Quality magazines often capture a small slice of a bigger story or the sweet telling of a small one.  Either way, it's a delight to find a pearl hidden between the covers.  

One such story showed up in a somewhat obscure magazine we carry published by Oxford American , A Magazine of the South.  John T. Edge's piece in the fall 2016 edition, The Harris Hegemony, underscores the danger of stereotyping.  Will Harris, a fourth generation cattleman in southwest Georgia, ditched high-yield, fertilizer intensive farming and went organic, adopted animal welfare practices, and attracted food obsessives to his products.  When lauded as a savior, he scoffs that he's not saving anything except "...(his) own ass."  He rebuilt houses in this formerly dying town for his farm workers and incurred the wrath of old time locals who don't like all the black workers who became their neighbors.  

Reflecting on his new thinking, he dismisses organized religion but didn't stop there.  "I was raised to be a racist and homophobic, but then I realized, that shit don't work."  A daughter who works on the farm is now pregnant and lives with her wife in the house where her dad was raised.   So much for forgetting that those who live in the rural south may well be as disparate as we are. 

This year's Spring edition is equally worth reading.  The short piece on the black horsemen of Kentucky starts sweetly by comparing Da Hoss, an aging racing thoroughbred, with Gene Carter, his aging minder, at the Kentucky Horse Park.   "Carter looks better; he's ninety to De Hoss's seventy-eight human years, and his back only just stoops."  The article then reflects on the buried history of black jockeys who dominated the early Kentucky Derby races but have now been erased, compliments of Jim Crow.

Hopefully it will take you less time roaming around the book store than the year it took me before I found this small treasure.

Dave