Sitting Up With The Dead Book

A writer of irrepressible spirit takes us on an inspired road trip through the South to uncover some of America's most talented and colorful storytellers, their tales, and the lush land that links them.

Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead.Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips through the states of the old south to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales. Stories provide the connective tissue of the South, linking the past with the present. They join communities as widespread as the coastal planes of the Carolinas and Georgia, the swamps of the Gulf coast, and the mountains and vales of Appalachia. As distinctly American as jazz, they blend cultures and oral traditions as diverse as those of southern England, Ireland, West Africa, and native America. They contain bits of lived history, both from before the great national train wreck that was the Civil War, and after. In Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro offers a paradoxical wake for the undying body of the Old South, to hear its truths and contemplate its robust afterlife in the tallest, "lyingest," most fruitful, and most haunting of its tales.

In these pages you meet some of America's most colorful tellers, some of them local celebrities, others national treasures. Among them are Ray Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow; Kathryn Windham, the "ghost lady"; and Grammy Award-winner David Holt. You encounter plat-eyes and boo-hags, Jack the trickster and Brer Rabbit, mule eggs, singing turtles, talking corpses, and flying Africans from the sea islands of South Carolina. Throughout, Pamela Petro is our inquisitive, insightful, funny, and (usually) intrepid guide. Stories are her rabbit hole for entering the Otherworld of the South. She invites us along for a journey that is as full of wonder and rich with rewards as any you are likely ever to undertake.