Cynthia Tucker

Pulitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect in a powerful series of essays on the role of the South in America’s long descent into its present political predicament. In 1974 the great Southern author John Egerton published his pioneering work, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive even deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present. They see the dark side—the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today. They explore the roots of the racial backlash against President Obama; the specter of family separation on our southern border, with its echoes of similar separations in the era of slavery; as well as the rise of the Christian right, the demonstrations in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capital—all of which, they argue, have roots that trace their way to the South. But Tucker and Gaillard see another side too—a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that has given us political leaders like John Lewis, Jimmy Carter, Raphael Warnock, and Stacey Abrams. The authors raise the ironic possibility that the South, regarded by some as the heart of the country’s systemic racism, might lead the way on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and of democracy under siege.

Frye Gaillard did not set out to write this book. One day as he was thumbing through a cardboard box of his essays, columns, and profiles, he simply realized that he had done it. Each article told the story of a person standing against social injustice or exploring the pain and ambiguity of the human condition. By blending interviews and stories of well-known figures like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sidney Poitier, Vine Deloria, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Jane Goodall with lesser-known heroes like Rabbi Abraham Heschel (who marched from Selma to Montgomery), Regina Benjamin (a Black doctor who was integral to the grassroots efforts of Katrina recovery), Kathy Mattea (who wrote powerful songs about coal mining and its real effects on the people of Appalachia), and Elyn Saks (who pioneered modern mental illness treatments while dealing with her own schizophrenia), Gaillard celebrates the people who have tried to make things better. While many of Gaillard’s subjects succeeded in what they were trying to do, others did not. Each story, however, contains a measure of inspiration. Against the backdrop of our turbulent time—our era of lesser angels on the rise—Gaillard asks, where would the rest of us be without them?

Pulitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect in a powerful series of essays on the role of the South in America’s long descent into its present political predicament. In 1974 the great Southern author John Egerton published his pioneering work, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive even deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present. They see the dark side—the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today. They explore the roots of the racial backlash against President Obama; the specter of family separation on our southern border, with its echoes of similar separations in the era of slavery; as well as the rise of the Christian right, the demonstrations in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capital—all of which, they argue, have roots that trace their way to the South. But Tucker and Gaillard see another side too—a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that has given us political leaders like John Lewis, Jimmy Carter, Raphael Warnock, and Stacey Abrams. The authors raise the ironic possibility that the South, regarded by some as the heart of the country’s systemic racism, might lead the way on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and of democracy under siege.

This group biography follows three generations of ministers' daughters and wives in a famed American Unitarian family. Shifting the focus from pulpit to parsonage, and from sermon to whispered secrets, Cynthia Tucker humanizes the Eliots and their religious tradition and lifts up a largely neglected female vocation. Spanning 150 years from the early 19th century forward, the narrative shapes itself into a series of stories. Each of six chapters takes up a different woman's defining experience, from the deaths of numerous children and the anguish of infertility to the suffocation of small parish life with its chronic loneliness, doubt, and resentment. One woman confides in a rare close friend, another in the anonymous readers of magazines that publish her poems. A third escapes from an ill-fitting role by succumbing to neurasthenia, leaving one debilitating condition for another. The matriarch's granddaughters script larger lives, bypassing marriage and churchly employment to follow their hearts into same-sex relationships, and major careers in public health and preschool education. In two concluding chapters, Tucker enlarges the frame to bring in the regular parish women who collectively give voice to issues the ministers' kin must keep to themselves. All of the stories are linked by the women's continuing battles to make themselves heard over clerical wisdom that contradicts their reality.