December 14, 2021

What a year 2021 has been — both for us as a publication and for all of us living through another pandemic year. This year we got to tell even more incredible stories from and about the South — stories that made us weep with joy and sorrow; stories that made us reflect on the past, live in the present, and work toward a greater future; stories that made us even prouder to represent our region and continue our mission of creating a Better South for all.

So, here are 21 of our best stories from the year. If any of these stories are new to you, we hope you settle in and spend some time with these words and photos. And if you’ve already read them, we hope you revisit your favorites, just as we have.

(In order of publication)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published January 5

Story by James Murdock | Photographs by Gregory Miller

Did you know that oranges grow in Georgia? Neither did writer James Murdock until he found one bright orange spot in his mother’s winter fruit bowl. Warming Southern winters are at the root of this relatively new phenomenon, and Murdock made the drive down U.S. Route 301 to Franklin’s Citrus Farm in Statesboro to find out more. 

Excerpt: Winters on Franklin’s Citrus Farm seem to be ideal for Satsumas, which need some cold weather to ripen. Will the climate still be ideal here in another 10 years? I ask farmer Joe Franklin about the possibility of citrus greening spreading north, if climate zones continue their shift. He thinks it’s still too cold — for now. At the moment, he is in the right spot: not quite hot enough for the bacteria-spreading psyllid to thrive and not quite cold enough to kill trees.

“That’s not to say that one of them clippers from Canada can’t come down and wipe our ass out,” Franklin says. “But things are changing.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published January 12

Story by Jon Ross | Photographs by Larry Fink

This profile focused on the life and legacy of Georgia musician Marion Brown, who, 50 years ago, recorded an experimental music collaboration to re-create the sounds of his Southern childhood titled “Afternoon of a Georgia Faun.” One of our favorite things about this story came after it was published, when Dijini Brown, Marion’s son, said he had never seen Larry Fink’s portraits of his father before. 

Excerpt: Brown catalogued the sound world of “Georgia Faun,” describing experiences and memories from his childhood. “Things that I saw and heard each day going from my house to school, church, visiting, roaming with my dog and a BB gun looking for birds to shoot. We cooked them over open fire in thick patches of woods near where I lived,” he said in an interview for 1973’s “Notes to Afternoon of a Georgia Faun: views and reviews.” 

“It was also,” he continued, “the things my ears enjoyed: birds singing outside my window, dogs barking, a rooster crowing in the morning, crickets in the summer, the sound of people having a good time in one of the houses where those good times are had, standing outside the sanctified church at night enjoying music, and the sound of happy feet stamping furiously, in tune with the preacher and themselves.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published January 28

Essay by Kyla Hanington
Photos by Brandon Thibodeaux, courtesy of The Do Good Fund

Kyla Hanington was a Canadian living in Maryland when she decided to attend the Mississippi University for Women. Her personal essay about breaking down Southern stereotypes and the Good White Person myth deeply resonated with us and made us fall a little more in love with Mississippi, too. 

Excerpt: I chose to study in Mississippi because I wanted to stop being a Good White Person, capital letters clanging into place. If I was going to be curious, open, willing to learn, I had to put that down. I had to be willing to stop advertising and claiming and demanding that I be seen as a Good White Person and instead just be. To sit with openness. To be willing to learn, including willing to learn that I can be wrong. And I was going to have to go to Mississippi.

To go to Mississippi is to fall in love with it. You understand why people live here. Their families are here, in the graveyard or in the town over. Their memories.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published February 9

Story by Alana Dao | Photographs by Marie D. De Jesús
Guest Edited by Charlie Braxton

This piece from Alana Dao tells the story of one of Houston’s most iconic restaurants and its intersection with the chopped and screwed sounds of hip-hop. Timmy Chan’s was opened by Dao’s Chinese immigrant grandparents in the 1950s but was later sold, soon becoming a place where artists such as Bun B of the group UGK and Street Pharmacy’s DJ Dirty Dave came for a plate of fried chicken and rice and a place to “park the car, blast the music so loud the buildings would shake.”

Excerpt: I think of my grandparents’ tenacity: my gong gong’s swagger, my po po’s desire for grandeur and economic comfort, and the struggle against poverty and discrimination. I think it was with this same spirit that they started Timmy Chan’s. What they first created has become a place of comfort for some, even if not in the way my grandparents had expected. It is also a place that rebels, adjusts, and adapts to change in its own way.

Houston hip-hop takes this concept further. Chopped and screwed, leaning into a slower sound, is a resistance against the harsh backdrop of capitalism and being stuck in traffic on Interstate 10. A way to connect and cope against larger systems. Hip-hop in Houston tells of a specific time and place, of lives lived in the face of hardship. In spite of natural and constructed forces, whether it be hurricane season, racism, or even the criminalization of simply being, the music declares: we are still here, still seen.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published February 18

Story by Jason Christian

In a year that saw a spike in hate crimes against the Asian American community, Jason Christian wrote this story about another time when racism left thousands of people displaced and unsafe in the place they call home. For about a year, Louisiana was the site of a World War II Japanese internment camp that saw more than 1,100 Japanese immigrants pass through its gates. It was a little-known story, misfiled and buried for decades until two Louisiana State University librarians uncovered National Archives reports, blueprints, memos, and black-and-white photographs of internees planting a garden at the camp.

Excerpt: The camps we tend to remember were called relocation centers, and they were run by the newly minted War Relocation Authority or WRA. … While the WRA camps were featured in Life and made headlines in The New York Times, the 18 camps run by the U.S. Army, Camp Livingston among them, and the others controlled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), an agency of the Department of Justice (DOJ), remained in relative obscurity. And the whole effort was for naught. “Not a single American of Japanese descent, alien or citizen, [was] charged with espionage or sabotage during the war,” writes Richard Reeves in Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese Internment in World War II. “These men, women, and children were locked up for the duration of the war because they looked like the enemy.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published March 2

Story by Xander Peters | Photographs by Josh Letchworth

Microplastic pollution, flooding, digging and dredging, old septic tanks, and overpopulation are all threats to Florida’s Indian River Lagoon, North America’s most biodiverse estuary and home to roughly 2,000 plant species, 600 fish species, and 300 bird species. Xander Peters dove deep into what this means for the future of the lagoon and the people working to save it. 

Excerpt: “Florida is nothing without good water — good, abundant water,” Nyla Pipes, a water quality advocate, said. “We need it for our tourism industry. We need it for water supply purposes, for the more than 1,000 people a day who are moving here. We simply do not thrive if we don't take care of our water resources.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published March 4

Essay by Cory Albertson | Illustration by Abigail Giuseppe

We’re huge Dolly Parton fans here at The Bitter Southerner, and so is Atlanta-based writer Cory Albertson.  He first discovered her when he was 4 years old, and he writes that it was her music, stage presence, and insistence on being different that helped him embrace the wonders of his queerness over the years.

Excerpt: She would definitely reject a “queer” label much like she’s rejected “feminist” — a distaste for labels and identity politics that just made her that much more queer. 

For me, she was queer because she fought for the freedom to create the body and the body of work she wanted. She was queer because she bulldozed through the limits patriarchy placed on femininity. She was queer because she refused to dim her uniqueness as well as the amount of pleasure and acceptance one life can have. Mostly, though, she was queer because I needed her to be.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published March 18

Story by Janisse Ray | Photographs by Christopher Ian Smith

Janisse Ray talks to botanists, archaeologists, and a former poet laureate calling for the Ocmulgee Mounds National Monument — located in the lush, rich country of central Georgia — to become the state’s first national park. And we soon discovered that they’re not alone, as this story, above all others we published in 2021, was our most-read of the year. Y’all really want a national park in Georgia (and we do, too).

Excerpt: I’d like to plant a seed in the middle of your heart that will become a public land growing in the heart of Georgia — a state that has committed more than its share of atrocities and also a state beginning to make atonement. This national park could be redemptive.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published April 6

Story by Josina Guess | Photographs by Kendall Bessent

Our Issue No. 1 cover story was magical — not just for the fact that the magazine itself was the realization of a years-long dream, but that Tennessee-born singer Valerie June agreed to be a part of it. This story by senior writer Josina Guess delved into June’s 2021 album “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” positivity, and meditation as activism. 

Excerpt: Some might call her a foolish dreamer — dancing around with a smile on her face, lighting candles while the world is on fire. In her outrageously good new song “Call Me a Fool,” featuring guest vocals by Memphis Stax legend Carla Thomas, June beats you to the punch. Her voice moves into deep waters and belts out the power of love. As a woman who has walked through fires and storms in her own life, she calls us all to shine.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published April 10

Story by Martha Park | Photographs by Johnathon Kelso

Martha Park takes us down to Florida and to E.E. Callaway’s Garden of Eden, a roadside attraction that opened in 1956 where visitors could see the “Birthplace of Adam,”  “Where Adam and Eve Built Their First House,” and “Where Noah Made the Ark From Gopher Wood.”

In his 1966 book, In the Beginning, Elvy Edison Callaway wrote that the Garden of Eden was “east of the Apalachicola River, between Bristol and Chattahoochee, in Liberty and Gadsen counties, Florida.” He also claimed that he had discovered remnants of Noah’s Ark, old petrified logs from the Florida torreya tree. This “rarest of trees” grows only along a narrow stretch of the Apalachicola River and is now on the endangered species list.

This story of science, faith, and conservation takes a look at the history of the torreya and the people working to save it from extinction. 

Excerpt: Callaway is often portrayed as a prototypical “Florida Man,” a wacko preaching a brand of off-kilter biblical literalism. But lately, I’ve felt drawn to people like Callaway, and to the places where people like him have sensed something sacred, where the space between heaven and earth — and time itself — seems to grow thin. I’ve wondered what it might mean, in an era of environmental collapse, to look for the divine in nature. Perhaps more than anything, I’ve been compelled to see what I might learn from a tree that hovers somewhere between the past and the present.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published April 13

Words & Photographs by Mark Darrough

Wild horses have inhabited Shackleford Banks since the mid-1500s, adapting to hurricanes and limited food and water sources on the long barrier island. After paddling out to the southern tip of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, photographer Mark Darrough spent a few nights among the horses and learned a thing or two about survival. 

Excerpt: I stood there for a moment transfixed; a group of wild horses grazed on grassy dunes rolling down toward the vast blue of the Atlantic, where, above it, the winter sun ran a low parallel arc along the island.

When I recalled the moment, days later to Margaret Poindexter, president of the Foundation for Shackleford Horses, she could relate. “I remember that feeling. … They were on the island when my grandfather took me there as a kid, and they have enchanted me ever since,” Poindexter said.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published May 18

Words by Jay Steele | Photographs by Amy Steele

After digging through a Tupperware box of his mother’s old photographs, Jay Steele unearthed a series of images from the 1972 Morris Family Old-Time Music Festival. This wasn’t only a time capsule of a muddy, banjo-stomping music festival but a peek into the life of his photographer mother and the world around her. 

Excerpt: I’d spent another trip a few years earlier organizing boxes of family photos, birth notices, newspaper clippings, Christmas cards, handwritten notes, and more. It was overwhelming, but these newly discovered photo slides were a different experience. Collectively, they were the Rosetta Stone to my mom’s young adult life. … Things I had heard about but didn’t really know about. I was actually seeing her in these situations and also her life at that time through her own eyes. I was simultaneously learning so much and realizing I knew so little about her. It’s the closest and perhaps the furthest I’ve felt to her since she died.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published June 22

Words & Photographs by Rory Doyle

 
 

If you drive along U.S. Highway 61 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, you’ll come across Chuck’s Dairy Bar. Photographer Rory Doyle invites us to take a seat at the small restaurant — a mainstay in the town since it opened in 1964 — that provides a signature burger topped with chili and slaw and a place to gather in a region hard hit by rising waters and a shrinking population.

Excerpt: “Chuck’s means several things to me. Yes, it’s just a building sitting there, but it also means security — [not just] for me and my family, but all the other families who’ve been coming here for so long,”  Tracy Harden says. “It also means hope. If Chuck’s can show people what it means to love, to have fun, or a better way of life, then I see hope. There should be a lot of hope for our future if we all do our part. I see Chuck’s as the place where I can do my part.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published June 29

Essay by Brian Griffin

 
 

When artist Wayne White told us his good friend Brian Griffin wanted to share a few of his “Brine” stories with us for his Summer Voices Guest Editor week, we said yes. But we weren’t prepared for one of the most heartbreaking yet powerful essays of the year. Brian Griffin wrote about the gunman who opened fire in his Tennessee church, PTSD, trauma, and healing through humor. This is a story you’ll need to carve out some time to read, but we promise you won’t regret it.

Excerpt: Mass shootings are directed at human beings. Innocent, individual human beings. 

I experienced this firsthand. So have many others. We live in a world in which men revel in anger and political hatred, then lash out blindly with guns. But the reality of these shootings is not ideology or rhetoric. The reality of political violence is not even political. 

The gunman thought he was sending a message — but there was no message. There was only death.

Later we analyze it; we pick it apart and talk endlessly about it, but in the moment, in the here and now of gun violence, it has no explanation, no rationale. It is senseless. It has no meaning other than what it is — an attack on the very idea of human dignity.

A bullet does not strike an ethnicity or an ideology or a faith or an identity. A bullet strikes the soft animal of who we are.

The body. The bone. The flesh. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published July 13

Words by Gray Chapman | Film by Dane Sponberg

 
 

This moving film from Atlanta couple Gray Chapman and Dane Sponberg chronicling the months leading up to the birth of their firstborn made us teary and hopeful. 

Excerpt: We have spent the last four months — a third of a year — starved for joy, scanning the horizon for beauty, rooting for it in the dirt. Tomorrow, we will find it. Your lungs will meet air, you’ll crane your face toward the sun, and you will come home. We’ll see you in the morning.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published August 17

Story by Shane Mitchell | Photographs by Amanda Greene

 
 

Another year brings another one of Shane Mitchell's in-depth Crop Cycle stories — and this one may be the sweetest, juiciest one yet. (If you need to catch up, check out her writings on sugar cane, okra, tomatoes, boiled peanuts, and rice.) This story covers the past, present, and future of Georgia’s most famous crop and takes us on a multistate trip to a graveyard, an orchard, a peach festival, and research labs. This is one sweet story worth savoring. 

Excerpt: “From the Chinese Cling comes the daughter peach we most often visualize neatly arranged in baskets at roadside stands or on the jacket of a Capricorn Records album dedicated to a deceased guitar hero. In 1875, Georgia peach grower Samuel H. Rumph crossed an open-pollinated Chinese Cling with Early Crawford, and the resulting juicy yellow freestone was characterized by a crimson blush on its cheek. He named it for his wife, Clara Elberta Moore. One of the earliest paintings in the splendid U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection is a Chinese Cling by Deborah Passmore Griscom from 1893. Her 1902 cross-section study of an Elberta affected by Leaf Curl sings of fruit gone bad. Yet Elberta became the commercial standard, so much so that Southern growers still identify the ripening season of other varieties either as days before, or days after, this prunus goes sploosh on the ground.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published August 31

Photographs by Darnell Wilburn

 
 

It’s rare that we ever get to break news, so we all had ourselves a moment when we heard that Stacey Abrams told guest editor Charlayne Hunter-Gault she intended to one day run for president. This meeting of two legendary civil rights trailblazers was one of the highlights of our year, and we encourage you to read their important conversation about voter suppression, vaccine hesitancy, and doing good in full. 

Excerpt: "I don’t talk about hope, I believe in being determined. Hope feels good, but I’m not optimistic or pessimistic. I am determined." — Stacey Abrams

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published October 12

Story by Alice Driver | Photographs by Liz Sanders

 
 

Alice Driver and Liz Sanders took a road trip through their home state of Arkansas — the driest state in the nation. The story and photographs that followed weren’t what they or we expected, but it became one of our favorite stories of the year. 

Excerpt: When I started writing this essay a year ago, I wanted it to be about alcohol as a territory for exploration, about geography, soil, history, and the poetic language of wine and spirits. I wanted it to be about all the things I never learned growing up in a dry county where alcohol is sin. But my research took me in another direction. It led me to the Ku Klux Klan, to crystal collectors and anti-vaxxers. It left me even more puzzled about the spirit of this place.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published October 26

Words by Eric NeSmith

Featuring the Photos of George Masa, Courtesy of Highlands Historical Society

 
 

When he was a young newspaper intern, our publisher, Eric NeSmith, spent a summer exploring the mountains around Highlands, North Carolina. Decades earlier, a Japanese immigrant named George Masa had walked those same paths, photographing and mapping the Blue Ridge Mountains. Masa died in relative obscurity in 1933, but his stunning photographs played a monumental role in the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

Excerpt: "Masa’s most powerful weapon was his camera. He used photographs instead of words to help people understand and change,” historian Ran Schaffner said.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published November 9

Words by Rachel Priest | Photographs by Mary Inhea Kang

 
 

In another pandemic year and in a deeply divided country, maintaining friendships can seem near impossible. But friends got Mary Inhea Kang through the death of her father and inspired her ongoing project “In Praise of Friendship.” Our assistant editor, Rachel Priest, penned this piece about the Austin- and New York City-based photographer who is now focusing inward and working on taking up space as a form of self-care and love.

Excerpt: There’s a certain beauty in the project. It isn’t just who she’s photographed — partners about to have their first baby, a trio of friends who met in college, a father and daughter, two neighbors, one of Mary’s friends — even though it’s a stunning display of diverse friendships. The real magic is in the how. With her Mamiya RZ67 and Canon 5D Mark III, she goes beyond the technical aspects of photography — aperture and shutter speed and ISO and focus — and gets to the heart.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Published November 23

Words by David Peisner | Photographs by Michael Stipe & Christy Bush

In July, when we got the word that Michael Stipe, one of the greatest artists of our time, had agreed to sit for a Bitter Southerner interview, we were blown away. Our Issue No. 2 cover story by world-class writer David Peisner reflects a little on the R.E.M. days, but mostly focuses on Michael’s present pursuits and gives us a glimpse into what he’s working on for the future. Michael offered to shoot his own portraits, and photographer Christy Bush added never-before-seen images to round out this stunning story. 

Excerpt: When Stipe was the lead singer of one of the biggest bands in the world, the very act of putting himself at the other end of a camera automatically changed the power dynamics in the room. It put people at ease. And the direction he chooses to point his camera can be just as authorial as his lyric writing. As such, his life’s work is not just music or photography or sculpture, but also curation.