Jeanne’s Substack

The first time I didn’t see the Mississippi Delta was in 1997. My friend John and I were on the first of what became multiple tours of the southeast. We had very little in the way of a plan of where we were going, except we knew that we wanted to make it to New Orleans. We weren’t sure how we were going to get there, but when we did get there, we headed due south on Louisiana Highway 23. We launch The DETOURIST from Vicksburg, Mississippi. And the first thing we do is—that’s right—take a detour. On the way we encounter the rarely-told story of how a racial massacre in 1874 brought a former Union General back to center stage, and the story of an unlikely experiment in Black self-government in antebellum Mississippi. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Let's take a detour. My name is Pete Candler. I want to take you on a road trip through the landscape of memory in the American South. Starting October 2nd in the Mississippi Delta, we’re going to wander our way across the region to end up in Atlanta, Georgia. And along the way, we’re going to discover stories that you and I will not believe we’ve never heard before. This is The Detourist. Subscribe now, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s go. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Introducing RE(ADS): a new segment of the ADS podcast in which we take a single passage from a work that has influenced our journey over the last 25 years, and discuss it. In this first installment, John chooses a passage from W.E.B. Du Bois' classic work, "The Souls of Black Folk." Published in 1903, much of it was written during Du Bois' first stint in Atlanta as a professor at Atlanta University. The passage for today, taken from Chapter Four, "On the Wings of Atalanta," arises out of Du Bois' experience of Atlanta as the model city of the New South, and offers a prophetic and still timely critique of the dangers of "Mammonism." Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Read the transcript at adeepersouth.com/podcast/2022/6/20/ramblinonmymind2 Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Read the transcript at adeepersouth.com/podcast/2022/6/20/ramblinonmymind1 Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Read the story and see photographs from the site at https://www.adeepersouth.com/stories/2019/6/30/milledgeville Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Read the story and see photographs at https://www.adeepersouth.com/stories/2019/4/22/rumblingman Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

On Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard In the West End of Atlanta, two completely divergent versions of the city's history sit right next door to each other. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

In a corner of Putnam County in Georgia, surrounded by new lakefront developments, the homes of two famous Georgia authors sit back-to-back. Though essentially next-door neighbors, they inhabited totally different, even contrary, cultural and imaginative worlds. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a version of American history that we all learned in school: before it was a nation, the slipshod collection of English colonies began in New England and Virginia, and then gradually spread west and south. America was a porous, fibrous sheet of paper, the first settlements like inkblots that slowly bled out towards the edges of the blank white page. Expansion moved right to left: first Georgia, then Alabama, then Mississippi, and so on. But Mobile is a whole new inkblot. Read the story and see photographs at: https://www.adeepersouth.com/stories/2019/1/28/mobile Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Read the story and see photographs at https://www.adeepersouth.com/stories/2019/1/11/sunken-traces Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

In Taylor County, Georgia, in 1946, an African-American man voted in a Democratic primary for the first time. The next day, he was murdered. The episode prompted the future leader of America's Civil Rights Movement to write his first publication. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Twenty-one years after our first visit to the campus of Tuskegee University in 1997, we return to see a completely different side of the famous Alabama college town that we missed the first time around. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

To hear more of Bill Mallonee’s music, please visit billmalloneemusic.bandcamp.com Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

At Andalusia, the house where Flannery O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life writing stories, novels, letters and essays that would permanently screw me up for the better, we find an unexpected token of our first visit there twenty-four years earlier. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe

The vision of A Deeper South is rooted in the idea that the spiritual, political, and cultural health of a nation, region, city, town, or person depends upon an honest and unflinching memory; that the gravest danger to our cities and ourselves is a willful amnesia; that hope is to be found through the work of active remembrance, putting back together the fragments of personhood scattered by a culture of selective memory. We hope you will join the journey. Get full access to The DETOURIST at adeepersouth.substack.com/subscribe