Southern Storytellers

[gentle bluegrass music] [Billy Bob Thornton] The South is made for writers.

[Adia Victoria] I think the things that unify people in the South are the same things that unify all people.

[David Joy] Drawing a singular image of our people, that's where things get difficult or rather impossible.

[gentle music] Spend enough time here, but keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth closed and you may come to know this place.

[gentle music] [folk rock music "Kindness Be Conceived"] Hold me hard, I've been let loose Set Me clear Of all I do Kindness be conceived When we wake In the Austin city lights There is a concrete stuck between How we breathe And why we die Why we breathe And why we die [crowd cheering] - Ummmm.

Yeah, so... [acoustic guitar music] Growing up, I was drawn to more percussive kinds of playing and really intricate finger picking that I heard in country blues or different old-time music.

The first concert that I went to truly was a county fair.

I was young, I was five or six and my mom brought me to it and I remember these bales of hay that we were sitting on and then there was like a live bluegrass band and then there was square dancing.

That was the first time I heard bluegrass music.

[bluegrass guitar music] That's what I love about old country music.

I like that high and lonesome sound and just real plaintive sad, like melancholic music that can infuse with, there's still an optimism there.

And it reminds me a lot of Vietnamese music that my parents love.

You know, there's just this utter, just like the human condition, lamented, but also celebrated.

[mom singing in Vietnamese] [mom singing in Vietnamese] [mom singing in Vietnamese] - So this the best.

Both like mint or basil or anything, you know, and the last thing, this is rice noodle.

- Food in my family, like when people gather, it's this unit that has come to have a feast and take care of each other in that way.

It's so a part of Buddhism.

Everything is about like how do you feed the ones you love who are with us and no longer with us and it's just like this ongoing act of devotion.

[family speaking in Vietnamese] [reflective music] Both my parents, because of their affiliation with the South Vietnamese Government, had to flee and my dad was a helicopter pilot who was in Saigon until the last days.

He was haunted.

I don't know what he saw in the war, I just remember his friends gathering around.

They would always end up crying, like all these men at a certain point would just start remembering and crying and truly, I think he was never meant to be a parent.

You know, and some people are just not meant to do that.

And some people try harder to push through and I think he just couldn't do it.

After my dad left, becoming a single parent, it must have been terrifying.

The laundromat demanded everything of her.

That first or second day, she was truly by herself with it.

She just went into the back behind the dry cleaning machines and just cried.

She just knew she had to get it done and create a livelihood for herself and for us.

- I left my country the end in 1973.

The 29th.

- The day Saigon fell.

- The day exactly at the 30.

- Right, right, okay.

- But before that night, we already have to escape.

Now nothing good for you have to leave your country.

You have to lose everything.

And besides the scare, how we survive, you know.

- Yeah, it's tough.

It's just the, you know, sadness and typically, I don't want my mom to see me upset or sad.

I think the worst thing either of us can bear is seeing the other cry, so... there's a lot of looking straight ahead.

But I remember when my mom said, "You have to learn for yourself what freedom is and what is it about freedom that will compel you to leave everything?"

- To me, we're lucky to be here.

Try to put any bad thing back, all the way back.

[laughs] Don't want to remember.

- I just was crying for everything she's been through that she doesn't ever ask for recognition.

If I don't give it, who's gonna give it?

[folk rock music "Temple"] I wanted to be a writer before I wanted to be a musician.

I wanna offer this of myself because I would like to know that I'm not alone.

[rock music] [audio screeching] [audience cheering] Thank you so much.

- We were talking about the South earlier and I've heard everybody, a lot of people try to answer this question and maybe you can, the old idea of why the South is so rich in writers.

I mean, look, it's incredible.

Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter and Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty.

But just writing, it seems to be that it's in the soil or in the land or in the water or something that people write better.

- Yes, I think people have more to write about in the South.

People ask me that so often, but I can't explain it.

- Nobody can.

- No.

- What I wonder, aren't you curious about it?

I mean, if you had been born in Dayton, Ohio, would you be Tennessee Williams or?

- Well, I hope I wouldn't be Ohio Williams.

[audience laughing] [gentle music] - This is new and has pretty much everything that I've written.

"Men We Reaped," it's a memoir.

One of my cousins and three of my friends, all from my small sort of community, right, they're all basically young Black men sort of died from different reasons, right.

So my brother died in October of 2000.

Some time in 2001, the drunk driver who killed him, they couldn't charge the person who killed him with manslaughter.

The only thing that they could charge this person with was leaving the scene of an accident and so, and I remember feeling as if my brother had been completely erased.

I wanted this record to exist, right, and this accounting to exist and I wanted to bear witness like to their lives and to the fact that they lived and they were here and they were loved.

You know what I'm saying?

There are certain elements of that that I think that are very specific to the South and very specific to the rural South.

[somber music] "We are in Wolf Town, distant past to 1977.

Before DeLisle was named DeLisle after a French settler, the early settlers called it Wolf Town.

Pine and oak and sweet gum grow in tangles from the north down to the south of the town to the DeLisle Bayou.

The Wolf River, brown and lazy, snakes its way through DeLisle, fingers the country in creeks before emptying into the bayou.

When people ask me about my hometown, I tell them it was called after a wolf before it was partially tamed and settled.

I want to impart something of its wild roots, its early savagery.

Calling it Wolf Town hints at the wildness at the heart of it."

There are graves all through here, through this wooded area, and like as you can see right here, the Black people like were buried here in the back of the graveyard.

And so the tree line sort of separated the front, which is like the white section from the back, which is the Black section.

And see, it makes me worried, like even now when I'm walking, it makes me worried that I'm walking over someone and I don't even know it.

I remember being shocked when I came here for the first time because, [deep sigh] because I had naively assumed, [laughs] you know, that death was like the great equalizer, right?

And so it was just sort of shocking to come here and see, you know, like the final resting places of, you know, my family members would be erased.

It's just heartbreaking because I feel like this happens all the time, you know, like there's this erasure of people, this erasure of the past, this erasure of these like lived histories, right?

And so I wanna push back against that, right, because it shouldn't happen.

[somber music] One of the things that I realized from my first book to my second book was that, was that I needed to keep a certain sense of connection to home in order to stay honest about the people that I was writing about and the place that I was writing about and, I don't know, and I thought that maybe living here would be a really good way of doing that.

[Interviewer] So can you introduce your kids to me?

[Jesmyn] Yes, that's Brando and Brando is five and the oldest is Noramy and she's nine.

Sometimes she says she wants to be an actress and a director, but I don't know if she- - And a marine biologist.

- And a marine biologist, so we got a lot going on.

He says a lot of different things about what he wants to do.

- I want to be a babysitter, a doctor and a gas station worker.

[Jesmyn laughing] - That's my first time hearing that.

I mean, I normally tell them, "I don't want you to go work at a gas station," but guess he must have gone in the opposite direction.

[Jesmyn laughs] [uplifting music] There you go.

- You can stop.

- Okay.

When we were growing up, those swings weren't there.

That little play thing wasn't there.

This swing was not there.

They had these concrete benches and the basketball court was there and we spent a lot of time here just being young and socializing, I guess, you know, because there was no other place for us to go.

I wrote about this park.

In "Where the Line Bleeds," the characters are here.

In "Salvage the Bones," I think they're here for like a minute.

Like there's a short scene where they're at the park.

In "Men We Reaped," I wrote about it.

It's, I don't know.

I guess I didn't realize like how much it mattered to me, I guess as a kid, you know.

- I call it pine cone gourmet.

[Jesmyn laughs] - At first I thought it was a fairy house.

Like there are good things about growing up in this place, you know, even for them, right?

So they get this sense of community, they get this sense of family, but for me to sort of think about like the racial reality of this place can sometimes be just really difficult to reckon with, you know?

But I do hope the work that I do helps to reform this place into a better South for them to grow up in, you know.

I try to do what I can.

Sissy's gonna take a picture of it.

[uplifting music] - Look at that, look how big that Dollar General is.

Only in the South is there a Dollar General the size of a Walmart.

Right?

That's the South.

- You know, there are two Avengers movies coming, Rob, I don't know if you heard about that.

One is called "Kang Dynasty" and there's "Secret Wars."

According to "Deadline," Michael Waldron, he has signed up to be the writer for "Avengers Secret Wars."

- I feel like people used to be really nostalgic and wistful about the local bookstores.

I am wistful about Barnes and Noble, the giant Bookstore corporation and I love it dearly.

Look here, this is the "Star Wars" section.

I've read certainly all of the old ones of these.

As a kid, this was the only "Star Wars" that existed, except for the original three movies.

So something like "Shadows the Empire" was absolutely electric to read and still is, frankly, it's so, so good.

"Tales of the Bounty Hunter."

I remember my friend had this at his house.

A lot of time spent imagining other worlds, like where Bossk lives.

Why wouldn't you wanna be where Bossk is?

Look at that guy.

He looks like a blast to hang out with.

So, if you wanna know how much I love hot wings, there're a central part of one of, if not the very first story I ever wrote.

"Jim the Fat Cat" is pretty much everything I'm interested in even now is encapsulated in this book.

"Jim was very fat and out of shape.

He's wearing a $3 Cafe shirt."

I did this in third grade.

It's how much I like hot wings.

"Every night he went to $3 Cafe and ate 50 extra hot chicken wings.

Jim didn't have a nice home, in fact, it was pathetic."

Look, there's the hot wings.

As a child, I was obsessed with hot wings and television.

And as a 34-year-old man, I am obsessed with hot wings and television.

Thank you.

- You're welcome.

- Good to go?

- Yeah, thank you.

The wings are awesome here in the South.

I can't separate this food from my childhood spent coming here after my dad would take me to one of his softball games.

This was the spot, this was kind of the special meal and the other memory tied to it is sitting here right before I got on the interstate to drive out to California.

So, you know, on the one hand, it's just a little hot wing restaurant, but on the other hand, it's one of the most important places in my life.

It's kind of cool.

[uplifting music] It's so overgrown now, you couldn't even tell.

It was our mailbox and the driveway went way back down in there into the woods and probably like a minute long drive and then you'd come around a corner to our big, old, haunted house that we lived at.

And now it's a subdivision.

I believe this old fence must have lined the property.

The feeling of trying to recreate those memories, rebuild that house, you know, rebuild just a world of your childhood that simply doesn't exist anymore.

[leaves crunching] [upbeat guitar music] - When I would get home from school, growing up, like I'd walk around back here and squirrel hunt like every day.

There's a lot of inspiration back here.

I mean I have so many memories like from this spot, even, like killing my first deer or, you know, walking through here with my grandpa.

[motor humming] My grandfather, who just passed away a few months ago, his mom died when he was born and so he was raised by his grandfather and on this property.

We all grew up here and so it is always been really special.

People always are surprised by the fact that I don't live in Nashville and I lived there for 10 years, you know, to get my career kind of going, but it was all always my intention to move back home.

I don't know, man, there's something special about your hometown and I love the fact that I was from the South.

I took pride in that.

Still do.

I just hope there ain't no snakes in here already.

Getting close.

[Interviewer] What kind of snakes are in there?

- Copperheads, rattlesnakes.

That shoulda ran any of 'em outta here, I would think.

[strumming] [guitar music] This one kind of makes sense to me being where we are.

We're sitting on my grandpa's land, even though I own it now, it still feels like my grandpa's land so I wrote this for him a few years ago.

[music "Grandpa"] He stood on that bank when I got baptized Gave me a 30-30 when I turned nine At 16 you caught me drinking Out in the barn I could hear you cheering when we won state And you held my hand at grandma's grave And I'll always be thankful You never sold the farm Grandpa, you stood so tall Chewed that Red Man, wore over-alls You were the same man on Sunday morning As Saturday night Five foot six to the top of your hat But when you talked about the war Thought you were Superman American-born simple man with a Southern drawl You walk the walk, You talk the talk, Grandpa Mmmmm I think what's really, really special about the South and being from the South is the pride that you have in being from here, if you're from here, and I also think we're misunderstood.

Sometimes we get the dumb hillbilly thing thrown our way too and...

I don't think that's fair either.

I don't know if that's worth saying, but, I don't know, it is to me.

And I've never shied away from who I am.

I think that's important also.

I think even if people didn't grow up the way you did, or even if they don't have everything in common with you, if they see that this means something to you and this matters to you, I think they can understand it because they can still relate it back to something else.

You know, like we had a song called "Small Town USA" out.

It was our first big song and I wrote it about right here and being in the town of 300 people, but we go play it in New York City and people lose their minds over it, a song called "Small Town USA" and I didn't understand it at first, but after playing there a bunch and talking to people, their little two or three square blocks where they, they still shop at the same grocery store as everybody else in that little area.

You know, go to the same little convenience stores or whatever, so I just think if you can relate to people as a songwriter, that's key and for me growing up in the South allowed me to maybe understand that more so than I would have otherwise.

We actually shot the video here too.

Did it all in the town, but... [music "Small Town USA"] A lot of people called it prison When I was growing up But these are my roots and this is what I love 'Cause everybody knows me and I know them And I believe that's the way we were supposed to live I wouldn't trade one single day In small town USA Give me a Saturday night, My baby by my side A little Hank Jr. And a six pack of Lite An old dirt road And I'll be just fine Give me a Sunday morning that's full of grace A simple life and I'll be okay Here in small town USA - Are you more interested in character than you are in place?

- I don't know.

- Because your characters are part of place, aren't they?

- They are, they come out of it, I think.

[Host] You don't regard yourself as a regional writer.

- Well, I am one, I suppose.

It doesn't bother me if I am 'cause I think just about everybody writes from the place they know.

[Host] How how do you suppose it happens that there are so many good writers from Mississippi in this generation?

- I think part of it is the oral tradition and another part of it is that that's how, especially in those early days when Faulkner was writing, earlier days, people had nothing to entertain them but family stories.

You didn't have anywhere to go at night but the porch of the country store, you know, and all of Faulkner, they sit around out in the little hamlets and talk at night with the mockingbird singing and the moon shining on the pear tree and then you start talking about things that have happened, you know.

[pensive music] - I think what's interesting to me now about seeing this plinth where the monument used to be, is the way that it enacts a kind of erasure of the hundreds of monuments North and South commemorating the Civil War.

So now that they've come down and are coming down in so many places, we see almost a wound, a scar, an absence where those things were once inscribed.

I think that it might make people ask questions that allow us to tell a fuller version of our American history.

To see it and to see something gone is to ask what was there.

"Here, too, for the Confederacy, an obelisk oblivious in its name, a word that also meant the symbol to denote in ancient manuscripts, the spurious, corrupt, or doubtful.

At its base forged in concrete, a narrative of valor, virtue, states' rights.

Here it is only the history of a word, obelisk, that points us toward what's not there, all of it palimpsest, each mute object repeating a single refrain.

Remember this."

[reflective music] Now we're on our way to my hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi.

What I love about the place is that it made me, um, but there's also much to hate about the place.

Mississippi is a state like many states in the Deep South, inscribed with a narrative of the Confederacy.

In the spring of 1966, when I was born, my mother was a couple of months shy of her 22nd birthday.

My father was out of town, traveling for work, so she made the short trip from my grandmother's house to Gulfport Memorial Hospital, as planned, without him.

On her way to the segregated ward, she could not help but take in the tenor of the day, witnessing the barrage of rebel flags lining the streets, private citizens, lawmakers, Klansmen, often one and the same.

The 26th of April that year marked the 100th anniversary of Mississippi's celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, a holiday glorifying the Old South, the lost cause and white supremacy.

She could not have missed the paradox of my birth on that particular day, a child of miscegenation and interracial marriage still illegal in Mississippi and in as many as 20 other states.

Who I am and why I write has everything to do with those early years in this place.

I mean, my mother and my grandmother are in the ground here, so they're part of the landscape.

How could I not both love it and hate it?

[ambient road noise] [ambient road noise] [ambient road noise] We're entering Harrison County.

It's the county I was born in.

[somber music] Nearly 30 years after my mother's death, I went back for the first time to the place she was murdered.

The last time I was at the apartment complex, the morning after her death, I could see the faded chalk outline of her body on the pavement.

For as long as I can remember, my father had been telling me that one day I would have to become a writer, that because of the nature of my experience, I would have something necessary to say.

So this is the road, 28th Street, that the cemetery is on.

And the way that I find my mother's grave, because there's no marker on it, is I have to count the entrances before I turn in.

[turn signal clicking] She should be right here.

My mother.

I didn't put a stone here for the longest time for one reason and the reason was when my mother died, she still had her married name.

Even though she was divorced from her second husband, she still had his name and he was the one who murdered her and so I didn't want to erect a monument with his name on it.

I didn't wanna inscribe that on the landscape.

[somber music] "In the cemetery last June, I circled lost weeds and grass grown up all around the landscape, blurred and waving.

At my mother's grave, ants streamed in and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising above her untended plot.

Bit by bit, red dirt piled up, spread like a rash on the grass, a red and humming swarm."

[somber music] It's pretty amazing to stand here and look out and to see so many folks I know who have come here for this moment that it's sort of hard to find something to say without tearing up.

I thought I'd be able to do it.

When I was born here on Confederate Memorial Day in 1966, when it was still illegal for my parents to be married, I don't think any one of my ancestors could have imagined that there would be a marker like this for me and so I wanna thank y'all because by being here, you help me honor my ancestors, my father Eric Trethewey, and most importantly my mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough.

Thank you.

- One, two, three.

It's tall.

- Uh oh.

[audience clapping] I'm inscribed now in the landscape as part of the rich cultural and literary traditions of the State of Mississippi and Black Mississippians.

[Maya Angelou] In my memory, Stamps is a place of light, shadow, sounds and entrancing odors.

I am a writer and Stamps must remain for me in that a nebulous, um, unreal reality because I'm a poet and I have to draw from these shadows, these densities.

I don't want it to become a place on the map because the truth is you never can leave home.

You take it with you everywhere you go.

[gentle music] - You see, I love Black folk.

[audience cheering] Black look like a revolution, look like a family reunion in the park.

Black look like it's a different world, smell like a crawfish bowl in New Orleans.

Black folk joke around like Marvin and they got pains from JJ in the living room.

It sound strong, it look like sacrifice.

It be flowers blooming in the summertime.

Blacks sound like old songs, smell like good food and tastes like heart disease, but feel like amazing jazz fest.

Smile like your mama As like the scent, beautiful child Know you're the one Smile like your daddy Make me so happy, child This is the lower ninth ward.

This is across the canal.

Things are changing in this neighborhood.

We actually did our song "There Goes the Neighborhood" just to mark the changes of New Orleans and, you know, gentrification and things that are being built up, things that are even being kept torn down.

"I watched the neighborhood and I know they're coming.

They're friendly, kind, and sweet.

They give sugar when I ask for sugar.

They came with wood and nails, coming to build and break.

First there was one, then two, then there were 20.

These shotgun houses have committed an unruly suicide.

They've turned themselves inside out trying to be your home in my hood.

Going into the eighth ward, which is where I grew up at.

I love that Jamaican spot.

They got some good curry chicken over there.

They got some good chicken over there.

I just feel like I really can't get lost around here 'cause I know this area.

I feel like no matter if I get on that street or that street or that street or that street, I know that this is the main one that I'm returning to that is gonna get me home and I love that 'cause I need to get home.

This is Porsche.

Porsche was a gift to my mom from me and my oldest sister because- - 1958.

- Dang, '58.

Ma, it's crazy.

And she's a little sweetyheart.

She's a sweetyheart.

[pot sizzling] I'm more left-handed, so.

[spoon clinking] Oooh, we!

[Tarriona sighs, laughs] Yeah!

- Turn it down.

- You should have made me come up in the kitchen with you when I was a child.

You should have made me- - Yeah, but you should have made it a thing.

Your children always find a way to blame you for something.

- Always, they always blaming me.

- You didn't call me in the kitchen and tell me to come and watch you cook.

- You weren't interested.

- I was 100% not interested at all.

I guess I had been a creative since a child 'cause I wrote stories.

I think because my big sister wrote and I read her poetry, so it just made me... in love with poetry early on.

Writing young, I always knew that I was writing above my time and above my experience.

That was really cool so I think I knew I was a storyteller pretty, pretty young.

Ma, you know, I used to love when, to see people get baptized.

I used to, not in the act of them even going in the water, but the way that the church, the way we would take all the chairs away from the choir stand.

It would break the floor apart.

It was so magic to see like that you were underneath the water this whole time.

I stretch My hands To Thee They said know why Thou help I know - Those old spirituals just brought you so much peace and joy just to be up there, to be able to praise God and know that you gotta sing it, who could come in when you need Him just in time and that's what I love about the old spiritual hymns.

You know, some of the churches don't sing those songs no more.

- Oh, it was so Southern.

Done got over Done got over at last - Oh, at last.

Turn around Done got over [Mom] Take another round, so that's coming up.

Done got over Take another round Done got over Done got over at last - See, I didn't know they was singing, "Done got over at last."

Every hour I need Thee - Growing up around beauty, church, Black Southerners, food, and even a bit of poverty can really give you a different outlook on life.

I think the stories here are just that much more real, that much more closer to the heart.

[music "Mr. Bluebell"] - Hey.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

And then in four.

Yeah [Tarriona scatting] [Tarriona scatting] Yeah [Tarriona scatting] Hey, Mr. Bluebell with the soft white skin Even tone and your pretty blue eyes I'd like to bake a bit 'bout 'Merican pie Grab a chair, we'll let you take a big bite We'll have a conversation about the FDA Captive soul and how you got inside The conversation won't go lightly If we refuse to look deep inside Inside ourselves, there's so much left There's so much there, we really don't care Focus themself, scrolling in depth Selfish and wander, full of oneself When the years become days And the past is today So easy to scroll all your problems away Addictions not mentioned with filled out prescriptions I'll scroll through your cloud It's amazing that you write something that everybody could just feel empowered by.

When the poem came to me, when the muses were inspired by me, it could have went to anybody.

They gave it to me.

They believed I could deliver it without fear.

I just love me Some Black people I just love me Some Black people I just love me Some Black people I just love me... I think when we were going through covid and I was seeing so much poverty around me, so much drugs, so much mental illness, that I wanted to write a love letter to Black people.

I'm talking about Black people particularly in this poem because the hate is so loud that the love has to be even louder.

Oh I count the days, count the ways I count the days, count the ways I count the days, count the ways Until I let Layla have the way [audience cheering] Layla have the way Ay, ya, yi Layla have the way Ooh [audience cheering] [Narrator] In the fall of 1965, the New York Herald Tribune asked 200 authors to name the best American works of fiction since the war.

The book most often cited was "Invisible Man."

The result of seven years work, this first novel won for its author of the National Book Award in 1953.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City and was named for Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He only decided he was a writer in his mid-20s.

- Power for the writer, it seems to me lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity about humanity.

The unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race or religion are very, very important.

I think that the nation is still in a process of becoming, of drawing itself together, of discovering itself, and when the writer fails to contribute to this, then he's played his art false.

[Narrator] "Memory knows before knowing remembers," William Faulkner wrote.

"What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives."

available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

[gentle music]