteen times. The following summer, in June 1963, Fannie Lou was in Charleston doing a voter registration drive led by the SCLC. They took a Trailways bus back from Charleston to Ruleville, and when they stopped in Winona, they were detained by Mississippi State Patrolmen. The short version is: she was taken into a jail cell in which a state patrolman ordered two Black men to beat her with a blackjack. She suffered permanent injuries from this beating in this most sinister display of white power, using Black men to beat a Black woman. It’s hard to imagine a more cynical display of white supremacy, in which Black bodies are used by white men to beat one another.

Despite the apparent wishes of the Mississippi State Patrol, that was not the end of Fannie Lou Hamer. Jump ahead to the following summer, August, 1964, almost two years to the day after she attempted to vote in Indianola, Mississippi.

In August, 1964, the Civil Rights Movement hobbles into Atlantic City. Dr. King is there. He limps in nursing a sprained ankle. Hamer comes in limping, too, because of a case of polio she suffered as a child. Just two months before this, three civil rights workers—Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Lyndon Johnson of Texas has been President of the United States for nine months. This is not the Lyndon Johnson invoking “We Shall Overcome.” This is not LBJ of the Civil Rights Act. But Johnson is President. He is no special friend of MLK at this point. He is, in fact, having his hotel rooms in Atlantic City wiretapped.

Hamer and King and other civil rights leaders are in Atlantic City for the Democratic National Convention of 1964. Hamer is there, testifying to the Credentials Committee of the DNC that the official Democratic Party in the state of Mississippi does not represent the people of that state, and that the official delegates from the Democratic Party should not be seated at the DNC.

With the backing of King and other national civil rights leaders, she is trying to persuade the DNC to seat delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which has sent sixty-eight delegates to Atlantic City. So she’s making this case to the Democratic Party, on behalf of Black Mississippians, that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party have a voice in national politics. So she’s giving this powerful personal testimony at the DNC.

King has been there. This thing is televised. It’s on primetime. One person gets really uncomfortable with this, because she’s like the Booker Wright of the sharecropping culture in the Delta (if you remember Booker from last time.) She is exposing the reality of what it is like to be a Black woman in a sharecropping culture.

The culture she describes is ruthless, violent. She’s giving personal, firsthand testimony of having been beaten in a jail cell by two other Black men, who were forced to beat her with a blackjack in the presence of a law enforcement officer in the cell, who of course was white.

Now Hamer is giving this testimony on national television. It’s making LBJ really, really nervous.

So it’s late summer 1964. Everyone is wondering who LBJ is going to pick as his vice presidential running mate. So suddenly he calls an impromptu press conference to announce not who his VP will be, but that it has been nine months since Governor Connally of Texas was wounded in the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. Nine months. Now, nobody marks a nine month anniversary that I’m aware of (and it doesn’t even make sense to call it a nine-month “anniversary” because it’s not even a year).

But Johnson knew this would be covered by live TV, so he got up and talked for a few minutes for the sole purpose of blocking Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony from being broadcast in living rooms across the country.

It didn’t really work, because later that night, Hamer’s testimony was all over the place. It was being broadcast on the major networks. She got to have her say. And her testimony is incredibly moving. She’s herself moved, wiping away a tear by the time it’s over. And at the heart of it is an interrogation of the United States.

I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered.  All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America.

Now I encourage you to go look this clip up and watch the whole thing if you can yourself. (It’s on YouTube.)

What Fannie Lou Hamer is giving voice to, it’s multitudes. One of the things that I find striking about this passage in particular is something that comes up a lot on these trips: here is a Black woman who has no reason to trust the American narrative of itself, to trust the language of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” She has no reason to put any stock in those promises, those classic riffs on the song of American identity. And yet, like many civil rights leaders, like King, like James Baldwin, she is appealing to that American self-understanding, holding it to account, interrogating it, demanding that it live up to its promises. Just as King said, at the very end of his life, “all we say to America is, be true to what you said on paper.” That’s what Fannie Lou Hamer is putting before the Democratic National Convention, and by television broadcast before the entire country: an interrogation of America’s self-understanding.

And that’s uncomfortable for the President of the United States, who—God bless him—is going through his own sort of transformations at this stage. And he will come out by the end of this, maybe, a little bit different. At least his public dedication to civil rights will be made more explicit. But for now, he still thinks that he’s a person who can get away with preempting a Black woman’s testimony on national television by a completely specious press conference that means absolutely nothing. It could be one of our most prominent, if not least remembered, recorded instances of a white man talking over a Black woman.

In a way, LBJ is just putting on display the logic of white supremacy at the highest levels, and the way it works: if you’re a white man from Texas who’s President, you get to say whatever you want at any time, and it doesn’t matter who’s speaking. You have the right to air time.

The 1964 DNC didn’t end especially well for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In the end, their entreaties to the credentials committee at the DNC didn’t yield much. The MFDP had brought sixty-eight delegates to the DNC. The National Party allowed them just two delegates to represent Mississippi, but only as at-large delegates. They were allowed to participate, but not to vote. Many members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party felt rebuffed by this and walked out of the DNC.

Fannie Lou Hamer’s story, I mean, it’s hard to put words to, it’s almost unbelievable the amount of suffering that this woman endured. Her uterus was forcibly removed in 1961 without her permission. She was imprisoned and beaten within inches of her life. Her home was shot at 16 times. And she died young, at age 59, from cancer and other complications that surely stemmed from a very difficult life. This is a person who literally went from nothing, sharecropping a white person’s farm in Mississippi, to running for Congress in 1968.

If you think about the shifting tides of American party politics in the 20th century, Fannie Lou Hamer is at the center of that shift. In the first half of the 1960s, the Democratic Party in the South was a plantation dinner party posing as a political party. It was entirely white. Its platform was nakedly white supremacist, opposed to integration. The entire platform was the antithesis of the vision of the Civil Rights Movement. But in 1964, Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was an attempt to prevent the all-white Democratic Party from having a stranglehold on power in Mississippi.

And as the name suggests, Hamer’s aspirations were profoundly local. They were rooted in the soil, literally. One of the things that she did after the peak of her political engagement at the party level was to encourage people in Mississippi to plant vegetables. She was dedicated to the dirt in Mississippi and the people who worked it. She was one of them. She had worked the soil in Mississippi her entire life.

But she felt that the Democratic Party did not represent the people of Mississippi. Speaking in terms of numbers, that was plainly true. The majority of Mississippians in the Delta were Black. And that majority had zero political power and influence. So when voting rights initiatives began in the 1960s, they were not met with a lot of pleasure on the part of the ruling class. And Fannie Lou Hamer’s life is a testament to the resistance among white leaders, white elites, white aristocrats, and ordinary white people to the idea of Black enfranchisement. Fannie Lou Hamer took the blows for that movement. And she didn’t just take physical blows.

This is worth paying attention to right now, not just because of the political climate that we are all just breathing in like toxic fumes every day, that is just getting grosser by the day. The mechanisms are not that different now, but they are somewhat different. A few minutes ago I mentioned that Hamer was an essential figure in the changing tides of American party politics. If you’ve had a minute to observe the commitments of the two major parties in our country, the Democratic and the Republican parties, you will see that they have basically flipped. The Democratic Party that once represented the white ruling class, which held whites-only primaries in Georgia—advocated by my cousin Allen Candler, for example, Governor of Georgia in the late-19th century.

During the Johnson administration, the Democratic Party at the national level embraced the Civil Rights Movement. And by contrast, the Republican Party, which began in the 19th century as the party of Lincoln—the party of the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, the Party of Abolition—is now anything but the party of Abraham Lincoln.

I don’t want to get too much into politics here, because frankly, I don’t really know that much about them. But I do know that Fannie Lou Hamer is at a critical juncture in the Democratic Party’s history and in the nation’s history, calling the party to the floor, and saying, the Democratic Party at the national and at the state level, but particularly at the state level, does not represent the fullness of the people of Mississippi, the majority of whom are Black, and the majority of whom do not have the power to vote, and the majority of whom live in fear and lack the same rights in practice that their white brothers and sisters possess.

In some ways Hamer is inviting the Democratic Party to a crisis of conscience.

I question America. Is this America?

And by the way, it wasn’t just the Mississippi Democratic Party that didn’t like where Hamer was going with all this. LBJ didn’t like it; [he] referred to her as “that illiterate woman.”

Really, this isn’t about party politics at all. It’s about an American self-examination, beseeching an entire nation to look at itself honestly. It is entirely fitting that someone like Fannie Lou Hamer would put this question to America. I’m not sure that there is anyone who quite so powerfully represents this fundamental paradox that Dr. King articulated on that very same day in Atlantic City in 1964. He said, “for it is in these saints in ordinary walks of life that the true spirit of democracy finds its most profound and abiding expression.”

“Saints in ordinary walks of life.” That was Fannie Lou Hamer: the kind of person who had the least reason to represent the true spirit of American democracy, and yet gave it its most profound and abiding expression. And if King is right, that she represents the true spirit of American democracy, then that spirit may consist in a rigorous, relentless questioning of America’s seriousness about its own claims, about the depth of its intention to be true to what it says on paper.

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Read the transcript and listen to audio of Hamer’s entire testimony here.

[00:00:00] An Inconspicuous Address

[00:02:00] Same Street, Different Worlds: Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland

[00:04:00] A Revolution Begins in a Brick Church in Ruleville

[00:06:37] A Simple Song Lights a Flame

[00:09:29] Misruleville: Sunflower County

[00:11:17] A Procession to a Barn

[00:15:58] A Tale of Two High Schools

[00:17:57] Chinese Groceries, Tamales, Italian Beef Sandwiches: The Delta’s Micro-cultures

[00:21:49] The Civil Rights Movement Hobbles into Atlantic City

[00:24:17] The President is Getting Antsy

[00:29:41] A Black Sharecropper Helps Capsize 20th Century American Party Politics

[00:33:21] You Are Warmly Invited to a National Crisis of Conscience