Lonzy Barker Is Missing By Joe Bageant

20 May 2013 — Joe Bageant.net

See the introduction to this series of posts: Writing on Things Southern and Past

Lonzy Barker is missing. Has been for several months now. Nobody noticed it until that smelly old hermit didn’t show up here at Dalton Bayles’ post office store for his sardines and rock candy. “He could be layin’ over there in his pigpen dead or something,” says Dalton. Did I tell you, dear reader, that Lonzy Barker lives in a pigpen? Always has. Anyway, after three months of Lonzy’s government checks piling up in the pigeonhole, Dalton has decided Lonzy “just might be — I ain’t saying he is and I ain’t saying he ain’t — missing.”

Queen of the Skies By Joe Bageant

7 May 2013 — Joe Bageant.net

See the introduction to this series of posts: Writing on Things Southern and Past

As I drove through the decaying neighborhood in Winchester, Virginia the pain of growing up there came back — the stabbing kind that only lasts a second but makes you flinch as you remember some small but stupid and brutal moment of adolescence. I have never known if everyone has them, but I’ve always suspected they do. Now that old neighborhood slid by my rental car window looking like it was painted by Edward Hopper, then bleakly populated with gangstas, old men with forty-ounce malt liquor bottles, hard-working single moms and kids on cheap busted plastic tricycles.

Blood and Poppies By Joe Bageant

27 April, 2013 — Joe Bageant.net

My family’s ancestral home on Shanghai Road, a great sagging clapboard thing perched on a hill with its many filigreed balconies and porches like heisted antebellum petticoats, sat perched on a hill at the base of Sleepy Creek Mountain. Gnawed by the elements on the outside and woodsmoked by a thousand griddlecake mornings on the inside, where children ran the stairways and mice ran the cellars, my grandparent’s house was stuffed and running over with life itself.