WRITTEN IN THE SKY

Foster explores the persistent legacy of racism in the Deep South in this nonfiction anthology.

Part memoir, part social commentary, this collection of deeply personal essays reflects on Southern history, with particular emphasis on the intersections of class, race, and gender, through vignettes from the author’s own life. Two essays on Foster’s visit to Montgomery, Alabama’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a site dedicated to the legacy of Black victims of lynching, aptly bookend the volume. The opening essay (the titular “Written in the Sky”) is written as a letter to the author’s great-niece, using the trip to the memorial as context to answer the 5-year-old’s haunting question: “Do you ever meet yourself?” This question of “who am I” runs through the book to the final essay, “Archive of the Dead,” which returns to the memorial as the author reflects on the life of a Black domestic worker, Maddy, who was once employed by her family. Born in Alabama, Foster was part of a generation of postwar white southerners who embraced “the sentimentality of easy solutions, do-gooder notions, and the up-by-the-bootstraps mentality that fueled so much of popular philosophy.” As a 20-something caseworker in western Tennessee assigned to work with poor white sharecroppers and junk haulers, she encountered the “sour meanness and desperation, racial injustice, ill health, and lack of resources that so often accompanied poverty.” There is ample social commentary on offer, from the author’s thoughts on Donald Trump to a 2004 profile of female students at Tuskegee’s Booker T. Washington High School that explores issues of white flight and crumbling infrastructure. A professor emerita at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction and author of multiple novels and nonfiction books, Foster fully displays her literary talents here as the work demonstrates a profound sensitivity to history, nuance, and self-reflection.

A powerful, often heart-wrenching collection of essays tackling the history of the American South.