Front Porch

Walter Inglis Anderson, Flight of Doves, ca. 1955. Watercolor on paper. Painting from the collection of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, given by the Family of Walter Anderson in memory of Duncan Moran. © Family of Walter Anderson.

i can't imagine a better time for a special issue on the Imaginary South than now. And, to be sure, we could have no better guest editor than the brilliantly original Zandria F. Robinson, whose vision—and imagination—flavors all that follows. In this current moment, the whole idea of the imaginary mixes and blends with my concern about the dominance of a kind of alternative and invisible fact—or perhaps no facts at all. I long, at times, for the grounding influence of what James Agee called "human actuality," a desire to see and face, again borrowing Agee's words, the cruelty and radiance as best we possibly can. And yet, I also contend that it's artists, scholars, and thinkers, including those in this issue, who have most fully helped us to see and understand the actual through insightful renderings of imagination, speculation, and the aesthetic power of thick description, all leading us to a place of revelation.¹

I've been thinking much about my late friend, the wonder and writer Randall Kenan, so perceptive and revealing in everything he wrote about the power of imaginary ideas, forces, and places. Writing in Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Kenan reflects on his childhood wish to become a scientist, something he eventually gave up to be a writer. "I always believed the desire stemmed from my fundamentally intense sense of magic and the supernatural." He continues, "I had been fascinated by tales of ghosts and vampires and werewolves. … Perhaps it was the ability to affect matter, to change the world."²

To think of Randall Kenan is to also be thinking of James Baldwin, about whom Randall wrote extensively. Baldwin said, "Visible reality hides a deeper one, and … all our action and achievement rest on things unseen." As a photographer, I often feel this conundrum—that we find deeper truths in what we never see, that we are limited in our storytelling by what is "visible." We look, then, to the unseen, to the power of opposites—the darkness and the light, the seen and unseen, the known and unknown, the dreams and the reality.³

I've spent my life imagining a South different from the one that I see daily, one that is more akin to the Beloved Community or the vision outlined in the spiritual "Down By the Riverside," where we will lay down our heavy load and "study war no more." I've also found myself gleefully dreaming of a South in the image of the Harry McClintock-penned hobo's anthem "Big Rock Candy Mountain," where "the cops have wooden legs" and "the hens lay soft-boiled eggs." In the song "Little Stream of Whiskey," which shares so much with "Big Rock Candy Mountain," the singer is "a-goin' to that better place where everything is right, / Where the handouts grow on bushes and they sleep out every night." Wouldn't it be nice in the age of covid-19 to have a kind of heavenly space right here in the South like the Carter Family and Reverend F. W. McGee sang about in "50 Miles of Elbow Room." "When the gates swing wide on the other side," the song proclaims in a welcoming invitation to all, "Just beyond the sunset sea, there'll be room to spare as we enter there, there'll be room for you and room for me." The compassion and reverence for all—for you and for me—in these songs has always contrasted sharply with some of the other southern anthems that portray a South with exclusion and a blind eye to the history of its haunted lands. Take, for example, Hank Williams Jr.'s picture of his South when he wrote and sang, "If heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, I...