Lynchburg, Virginia, where I’ve lived since 1986, embodies much of the complexity of the South: the pain, the beauty, the poverty, the hospitality, the racism, the religious fervor, the emerging alternative voices. This city of hills and ravines and church steeples, framed by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the James River, is named for Quaker ferryman John Lynch, not the act of lynching, though in Riverside Park, a few blocks from where I teach, cherry trees bloom over the grassy outline of the city pool that was filled in to protest desegregation. Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer’s house and garden shine as a museum in the federally recognized Pierce Street Historic District; Ota Benga’s remains are lost in a now unmarked grave in the city limits. These are just a few local examples of the larger tangled, teeming history, culture, and environment of the South. The writers and artists in this issue of About Place explore that tangle brilliantly with compelling language, stories, images. They reveal new facets of the region and challenge old assumptions and mythos with fresh perspectives. It has been an honor, with Derrick Harriell, to assist Ann Fisher-Wirth in bringing this powerful body of work on the South to light.
