Book Review

In the riveting opening story of Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection, a young couple attending a family wedding in Texas Hill Country wonders if their love might be doomed by a family curse, originating with an ancestor who abandoned his partner to escape enslavement. At the story’s close, his descendant, Ever, considers the possible versions of the story of the curse that never reached him and why: “Say what these people left in their wake: A line of men and women looking for ways to have more than what was allotted. So many truths have been withheld. So many have been warped into what’s convenient for the teller.”

This story, “When We Go, We Go Downstream,” sets the tone for this capacious collection in exploring how the past—particularly history that has been warped or withheld—inevitably exerts pressure on characters’ lives in the present. Focusing on the experiences of contemporary Black protagonists, Moore offers a nuanced portrait of what it means to call the American South home in all of its complexity and capacity for paradox.

Moore’s command of the South’s geographic diversity is especially impressive and vital to this project. These eleven stories span as many states, ranging into nearly every possible corner of the region, from New Orleans to the Florida Everglades, from the mountains of western North Carolina to coastal Georgia, from Kentucky to Alabama. I come to the book as a queer white writer with my own fraught relationship to the South as home, having moved to North Carolina when I was six, grown up there, and then moved away after high school. As such, I appreciated that Moore even includes two stories about characters with Southern upbringings since transplanted elsewhere, specifically New York City and the upper Midwest.

This collection is further distinguished by Moore’s passion for research. She cites Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Imani Perry’s South to America as inspirations to be “unflinching in incorporating historical and contemporary realities into the lives of [her] characters.” At the end of the book, she includes an extensive source list for each story, shedding light on influences that may be only lightly alluded to in the text. One instance is the Everglades City setting of “Cottonmouths,” whose first permanent Black settlers were long overlooked in historical records. Another is the imprint of the Gullah Boo Hag myth on “All Skin is Clothing,” which makes a young boy study his family more closely, fearful of how they might surprise him.

While the citations might lead some readers to anticipate that these stories are history lessons in the guise of fiction, Moore’s touch is deft and light in this regard. Though the historical lens is often integral, it always remains secondary to Moore’s chief strength: her richly drawn and dynamic characters. For example, in a story about a woman navigating the intertwined legacies of medical racism and folk healing traditions in her own family after she develops uterine fibroids, the research behind it feels essential, but only in retrospect. What makes the story so powerful are the high-stakes conflicts that develop within and between the protagonist, her aunt, and a friend diagnosed with the same condition.

Moore’s interest in the interplay between past and present extends to more strictly personal histories as well. Especially memorable examples include “Surfacing,” in which an encounter with a teenage girl compels a woman to face a long-buried trauma, and “Naturale,” wherein a woman seeks to reclaim her marriage after learning of her husband’s past affair with a colleague. I also loved “In the Swirl,” an immersive slow burn of a story that, on its face, is about a summer romance between lifeguards but at a deeper level is about a woman trying to access and reclaim aspects of her younger self.

I’m also struck by Moore’s counterintuitive preoccupation with the distance between past and present, even as she frequently examines their interdependence. This chasm is most stark in “Gather Here Again,” in which Damonia, a grandmother, takes issue with her daughter and son-in-law’s approach to protecting her grandchildren in response to white supremacist rallies near their home in the Starr Hill neighborhood of Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet she’s stymied by the difficulties of trying to express this:

Oh Lord. Where can she begin? With her own grandmother in Milledgeville, who’d seen the night riders on their long procession through the pines, their horses moving so slowly that the raised torches looked like an orange snake gliding up from hell? . . . She does not even know how to tell her grandbabies about her own encounter with the men who were not ghosts.

Here, Moore probes the gaps between generations, taking stock of what carries forward as well as what is most difficult to transmit.

In general, these longform, character-driven stories feel to me very much in keeping with the realist tradition of contemporary short story masters Danielle Evans and Jamel Brinkley, though Moore does veer firmly into the speculative realm for the final story. As with these writers, in Moore’s hands, length is a virtue; I was never in a hurry to leave the richly layered and elegantly constructed worlds of these stories. Specifically with respect to the contemporary literature of the South, the book might also draw some comparisons with Gulf Coast writer Morgan Thomas’s recent collection, Manywhere, which makes far more liberal use of speculative elements but seeks to engage with the history of the South in a similar spirit.

The only story in Make Your Way Home that initially didn’t land for me was “The Happy Land,” which portrays a gay man’s troubled relationship with his homophobic father. The story is about three-quarters of the way into the book, which is precisely where I’ve grown accustomed to finding lone stories with queer protagonists buried in books otherwise dominated by straight characters. However, it soon becomes clear that this story is not a token nod to include an LGBTQ+ protagonist but rather integral to the book’s broader concerns about finding belonging in the South. I respect the risks Moore takes to write this story—the book is stronger for it.

Ultimately, Make Your Way Home confronts a common narrative about the South for people of color and queer people—that one must leave the South (or at least the more rural parts of it) to find happiness. The final story, “Till It and Keep It,” does this most inventively, taking its name and structure from the Biblical book of Genesis by reimagining the Garden of Eden in a speculative, near-future version of rural Tennessee. Responding to the beauty of the place, the protagonist, Brie, reflects:

Had she not known she and Harper were somewhere in Tennessee—and had it not been for the cloud of heat—she would’ve thought they’d made it to Maine. Which meant Harper had been wrong when she said Low America was finished, that—if the cities would not let you in—you had to get north to have a home that would flourish and last.

This penetrating debut is a call to reevaluate this assumption, inviting us to not only consider the untold versions of the past, but also the untold versions of the future.