In the Introduction to Ghosts of Segregation, I use the mantra “dig, bury, leave, and come back” to describe the ways societies remember themselves—through memory, history, and the land. Those themes animate the book, a photo-essay collection focused on the built and natural remnants—roads, bridges, trees—of the country’s racial past and present.

They sit still in Rich’s photographs. People were denied humanity here, lynched here, shot here, tired here. They are there, moving more, in my seven essays too. People remember here. They sang blues and jazz and Gospel here. They made this here, and re-made and unmade that there. Memories get caught up in the land, was my point. And who but us to dig them up.