Dear Bitter Southerner Reader,

Fresh off Amtrak from Mississippi in 1992, I needed an apartment in New York City. I had no money for the deposit, so I went to the property manager’s office in Union Square and told her that I could “put some land on it.”

I still remember the mortified look on this woman’s face when I said this. I myself now laugh at how “country” I was. She didn’t understand how I could say/think something so absurd — that land was as good as money, that land was currency. But in my defense, it was the only currency I had ever known.

My grandfather willed my grandmother and all of his children seven acres of land each. My childhood was spent hearing my aunts and uncles barter, battle for, and sell that land among each other. That land is where I still live now. I walk on this parcel of earth where my grandmother walked through low clouds past wild strawberries to uproot okra. It is my currency. It is my wealth, my haptic connection to my ancestors — missed and beloved.

My town is in southwest Mississippi, only miles away from where the Mississippi River spills into the Gulf of Mexico. I was curious about this convergence and wondered, “Did it have a name?” It did. It’s called the “mouth.” I love this. “The mouth.”

I live in the mouth.

A mouth that calls and curses my name, and I respond to those calls and curses with constant return. I cain’t quit it.

Even though living here means being in permanent battle with Confederates. Even though living here is a decision to be artistically needful and yet needing nothing.

The mouth. The land.

They rule me.

And so, for my guest editor week, I have sought out folks with similar obsessions — artists D’Angelo Lovell Williams and Allison Janae Hamilton and organizer LaTosha Brown, daughter-heir to the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer.

They are all plate shifters of the tectonic kind in their fields of work. My wish is that they make fans and followers of you all.

Enjoy!

Yours, or what’s left of me that the mouth didn’t take,