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The Eviction

Curtis Price

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Itโ€™s that time of the month again and the Sheriffs are here because evictions are starting. Alabama law requires a Sheriff to be physically present during an eviction and today, the Sheriffs lounge in the oppressive ...

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โ€œI Want To Learn Everything!โ€: The Proletarian โ€œIโ€

Curtis Price

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By the early twentieth century, literacy rates in Russia substantially increased among urban workers and peasants as a result of extending public education to previous illiterate sectors of the population. This drive toward adult education was ...

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Our Eyes Are Watching . . . Green Beans and Watermelon

Curtis Price

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Out with the dog on a hot muggy Alabama afternoon with temperatures skirting 100, I walked across the parking lot of the African-American church across from where I live. In the middle of the tarmac, someone ...

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“Hard Times”

Curtis Price

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Itโ€™s the expressions. Some stare vacantly with that deer-in-the-headlights look, some glower defiantly, others hold the steady downwards gaze of the already-defeated and always-defeated, the type of people who look like they could use a small ...

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This Place is Poisoning Our Loved Ones

Curtis Price

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Below is a post from the โ€œLook Out For One Anotherโ€ FB group in Huntsville, Alabama. Most of the responses gave specific information about who to contact, but a few made larger points such as the ...

The Moral Economy in the Black Rural South

Curtis Price

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(Reprinted from the July-August 2019 โ€œThe Brooklyn Rail) Once you drive out of Huntsville, within 15 minutes you run into deeply rural areas. Open fields, some cultivated, some wild; mobile homes and modest bungalows mix with ...

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At The Pain Clinic, North Alabama

Curtis Price

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I’m in Boaz, Sand Mountain, with a friend going to the local pain clinic. The waiting room is filled with middle-aged, rural/small-town, working-class whites who generally look in poor health. A crowded waiting room full of ...

The Black and White of It

Curtis Price

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One of my neighbors living three buildings down had his leg amputated several months ago. At first, the doctors thought it was a Brown Recluse spider bite but later figured out it was a circulation problem. ...

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The Grammar of Loneliness

Curtis Price

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When the elderly woman spoke to me after I said โ€œhiโ€ outside our apartment complexโ€™s communal laundromat, her words tumbled out with the unmistakable grammar of terrible loneliness. She had a slightly anxious, furtive look, as ...

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World of Interconnected Strangers

Curtis Price

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As I parked, I heard a tap on my window. The tap came from a neighbor from the building next door, a 40-ish African-American man with an unfashionable, immaculately coifed Afro and John Lennon-style glasses, radiating ...