Penelope Niven

I wanted to see James Earl's homeplace. I, too, am a Southerner. ("Can a black Southern man and a white Southern woman really work together?" someone from elsewhere in the country wanted to know.) We grew out of the same time and place and history. Our grandmothers taught us the same hymns, cooked the same greens with fatback, the same fluffy biscuits, the same red-eye gravy. James Earl and I know the same landscapes, the music Southern voices can make, the heavy burden of our shared history.

As I traveled through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas to interview his relatives, I discovered that while he is the most famous member of his vibrant family, James Earl is by no means the only remarkable one....