Radical Souths

Originally published in 1950, the long out-of-print novel The Bitterweed Path was rediscovered in 1996 with the support of John Howard's critical introduction. In the years since, new generations have witnessed its subtle yet daring contribution to Southern gay literature. This 75th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by John Howard and a new afterword by Harry Thomas Jr. that provide fresh insight into the workings of race, class, and queerness in this enduring novel. In The Bitterweed Path, Thomas Hal Phillips vividly recreates rural Mississippi at the turn of the twentieth century. In elegant prose, he draws on the Old Testament story of David and Jonathan and writes of the friendship and love between two boys-one a sharecropper's son and the other the son of the landlord-and the complications that arise when the father of one of the boys falls in love with his son's friend. Defying stereotypes about both Mississippi and the 1950s, The Bitterweed Path challenges conceptions of the US South as a place devoid of queerness and reimagines it as alive with same-sex desire.

Inspired by the horrors of the Greensboro Massacre, Cris South penned Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses as part of the noted Feminary collective. The book, a thinly fictionalized representation of her own life and activism, centers on Jessie, a working-class printer whose antiracist and anti-Klan activism come to the attention of Klan members, with harrowing results. Jessie's story mirrors that of the author's and offers a vision of what multiple intersectional coalitions of oppressed people look like: lesbian feminists, Black activists, and, perhaps most memorably, a woman who confronts her abuser swinging an axe, Lizzie Borden style, to reclaim her agency. Although Jessie's suffering-and the suffering of the women around her-is stark in its realism, the book ends with a celebration of both resistance and love. This is the novel's distinctive contribution: it refuses abjection and claims the healing power of political resistance and coalition.

This novel is one of the most clear-eyed and compelling works of the Great Depression. As Marge Crenshaw grows up in the cotton mills, she learns to fight the forces of racial, sexual, and class oppression that hold her, her family, and her community back. With her brother Tom, who has joined the Communist Party, Marge eventually becomes a union organizer who leads the famous strike at Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina-a real-life strike in 1929 that claimed numerous lives, including that of organizer and songwriter Ella May Wiggins. Myra Page was an active member of the Communist Party, and Gathering Storm stands out from other Gastonia novels because it was printed in the Soviet Union. Yet this is not a novel about outsider agitators infiltrating a peaceful Southern town. Page was born in Virginia and worked as a labor organizer throughout the South. And as Marge's heart-wrenching story demonstrates, the fight against the forces of capitalist exploitation and inequality was entirely homegrown. Gathering Storm is a bona fide Communist novel; but with the story of Marge and her family at its heart, it is also a deeply intimate novel that proves the personal is always political.