A Land’s Weight
Posted on April 11, 2025
I received a draft of the cover image for Scarlett today. No people, just the land: coastal Georgia’s telltale live oaks draped in Spanish moss.
(I’m reminded of García Lorca’s “The fault is the land’s,” in Blood Wedding.)
By one measure, this image of Spanish moss is a cliché. By another, it’s perfect—an emblem of the story Scarlett seeks to tell. Neither black nor white nor a mix. A mournful evocation of a place where kidnapping and torture and murder and rape by one group of people over another took place. Repeatedly. A place where crimes went unpunished, a place where crimes still happen.
A scrawled signature, redolent of the 18th century where this begins. And the subtitle (long struggled over by editors and outside readers) feels finally right, saying plainly what the story says: the curse—blemish—torment—vicious hatred—endures. To capture and imprison someone for no reason but commerce and greed, unwilling to acknowledge a person’s capacity to love, create, imagine, enact. To simply be, as the yogis teach.
The land bears the scars. But the fault is ours.