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January 2025
Crossroads
Imani Perry on the South’s Vital Place in America’s Identity
The South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest.
Without the Gate
Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.”
Lost and Found
I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.
Time in the Shape of Hills
My bones wake me up at night. It was my hips at first, then my femurs screaming. Now my ankles. But my doctor won’t listen. It started last year when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Spain. I’m sure that’s why my bones hurt—from all the walking.