Confederate Streets

Winner of the 2009 Benu Press Social Justice and Equity Award in Creative Non-fiction


In Confederate Streets, Erin E. Tocknell takes us to two Nashvilles: the one that shaped her sensibility as a writer—a rich, green, inviting landscape of backyard grapevine swings and cooling high jumps into the swim and tennis club pool, church choir practice and youth group outings, bluegrass, country, and the Grand Ole Opry—and the Nashville that was hiding in plain sight because of the segregation that persists in the city to this day.  The Nashville Tocknell brings to life as a result of archival research and personal interviews—its black ministers, musicians, teachers, principals, and students—is rendered with the same lyricism and power as her evocations of the city she knew in her own childhood, under the skin.  Whether she is chronicling the local history of busing and zoning, or taking us inside a 1930s club in the Jim Crow South to hear Harmonica Wizard Deford Bailey take the stage, or bringing us into her own church to hear an all-but-forgotten white minister preach against segregation twenty years before she was born, Tocknell’s essays are loving tributes to ordinary citizens who have worked for social change in the city that she—and they—have called home.

--Natalia Rachel Singer, author of Scraping by in the Big Eighties