Oxford American Fall 2022

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she also served as the inaugural chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies. Griffin received her BA in history and literature from Harvard and her PhD in American studies from Yale. She is the author or editor of eight books, including Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton, 2021). A frequent contributor to the Oxford American, BENJAMIN HEDIN is the author, most recently, of a novel, Under the Spell. He also produced a forthcoming documentary about Indigenous reparations, Lakota Nation vs. United States. Nashville-based critic and journalist JEWLY HIGHT is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and NPR Music. Her work…

In a fourth-grade class on Tennessee history, we learned about the state’s three grand divisions, so distinct one wanted to go its own way during the Civil War. We knew Memphis was westernmost. We were topographically unique: flatter, more swamp-like, with rainy seasons like the tropics. We were tethered to Mississippi, the state and the river, and to the eighteen counties of the Delta. Which meant we looked and ate and sounded more like Mississippi than most of Tennessee. We made barbecue, moonshine, Tina Turner, C. L. Franklin. A tambourine and a palm, a double-time piano, a worried line cooed over a bottom-heavy blues. On a school trip to St. Louis, we learned the city calls itself the “gateway to the west.” Texas, we were told, is bifurcated by the ninety-eighth…

When I was a child, a clown pushed his face into the driver side window of our family car and asked my father, “Are you happy?” Santa hadn’t asked when he was standing on that corner. Nor had the United Methodists who were handing out flyers for their car wash fundraiser. But the clown spoke as if he knew our family, waiting there at the red light. Momma was in the front passenger seat, and my sisters and I were in back—which, in a 1964-1/2 Ford Mustang, meant we were as close as three people could get, irrespective of their DNA. I was the youngest and heavier than the others—“husky” was the word I so dreaded—and sat on the end, directly behind Daddy, who was slim. We girls had quarreled over which…

I should’ve found a new dentist years ago. The fact that Dr. Patel has stopped giving me his signature scratch-and-sniff stickers and started calling me “the Elder” might have been enough to force others out by now, but not me. We’ve been through too much together: dozens of cleanings, six fillings, two extractions after an unfortunate encounter with the bottom of a swimming pool, and one nitrous-fueled hallucination wherein the toucans on the ceiling flew down to greet me. And history aside, where else am I going to find a free Pac-Man machine in the waiting room? So much is my penchant for Pac-Man and my loathing for change that, at thirty, I am still seeing my pediatric dentist. But Dr. Patel didn’t meet me as a full-grown adult earning a…

They are filed away in boxes in the National Archives, books and ledgers full of blotchy, ornate handwriting. A sheet inside of one, dated June 19, 1838, lists a fiddle and shot pouch horn, four chairs, and some bedding. Another gives the price for a spinning wheel and plough. Turning forward, you find mention of bee stands, cotton cards, pails, and chisels. And while they seem nothing more than a catalog of the most ordinary possessions, the pages delineate a tragedy of immeasurable scope, for they are the records of what a people lost when they were evicted from their ancestral lands, forced to give up everything they owned. “It’s really quite astonishing,” said Claudio Saunt, a professor of history at the University of Georgia who found these lists one day…

Six nights before my friend Sam and I hike through Ijams Nature Center to Alvis Williams’s grave, Mama texts me about Hunter’s death. It is 9 P.M. on a Tuesday, and I have just gotten home from the bar. I’m tipsy and working on my novel—inspired by the loss of my brother’s best friend, Micah. Annotations are spread across my bed. It had rained, and because I sat outside at the bar to lessen my chances of COVID, I am naked, having stripped out of my wet clothes. I cry first, nestled into the hollow of my secondhand mattress. Hunter was my stepdad Wyatt’s oldest friend. He’d spent many evenings on our outdoor lanai after paddling races and simulator training with my pilot stepdad, and it was on these nights that…