“Toubab! Toubab!” A band
of small children break the morning silence. They are following us at a respectful
distance, just in case the ‘white people’ would suddenly turn on them.
More than 20 years have passed, yet these memories remain as vivid
as if they occurred yesterday. A journey to Senegal, the cradle of the West
African drum scene, changed my musical appreciation—and my life—forever. I
still get goose bumps when I mentally relive the journey’s high point, our final
night in the nation’s capital, Dakar. But more about that in a moment.
It was the culmination of my youthful exploration of West African
drum and dance culture, a truly life-changing period of immersion into some of
the greatest music on Earth. You couldn’t make it up, a tale of bribery,
malaria, and ecstatic musical virtuoso.…
What happened to Tyler
made me paranoid that it would happen to me, too. I chose to stay away from
girls who I felt “sought too much attention”. You know the type –
girls with clearly marked daddy issues gaged into their ears from their dyed pink
hair to their visible tattoos to their acting careers to their penchant for
talking in front of a mic in front of strangers every night to their long
Facebook rants. Anyone who sought too much validation was marked with a giant
red X to me. They were walking warning symbols. I would be smarter than Tyler.
I would learn from his mistake of dating an aspiring writer who used him for
material. I would never be accused.
Furthermore I always
wanted to make sure anyone I slept with would be into it.…
I stand before a pitch of hillside, evening bled dark, a pathway of insideness swarming from that belly of mountain, it is a soccer team emerging, crowd shouting and the Spanish lesson emphasizes the pronunciation of jugadores. Not like doors, the mouth too round: ladders and dogs will get there – Something you thump your tongue against, something that sits against your teeth and rolls to your throat – the shape of the tongue is a monster of sharpness that must prick at the roof where there are no windows. Only widows,
which my son tried to understand yesterday, confusing divorce with death but sensing that the consequence is to be alone and we veered to what comes next. Heaven— who told him that?—or maybe you, living, remarry, or live alone in shade under apple trees with a German Shepherd thirty minutes from downtown.…
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination – Jess Row
Through an unflinching look at the literary canon since the Civil Rights era, Jess Row’s collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, examines the influence of whiteness on white writers’ imagination and America’s historical antipathy toward race.
As
Row deconstructs the fiction of white writers- notables like Raymond Carver,
Annie Dillard, Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson, among others- he points out
a pattern of omission, of narratives curiously devoid of racial question, or
tension, which Row defines as nothing short of “wishful thinking as a way of
life, a way of seeing, a way of making art” (10).
Written
primarily for white readers (of which I am one), I found Row very successful
making the connection between white writers’ literary deracination and the
literal ‘white flight’ from neighborhoods as blacks moved north during the
Great Migration, seeking refuge from lynch mob terrorism and Jim Crow (9-10).…
I pry up the bright coin of its lid. Behold — the destroyer of shirts, the speckler of grand pianos. True, I have turned the furniture to ghosts, and I have spread out The New York Times like a sidewalk along our walls. None of it matters. I have always believed too deeply in the steadiness of hands. I should know by now that ruin has a way of finding us, that only my toe print on the bedroom floor can prove that we resisted.
Cara wasn’t telling this to anyone in particular; rather, it was almost as if she was just realizing that a good fifteen minutes into our debate class, our teacher hadn’t shown up, and she had been too engrossed in her AP US History homework to notice until then.
I turned slightly towards her and stopped doodling on Will’s notebook. He looked up at me, as if he had been lost in watching me draw swirls and triangles on the spiral he had brought to class all year. It was the end of May, school would be over in just three weeks, and we really weren’t doing much of anything anymore. Neither one of us had qualified for the national championship, and we were both moving away at the conclusion of our junior years.…
Terry Barr’s essay collections, Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings from My Alabama Mother and We Might As Well Eat: How to Survive Tornadoes, Alabama Football, and Your Southern Family, are published by Third Lung Press of Hickory, NC. His essays have appeared in Under the Sun, The Bitter Southerner, Eclectica Magazine, Wraparound South, storySouth, Cleaning Up Glitter, and The Chestnut Review, among other journals. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his family, teaches Creative Nonfiction, Modern Novel, and Southern Film at Presbyterian College, and blogs on Medium.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Barr speaks with Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum about his work, the impact of COVID-19 on teaching and writing, some favorite films, and much more!…
