Blue Alabama

Andrew Moore, Yolanda Walker at The Purple Bowl, Pink Bottom, 2018.

There are others who are not remembered,
as if they had never lived,
who died and were forgotten,
they, and their children after them.

—Sirach 44:9

Alabama, the place in Andrew Moore’s photos, my home, is not exotic. But it is the subject of endless fascination. Sometimes is a punchline, or a word used to provoke horror. I have seen pages of words and pictures filled with my birth state, an abundant canvas for the American imagination, many times—the work of artists and poets, writers and intellectuals. This prolificity is at least in part