Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama

New Yorker staff writer Okeowo (A Moonless, Starless Sky) offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of her home state. Her motivation, she writes, is partly that, upon telling acquaintances she’s from Alabama, she’s often met with a “dumbstruck” response of “What was that like?” Surveying Alabama history, from slavery and Indian removal through the Confederacy’s defeat to the civil rights movement and mass incarceration, she notes that it’s a “land that has been turned over so many times, changed character depending on the circumstances, been in dispute as to who owns it.” According to Okeowo, an unresolved, backward-looking, and still tense atmosphere of ownership-in-dispute characterizes the modern state. During her interviews with a host of figures, from a white woman who endured childhood sexual abuse to a Black survivor of a Klan “night rider” attack, she explores and at times attempts to bridge this divide (recounting a discussion with a white historian who argues that the Confederacy can’t be judged by “today’s moral standards,” Okeowo, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, highlights that he is open to her disagreement on that claim, and that overall the conversation is productive). To do so, she draws on an ingrained neighborliness that, as a sort of counterpoint, also permeates her depiction of Alabamans. Probing and sumptuously written, this makes for an entrancingly ground-level and empathetic view of Alabama’s past and present. (Aug.)