If you're looking for a writer to aggregate content, regurgitate press releases, or deify pundits, I'm not the one. If you're looking for a writer to spew statistics, quote jargon, and bill by the hour, well, that's not me either.
If you want to know how people feel, what they think, and who they are, I might be your writer. If you want a seasoned journalist who prefers to be in the field instead of behind a desk, someone equally skilled with both pen and camera, someone who keeps a suitcase packed and notebook ready, I might be your writer. If you want a journalist who is a native Southerner — who understands its people, knows its terrain, remembers its past and cares about its future — I might be your writer.
Because if it's people you want to reach, I'm all in. And if you've got a story, you've got my interest. Email me today.
In the 23rd Special Construction Battalion, the officers were white and the seamen and steward’s mates — basically servants — were black. “I’m from Georgia,” an officer told them. “Where I come from, there’s only two kinds of niggers — a good nigger and a dead nigger. We don’t want no dead ones.”
In life, he was the keeper of history. Presidential photographs, letters, memos, campaign materials — nothing escaped the thin fingers and sharp eyes of the Columbus native who lived simply and died simply but touched time, leaving a signature of his own.
The teenager turned, walked back to the pool, slipped off his shirt and slid beneath the cool waters. Maybe his curiosity had been satisfied. Maybe he knew that Edward Yeates, head of Father’s Child Ministry, takes a no-nonsense approach to mentoring children who lack, and crave, a father’s presence. He gives them freedom, and he reins them in. Mostly, he loves them.
The post office is gone. The school is gone. City Hall is gone. Most of the churches are gone. Nearly every building in Smithville, Mississippi is gone — or so heavily damaged they will have to be demolished. The devastation from last week’s F5 tornado is so widespread, so absolute, that it’s easier to tally what remains: The telephone company. Coker’s Han-D-Mart. And an unshakeable sense of faith.
Three girls watch as the tall, well-dressed man strides down the cracked sidewalk, across the playground, through the weeds, past the swings, and toward a merry-go-round that might have once been blue but is now a tired gray. They seem wary here in the shadows of the housing projects and petrochemical plants that make up their world. Life on the west side of Port Arthur, Texas, is hard; street smarts come early by necessity.
Tangled ropes of purple, gold and green beads sailed through the air, landing with a thwack on Louisiana Highway 1 on Sunday afternoon. If ever a town needed Mardi Gras, it is Grand Isle — the first populated piece of U.S. territory to see oil make land following the April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon.
Donna Gainey grew up here in the picturesque fishing village of Bayou La Batre, Ala., – went to school only a mile away, married a local boy, and made the tiny City Hall on Wintzell Avenue her home away from home. This is all she’s known. All she’s ever wanted to know. For 32 years, she’s watched mayors and council members come and go, but still she remains.
Tempers flared inside a northwestern Tennessee courtroom Monday night as residents and local firefighters argued about the expansion of a local subscription-only fire-department policy that has ignited debate across the country.
Traffic is jammed, bumper to tailgate, but no one seems to mind. Drivers cruise along at crawl speed, hanging out their windows from time to time to wave and yell friendly greetings to one another. The smell of barbecue hangs like Southern perfume in the sweltering heat, and strains of “Sweet Home Alabama” blast from roadside speakers. In the heart of Dixie, where college football is religion and every day is a good day to celebrate, the World’s Longest Yard Sale might as well be redubbed the Biggest Tailgate Party.
If you want to be elected in the Bluegrass State, there’s only one place to be the first Saturday in August: Fancy Farm, Ky., where old-fashioned politics meets dyed-in-the-wool religion, and the differences are evened out by the glorious, gluttonous, gastronomic magic of charred pork and mutton at the annual Fancy Farm picnic-cum-political rally.
The moment Gulfport, Miss., resident Megan Jordan feared has arrived. The viscous onslaught of crude is no longer an abstract horror belonging to Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida. The first globules of oil have slipped through the Mississippi Sound and washed ashore in nearby Ocean Springs. For Ms. Jordan and her neighbors, this isn’t just any beach – it’s the keeper of memories, the provenance of dreams. The destruction is hard to bear. Their passion, properly channeled, could become a crucial element in future oil spill defense.
In the end, Magnolia Springs did not need BP or Mr. Obama or the governor in Montgomery. It needed the grit and determination of the people themselves – people like Hinton, who says he will stand chest-deep in the waters of the bay, linked arm in arm with his neighbors, if that’s what it takes to stop the encroaching oil from despoiling the sublime latticework of bogs and bayous that he calls home.
