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2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
famous Blues artist; Lazarus Barden II, a minister whose pride is resurrected when he whips his wife’s lover in public; Velmajean Hoyt, the miracle worker who, after resurrecting a dead girl, is exploited by a jack-leg preacher; and Amanda, a young black girl who is protected by an African water spirit as slavecatchers and their dogs approach.
In “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” we meet Gloria Brown, a funeral director/owner who “dreamt her daughter would die in a helicopter” (93). While working to console a man who just recently lost his wife, Gloria starts to think about her daughter, Tamar, who is a soldier serving overseas. The story ends with Gloria saying a silent prayer for her
daughter as her bereaved client looks into her eyes, an indication that he senses her fears. Gloria realizes that she and the man share something, much like “the passing of an angel in the darkness of the night” (98), a reference to Ezekiel’s vision of cherubim that gives us some hope that Tamar will come back to her family alive.
REMEMBERING RANDALL by Margaret D. Bauer the plantation South we began with, and turns them upside down and inside out, along with truths about family and religion, also familiar themes of Southern literature. A few years into my role as NCLR editor, about the time I was beginning to feel some confidence – or at least less anxiety – about approaching North Carolina’s literary luminaries at the many literary events I attended across the state, I saw Randall Kenan just ahead of me as I approached a crosswalk in Chapel Hill during a lunch break from some meeting I was attending. When I reached the light, I caught up with him, turned to him, reassured myself it was him, and reintroduced myself. As I morphed into the COURTESY OF UNC CHAPEL HILL DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Randall Kenan was, if not the first, most definitely one of the first “famous writers” I wrote to in my new capacity as Editor of the North Carolina Literary Review some twenty-five years ago. I’d heard about him, read something indicating he was working on an oral history project (his book Walking on Water, it turned out), and asked if he had anything for my first issue of NCLR, which was focusing on oral history. Reading about him, I’d noticed we were the same age, both Pisces, as he was just a few weeks younger than me – which gave me the courage to approach this rising star of North Carolina letters. I smile now at the thought of needing courage to approach Randall Kenan. All he had to do was smile, and you felt welcome in his orbit. Around that time too I heard him read his short story “Foundations of the Earth” at a conference as part of a panel celebrating the new Norton anthology of Southern literature. He was noted to be the youngest writer included, as I recall. That story of a grandmother coming to terms with learning about her grandson’s life only after his death touched my heart. The woman had been taught by her religion that homosexuality was an abomination, but she raised that boy, and loved him, and she was determined to understand him, even if it was too late to tell him he would have been welcome home, whoever he loved. I still teach that story every year in my Southern literature survey course. It is an ideal way to close the class, as the story’s gifted author draws on tropes of
ABOVE Margaret Bauer, NCLR Editor, with Randall Kenan,
inductee into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, Southern Pines, NC, Oct. 2018; OPPOSITE Kenan with Daniel Wallace, Bookmarks, Winston-Salem, NC, Sept. 2019