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I also made decisions about style. I wanted vivid, active prose (Mama sez, “I’ll slap you into next week” versus “the child was slapped into next week by her mother”). I wanted concrete images, such as when I describe the son of one of my neighbors washing collard greens with bath soap (119). I wanted to paint characters who would stick in the minds of readers, such as Aun’ Sis in “The Overweight Angel.” Notice I use the word “characters,” so a memoirist creates just as fiction writers do. And I wanted accuracy in word selection. Writing a column for several years for The Chapel Hill News was good practice in capturing that vividness.

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Summer Snow is also about intentionally disturbing the peace at times, as in the essay, “Would you go out with a white boy for five dollars?” I was hoping that readers would indeed contemplate cross racial, social and sexual liaisons in the South and what those had traditionally meant—as well as what they mean for contemporary times. With “Dental Charity,” I wanted readers to contemplate how even well-intentioned good deeds can backfire, or, in another essay, how desegregation was detrimental, or, in yet another, how celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday can be wrongheaded at times.