Project Description
The Thread of All Sorrows
For the On Being radio program blog
When the news of the shooting hits, suddenly we are all Southerners again, under one same long shadow.
If I was not a Southerner yesterday, or had forgotten that I was, I am today, again, as I have been so many times when this past that is never dead, this past that is not even past, comes back to live with us.
There are so many souths, and where I live now, in Roanoke, Virginia, is just one south, different from the south I am from, East Tennessee, which is different from the south of South Carolina. But I am grieving today for The One South and the circumstances under which it once rallied as one, the Confederacy, in a gruesome war in defense of slavery, and the way in which we now, all of us, in the Blue Ridge, and the Smoky Mountains, and the Piedmont, and the Cumberland Plateau, and the Mississippi Delta, and the cypress swamps, and the hill country, and the Bluegrass region, and the Gulf ports, and the tidal flats, fall under this long shadow of shame. I am grieving for the ways that we are still at war. …