When Times Are Dark, Have Mercy
Storytelling is a merciful, hopeful act. The words of skilled writers with compassionate hearts can heal wounded people and communities. Our 2025 membership drive is here. Please help keep this home for such writers running for another year.
This is Salvation South’s fourth year of publication, and here is what we have learned: beautifully crafted stories or poems or films or podcasts can shine rays of hope into parts of the human heart where despair has come to live.
We know this because you, our readers, tell us that what we publish can do that for you now and then.
The Kentucky novelist and poet Silas House wrote last month for us about why we need healing words in times like these. He paid tribute to his high school English teacher, Sandra Stidham, who showed him how words could set him free, could allow him to find the divine inside himself.
“It only takes one teacher to unlock something in us,” Silas wrote. “It only takes one poem to set us free.”
Knowing that stories can free us to love better and more deeply and more broadly is very important just now. We live in a time when many people—in the South and across the nation—cannot acknowledge what most of us know about our brothers and sisters: that all of us are God’s children, equally deserving of love, equally deserving of forgiveness, equally deserving of mercy.
Mercy is noble. Mercy is transformative.
When the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington in January asked our nation’s president to have mercy on immigrants who had fled conflict and persecution in their own homelands and had come to these shores “to find compassion and welcome here,” we saw her words as a call to action.
“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger,” she said, “for we were once strangers in this land.”
In the American South, which is by far the most ethnically diverse region in this nation, almost all of us, at one time or another, were strangers. Salvation South’s role is to tell stories that welcome anyone who has ever felt like a stranger in this land. To welcome everyone onto our region’s metaphorical front porch. To show them that our region’s hospitality is not a performative thing, but a quality that lives in our hearts.
To keep this publication and the community that has arisen around it thriving, we need more of you to become members of our Family Circle, the group of readers who offer their monthly or annual financial support.
The South we envision welcomes. It does not turn away. We create our words, audio, video, and images for the vast majority of Southerners who welcome others, instead of fearing them. In Silas’s essay last month, he called our attention to a four-line stanza called “Motto,” written by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht in the winter of 1937 and 1938.
In the dark times
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
Brecht was living in exile in Denmark when he wrote “Motto,” driven from his home in Germany when the Nazis took power. Faced with 2025’s dark times, all of us at Salvation South know how badly our readers want to sing, and how many of them want tp raise their voices above the darkness.
Our contributors—the hundreds of journalists, essayists, poets, filmmakers, and storytellers who have filled our pages for almost four years now—feel to us like a heavenly chorus. Voices raised in pursuit of a South ruled by love and by mercy.
To keep this publication and the community that has arisen around it thriving, we need more of you to become members of our Family Circle, the group of readers who offer their monthly or annual financial support. Every week, thousands of people read Salvation South. The members of our Family Circle number in the hundreds right now. We hope you will help us add a zero to that number by taking your place in our Circle.
We begin this year’s one-month membership drive by kicking off a series of collaborations with a man who has devoted his life and work to documenting the South as it is—and the hope for what it could be. William Reynolds Ferris is arguably the greatest folklorist in the history of the South. A Mississippi native, he was part of the team who built the Ivy League’s first African American Studies program, at Yale University in the 1970s. He played critical roles in establishing the first academic programs in Southern Studies, first with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and later with the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. Between working at those two critical cultural resources, Ferris served as the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the sixty-year-old support system for the preservation and teaching of American culture that is now being dismantled by the current administration in Washington.
Fifty years ago, Ferris worked with Yale’s Media Design Studio to release four documentary films based on his folklore work in Mississippi—Give My Poor Heart Ease, a portrait of blues culture, I Ain’t Lying, which documented storytellers, Made in Mississippi, which featured craftspeople and artists, and Two Black Churches, whose title speaks for itself.
Once a month throughout this summer, Salvation South will present each of those films in its entirety, and for each film, Bill and I will have a conversation aimed at capturing his thoughts about that work, fifty years later.
“From childhood on and my teenage years on, recording and preserving music and voices, the stories of, first, the community on the farm where I grew up and then later all over the Mississippi Delta and other areas, I saw it as a work of protest,” Bill tells me in our first interview. “The voices of Black families had been omitted from the books and the records … that we were taught in school. I saw their voices and recording them as a political act. It was not marching in civil rights marches, but it was in many ways to me just as important.”
We want our publication to become a home for any Southerner who has a story to tell that might give a poor heart ease. And we want Salvation South to be a welcoming spot for readers who seek such stories.
Our “Fifty Years of Ferris” celebration begins this week with Give My Poor Heart Ease.
Beginning our membership drive with a look back at Give My Poor Heart Ease feels just right to me. We want our publication to become a home for any Southerner who has a story to tell that might give a poor heart ease. And we want Salvation South to be a welcoming spot for readers who seek such stories.
Silas House’s essay last month ended with this three-line poem:
When times are dark
build a crackling fire
and gather good people.
We hope, when you open your email from us on Sundays to find your weekly package of stories from us, you will feel a little warmth from that fire. Your monthly or annual membership in the Salvation South Family Circle will provide the firewood we need to keep it crackling.
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Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.
