BOOK REVIEW

Margaret Renkl’s Graceland, at Last

By Angela Winsor     August 2, 2021




Margaret Renkl. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South. Milkweed Editions, 2021. 304 pp. $26.00 (hardcover)


There’s a way those of us who aren’t from and don’t really know the American South often hold it in our minds. We likely can conjure images of highways flanked with kudzu and wisteria. We might imagine sweet tea, magnolia trees, country music. We probably think: Bible Belt, red state, Confederate flag. And while we would not be wrong in our thinking—drive through almost any Southern state and find evidence of most of the above on roadside billboards or local radio stations—we also would not be wholly right. The American South might be those things, but Margaret Renkl would have us know that it’s “not only those things.” In her newest book, Graceland, At Last: And Other Essays from The New York Times, Margaret Renkl invites readers—southerners and non-southerners alike—into her homeland, her city, her yard, and along for the ride on road trips, museum visits, and interviews across the South. What we discover along the way is a place that is both “damaged and damaging,” but also full of people who inspire and landscapes too beautiful for words. Through these warm and heartfelt essays, Renkl shows us how to keep on loving this complicated place, how to look right at its “appalling truths” and gesture, still, toward hope.

The collection is comprised of over sixty essays gathered from Renkl’s popular New York Times column in which she writes about the “flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.” But Renkl, both an Alabamian and a long-time resident of Nashville, is “not the voice of the South” and, she will have her readers know, “no one else is either.” In her introduction, Renkl writes:

“…there is no one South in the South. The Deep South is as different from the Mid-South and the Upper South as the Mid-South and the Upper South are from each other. The urban South looks far more like its counterparts in the urban North and the urban West than it does the rural counties in its own states. The coastal South and the mountain South might as well be two separate countries. The immigrant South overlaps them all, multifarious in too many ways to list.”

 How could any single voice speak for all of it? Of course, they couldn’t—and Renkl “wouldn’t dare try.” Instead, she writes about her own life, experiences, and research across six sections organized by the topics she finds herself returning to again and again when she thinks about her homeland: “Flora and Fauna,” “Politics and Religion,” “Social Justice,” “Environment,” “Family and Community,” and “Arts and Culture.” The resulting collection of essays is stitched together like a patchwork quilt—an art form close to Renkl and passed down from her maternal ancestors—that works to show how “there is far more to this intricate region than many people understand.”

In her effort to uncover those intricacies, a through-line emerges across the book’s six sections: Renkl’s commitment to bearing witness—to the landscape, the people, the struggle around her. She calls her readers into this role, too. In one essay entitled, “An Open Letter to My Fellow White Christians,” she implores the reader to “make yourself look.” That refusal to look away—and that call to action—echoes throughout the book: Look and see the Tennessee River and its toxic pollution. Look closer at the voter suppression laws being proposed in her home state of Tennessee, poverty rates across the South, the forty percent of pollinators now facing extinction. Take an unblinking look at racial injustice. In “Looking Our Racist History in The Eye,” the role and weight of witness is heightened as Renkl takes a critical look at the way Nashville remembers and retells its own history within the Civil Rights movement. “Our stories about the orderly desegregation of schools and the peaceful desegregation of lunch counters and the benign treatment of Black people by the white people in power? That’s all a myth,” she writes. The essay highlights a recent exhibit of photographs assembled by the Frist Art Museum. This exhibit, We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press, 1957–1968, seeks to show a fuller, more complete picture of Nashville’s history by showcasing photographs taken for two of Nashville’s newspapers during the Civil Rights movement—many of the photographs had never been seen before. Now, people are looking. Renkl reports:

“…the show’s companion volume will be distributed to all branches of the Nashville Public Library and to every public school in the city, and all members of the Tennessee General Assembly will receive a copy to deliver to the public libraries in their own communities. Here’s hoping they pause to take a look first. There’s a truth in these photographs that many of them have likely never seen before.”

Here’s hoping they pause to look first. Renkl understands the important role that looking plays as a potential first step toward change, the need to allow as many people as possible to see. Here’s hoping we continue to look with her.

An understandable byproduct of such close, critical attention to the issues surrounding the South could’ve been a kind of hopelessness; no one person—or one writer—can carry it all. These pages could’ve been weighed down and overwhelmed by the impossible project of trying to fix everything, and quickly. However, “Despair is paralyzing,” writes Renkl, “and we have no time left for paralysis.” So instead of despair, the essays in this collection are marked by Renkl’s remarkable impulse to hope. Pollinators are facing extinction, but for Renkl, hope still springs from her home state’s efforts to plant and preserve around 13,807 miles of blooming flowers along Tennessee’s highways to support those endangered pollinators. The essay, “These Kids Are Done Waiting for Change,” praises the teenagers who organized a march that would become “one of the largest protests against white supremacy in Nashville history.” She says, “They are young enough to imagine a better future, to have faith in their own power to change the world for good. And that faith should give the rest of us more hope than we have had in years.” In “ICE Came to Take Their Neighbor. They Said No.” Renkl reports on a community in the Hermitage section of Nashville that protected their neighbor when ICE ambushed him and his twelve-year-old son. Members of the community gathered and stood by for hours, bringing food and water and, eventually, forming a human chain to shield them:

“We celebrate their courage in the face of unwarranted authority, and we take heart from their commitment to justice. We replay the video again and again to watch them link arms, to watch them calling out words of comfort and encouragement. We remember a truth that has lately been too easy to forget: we belong to one another.”

 Here, and all throughout the collection, Renkl maintains a posture of hope and a belief in people such as those in that Hermitage neighborhood. It’s a hope that’s contagious. It’s there in the title--Graceland, At Last. There is abundant grace in the way some Southern communities and individuals innovate and come together in the pages of this book to push back against the pervasive injustices around them, to do better. “None of this is surprising,” Renkl writes. That coming together? “This is what Southerners are famous for.”

There, especially, is how this collection shines—in Renkl’s ability to write with warm affection for the people and landscapes of her homeland and also look behind the curtain at the darker truths. She can hold the good without ignoring the bad. She can confront oppressive and unjust systems and policies, and still hold fast to the belief that change is possible. In a final moment in which she uncovers her own poignant truth, she writes: “Maybe being a Southern writer is only a matter of loving a damaged and damaging place, of loving its flawed and beautiful people, so much that you have to stay there, observing and recording and believing, against all odds, that one day it will finally live up to the promise of its own good heart.” Sitting with Graceland, At Last feels a little like getting acquainted with that “good heart.”



Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South ​by Margaret Renkl

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ANGELA WINSOR is a writer and photographer from South Florida. She currently lives and writes in North Carolina where she is earning her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She holds an MA in English from Auburn University. Her writing has been featured in Southern Humanities Review online, Saw Palm, NELLE, and the Lascaux Review.