Over the past 12 months, our contributors of journalism, essays, photographs, and illustrations have taught us amazing lessons about the South.
No braggadocio intended, but the staff of The Bitter Southerner believes 2019 was maybe our best year ever, at least when it comes to our feature stories. This year, our contributing writers, photographers, and illustrators produced amazing work. To sum up, we’re right proud of this list.
Our contributors took us deep into the lives of important figures in our history. They stood up in defense of Appalachian people and in protest of the folks who recoil from learning about the real lives of enslaved African people when they visit our region’s many “plantation museums.” They helped us understand our history, through our food and through the stories of those who lived under the threat of Jim Crow. They introduced us to Southerners who feed the hungry, struggle to rebuild after hurricanes, run the disappearing local fish shacks on our coasts, and preserve the music of our past. And one of them even visited 60 Waffle Houses to learn what they tell us about hospitality, our economy, and what a true cross-section of the modern South looks like.
If you missed any of these — our greatest hits of 2019 — you missed something important. Here is your chance to catch up.
— Chuck Reece
Photo Essay by Micah Cash
Micah Cash’s particular obsession is on how big institutions represent the culture of the South, over long periods of time. He called us in late 2018 with a proposal. He wanted to visit Waffle Houses all over the South with his camera, living by a strict set of rules. At every single Waffle House, he would sit down and order a meal, and then shoot photographs only from where he sat — and focused only on what he could see through the big, plate-glass windows. He said this exercise would teach us something important about the daily life of Southerners. Turns out, Micah was right — and his story became our most widely read of 2019.
Story by Meredith McCarroll
Photography curated by Roger May
Meredith McCarroll is a mountain woman, and this year she co-edited a volume called Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. That book collected dozens of Appalachian voices to tell J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist whose 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a national best-seller that left readers to believe that mountain folks were, essentially, just bad, lazy people — and that all of them were white. Here, McCarroll brought an exclusive essay to The Bitter Southerner. “The perception that mountain folk like to be poor serves someone — but it’s not the poor mountain folk,” McCarroll writes. “The representation of Appalachia as all white is not only inaccurate, but it preserves a false and destructive ideal of imaginary ‘pure white stock.’ Images of decay and absence allow those in power to turn away from a place that has been forgotten, but has not disappeared. The narrow ideas that circulate about this broad place do active harm.” For any with eyes to read, McCarroll — and every other contributor to her volume (including Ivy Brashear, whose brilliant “The Appalachia I Know Is Very Much Alive” is incorporated here) — begin to undo Vance’s harm.
Story by Michael Twitty
Michael Twitty, author of the James Beard award-winning The Cooking Gene, is one of the most important food historians in the South. One part of Twitty’s work takes him to the few Southern plantation museums now trying to tell the genuine stories of the enslaved Africans who labored and died there, where he shows, in the very kitchens where slaves cooked meals for their masters, exactly what his ancestors went through. In this essay, an earlier version of which was published on his website, Afroculinaria, Twitty confronts the many white plantation visitors who would much rather hear, yet again, the bullshit narrative of the “happy slave.” Twitty tells us to get things straight: “I remember when you waltzed in with a MAGA hat and told me, ‘I know what it’s like to be persecuted like a slave. I’m an evangelical Christian in America. It’s scary!’ More power to you for your faith, but that analogy? Your skewed perception? Or saying that nonsense to my face with the assumed confidence that I wouldn’t respond?” he writes. “The Old South may be your American Downton Abbey, but it is our American Horror Story.”
Story by Michael Adno
Repeatedly, Michael Adno’s writing for The Bitter Southerner has taught us new lessons about our region by diving deep into the lives of historical figures. With “The Sum of Life,” he immersed himself into a most important life: the great novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, whose work and legacy might have died had it not been for the efforts of one of the South’s leading literary lights, Alice Walker. Earlier this year, we rejoiced as Adno accepted the James Beard Award for Best Feature Story — for his first Bitter Southerner story, “The Short & Brilliant Life of Ernest Matthew Mickler.” With this story, he takes us into even deeper and more critical territory in the landscape of Southern culture.
Story by Max Blau | Photos by Dustin Chambers
As Atlanta, Georgia, prepared to host the 2019 Super Bowl, we published this remembrance of an African American community known as Lightning, now disappeared completely, bulldozed to make way for the city’s Super Bowl dreams. “The state of Georgia, for the most part, came and did what I would call a taking, through the use of eminent domain,” the late Atlanta City Council member Ivory Young told Blau before his death. “There were things done that were atrocious — there was very little, if any, negotiation that was going on at all. People were only offered what the state was willing to pay. Again, no negotiation.” Blau writes about inequities of the city The Bitter Southerner calls home , for a myriad of publications,. He reports doggedly and writes with great empathy. This story is one more example.
Story by Jennifer Kornegay | Photos by Matthew Coughlin
Odds are no other Bitter Southerner story in 2019 made more people happy — or renewed more people’s faith in the power of simple human decency and love for one’s neighbor — than Jennifer Kornegay’s story about a restaurant in tiny Brewton, Alabama, called Drexell & Honeybee’s. “The rule at Drexell & Honeybee’s is ‘everybody eats,’” Kornegay writes. “When diners are done with their meal, they put whatever money they can — or not a single cent — in a box by the door. … The restaurant is just the latest battle in a war on hunger Lisa (Thomas-McMillan) has been waging for a long time.” Kornegay is a longtime Bitter Southerner contributor, but this story got to the heart of the Southern Thing in a jarringly beautiful way.
Story by Moni Basu | Photos by Gunner Hughes
When the Category 5 Hurricane Michael barreled into the Florida Panhandle in October 2018, it made direct impact in the tiny but much beloved town of Mexico Beach. The town was destroyed. Veteran journalist, Moni Basu, traveled to Mexico Beach this spring, where she found the town’s longtime residents doggedly determined to restore their home, despite the long odds against them. “Nothing prepared me for my visit. Nothing could. It’s like getting ready for war,” writes Basu, whose work has taken her all over the world. “You can’t imagine it; you have to step onto the battlefield to know how it looks and smells, to know the fear. In some parts of Mexico Beach, it feels as though the monster storm hit yesterday. I think instantly of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, after which entire cities and towns lay crumbled for years. But Haiti is a struggling nation. This is America, and I can hardly believe the freshness of disaster in Mexico Beach.”
Story by Cynthia Tucker | Illustrations by Courtney Garvin
When the film “Green Book” grabbed the Oscar for Best Picture, it proved once again that Hollywood loves few things better than a story about African Americans that features a “white savior.” It also proved that the filmmakers conveniently overlooked the stories of all the black families in the days of Jim Crow who, when they traveled, relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, which guided them to hotels and restaurants they could patronize without fear or harassment or violence. In this story, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Cynthia Tucker collects stories from African Americans ranging from her neighbors in Mobile, Alabama, to legends like home-run king Hank Aaron, who tell us what traveling with the Green Book was really like, which bears little resemblance to that movie you saw.
Story by Michael Adno
Michael Adno admired no artist’s work more than Alabama’s William Christenberry. After Christenberry died in late 2016 at 80, Adno began a two-year journey of retracing Christenberry’s footsteps through west-central Alabama and frequent visits to Christenberry’s family and friends. In this story, Adno recounts how one of the South’s greatest artists made an enduring record of his native Hale County, Alabama — and what that ultimately meant inside the South and beyond it.
Story by Alexandra Marvar
The little village of Thunderbolt sits on the Wilmington River, a few miles northeast of where the river empties into Wassaw Sound along the Georgia coast. All along Southern coastlines, little “fish shacks,” locally owned seafood restaurants, have been part of our landscape for decades. A place called Despocito’s, in business for over 50 years, is the last fish shack clinging to life along the Wilmington. David Boone, who now owns Despocito’s with his 84-year-old mother, tells Marvar, “It’s a part of our history that — unless something changes — it’s gonna be wiped clean. You don't carry that respect for history when you're younger. I didn’t. But as you get older, you come to realize these things are important: to understand your past, and where you're going in life, or where you came from.”
Story by Shane Mitchell | Photos by Tammy Mercure
Here’s the thing about okra: We know the plant is not native to our continent. There are many stories — none confirmable — about how okra came to these shores. The only thing we know is when it came here: at the same time the first enslaved Africans arrived in the 17th century. Since The Bitter Southerner’s beginnings, food writer Shane Mitchell has told our readers true stories about how certain iconic foods of the South reveal our history, and she’s taken home two James Beard Awards for that work. This story tells us how a little green pod has connected Southerners across the lines of race, faith, and gender for centuries. Mitchell will also bring her story to life in an upcoming episode of The Bitter Southerner Podcast, set for release soon. Okra unites, in the gumbo pot and in our lives. It is truly an undeserved gift to the American South.
Story by Brian Foster | Photos by Adam Smith
In the late 20th century, no musician represented the Hill Country Blues, an unorthodox style of music that originated in northwestern Mississippi, better than the late R.L. Burnside. His raucous performances and landmark albums, bearing titles like “A Ass Pocket of Whiskey” and “I Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down,” took him all over the world. Today, the mantle of the Hill Country Blues sits squarely on the shoulders of R.L.’s grandson, Cedric Burnside, who started playing drums in his Big Daddy’s band when he was in his early teens, and who now applies his masterful guitar playing to the work. Memphis writer Brian Foster repeatedly visited Burnside’s family near Holly Springs, Mississippi, to bring us this story, which might very well be the most beautiful profile of a musician The Bitter Southerner has ever published.