History
fromThe Atlantic
1 day agoDeadlier Than Gettysburg
The Civil War produced mass prisoner suffering and systemic inhumanity, exposing brutality, evolving laws of war, state bureaucracy, and racialized violence.
Sasha Bonét's matrilineal memoir, " The Waterbearers," traces the lives of her mother and grandmother: powerful, complicated women whose personalities have been shaped by the rough edges of American society. Mothers, she suggests, can pass on both grace and grief. The flow of the bayous of Houston, where she grew up, remind her of "the way my mother and grandmother pour into me, and I into my daughter; the valuable and the harmful, the minerals and the mud."