Written in the sky: lessons of a southern daughter

Patricia Foster

"Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter is a double portrait of place and family, a collection of essays that interrogates the legacy of racial tension in the South and the way race, caste, and privilege are entwined in Patricia Foster's family story from the Depression era through the present day. After returning to Alabama to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Foster writes her five-year-old great-niece, "How can we teach you to love our country if we don't also explain our country's oppressive history, its duplicity and sin, its guilt and blood?" It is a fact that the South has often been a place of danger and fury, a place where civil rights activists were beaten and whipped, fire-hosed and bombed, where predominantly Black (and some white) activists and communities demanded the right to justice, equity, and respect. And yet, in Foster's white, striving, class-conscious family in small-town south Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, calls for racial progress were mostly ignored, relegated to the nightly news where visceral images of violence and protest were surely seen but rarely discussed. As a result, she came to her knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement--so prominent in Montgomery, Selma, Anniston, and Birmingham--largely in retrospect. It is this silence that Foster seeks to interrogate. As a college student at Vanderbilt University, she grew to recognize that indifference, alongside silence, could be an ideological space; only after a shameful event occurring the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder would she awaken to the unearned privileges of whiteness. A few years later, working as a caseworker in western Tennessee, she discovered that her belief in good intentions and easy solutions was irrelevant, given the southern caste system that affected poor whites and all Blacks. Written in the Sky is a book of essays that contends not only with the mythologies about race and class but also with the shadow stories beneath these mythologies, the more complicated and illuminating narratives Foster must excavate. To do so, she must learn to listen, to extend herself beyond her white middle-class life. The real story of place, Foster discovers, comes from wrestling with a culture's irreconcilable ideas. Foster's exploration of this struggle is organized in three interconnected parts--"Family Lessons," "History Lessons," and "Lessons of Legacy and Loss"--bookended by "Reckonings," two essays about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. In the first, "Written in the Sky," Foster considers how the memorial might be seen as a secular afterlife where the dead can speak, imagining what all those men, women, and children who had been lynched would say to her. In the essays in "Family Lessons," Foster wrestles with her family mythology: its class hierarchies, parental traumas, and the lasting insecurity about caste that pervades her family's psyche. In "History Lessons," she physically moves outside of white culture into the town of Tuskegee, where, in various visits, she teaches, interviews girls, talks to librarians and townspeople, and assesses the political zeitgeist of the 2016 election in this small southern town. In other essays, she explores the traumas and successes of women in the Civil Rights Movement. Foster shifts back to her family in "Lessons of Legacy and Loss" to portray the difficult, compelling relationships that preceded the deaths of a father, a sister, and a mother: moments of love and enmeshment, resentment and restitution that reveal how an excavated story allows for closeness and, in some sense, closure. In closure, she returns to the frame of "Reckonings," the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. This time, in "Archives of the Dead," she focuses on the tableau of stories that detail specific acts of domestic terrorism in short declarative sentences. Realizing that the psychology of racism haunts both the dead and the living, Foster is alert to the understanding that what is unconnected and sacred in her must not merely read the words but write about this legacy with an unflinching gaze"--

Written in the sky: lessons of a southern daughter

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