I’ve been going to the Van Vechten Gallery as Fisk University for almost as long as I’ve been living in Nashville.  And that’s long enough to have attended two different re-openings spaced near to twenty years apart.

Book tour for Rebel Yell begins. My husband David and I left Nashville in heavy rain and headed east toward Knoxville . Just around Carthage, Al Gore’s hometown, we saw a sign that questioned, “ If you die today where will you spend eternity?” Half the cars that pass us have a white guy wearing a orange shirt of some sort at the wheel and I know it must be game day in Knoxville. The fact I know this is proof things are different in the South. Things are so different in the sitting room part of my bedroom there is a closet and in that closet beside my sitting room fireplace is a “big orange” Tee Martin jersey . By "big orange" I mean it is literally quite big and orange and I mean that it is a replica of an official University of Tennessee football jersey. And there is a Tee Martin baseball cap that is not official. That baseball cap has a funny little medallion that is a picture of Tee that moves with a shimmer so it looks like Tee is throwing a forward pass. When things are hard for me with my writing work I uni up in my Tee Martin gear, official and unofficial, and I return to the struggle of writing, reminded the struggle of telling stories supports the struggle of living lives.             On book tour I cannot wear that uniform. Driving toward Greenville, South Carolina, the first earthly stop on a book tour that will occur largely in cyberspace I’m wearing a white pleated shirt and a long black cardigan and black leggings and pearls. There’s a diamond band on the fourth finger of my left hand and there are flat black suede driving loafers on my feet. I am unied up in a kind of preppy propriety crossed with Johnny Cash outlaw country chic, that some how fits, because it stretches, this round brown lady, who migrated from Motown to Music City.