The Visitor

Abstract

The following story—based on several years of fieldwork in a southern Appalachian city with an ugly Jim Crow past—is a fiction about place and identity. The city, despite its progressive reputation, remains deeply segregated. Its segregation is obscured, at least for some, by a veneer of gentrification and Black Lives Matter yard signs. When bodies begin turning up in unexpected places, the White narrator, a retired folklorist, uses French Structuralist theory to interpret events as though they were part of a single story. Over time, however, he realizes that his interpretations do not fit the facts, prompting him to shift his thinking from the structural to the idiographic. The story is an allegory, a contemporary fable, about the ultimate inscrutability of others—but also about the possibility, with sufficient imagination, of understanding.