One county, taken
as seriously as a capital
Still revising
The Cook Book began as a memoir and a manifesto: one South Georgia county, told out of order, the way memory actually arrives. Not a history of Cook County. A story of it. History as architecture — the beams, not the plaque.
I have set the book down. Not thrown it out — set it down, the way you set down a thing you have carried so long you stopped feeling the weight of it. Everything it taught me is in the work below. The research is real. The people are real. The work went on without the book.
The door stays open.
I spent thirty years going everywhere else to find the story. It was here.— Robin Postell
What Came Out of It
The book is set down. These are not.
The Parrish Line
Early 1873, J.T. Wilkes’ store, Puddleville, Georgia. A Parrish covers eight letters on the word Philadelphia and a town gets its name. Buffalo Bill, Rosalyn, Dora Agnes, and a man who ran a hundred yards with a broken arm and carried the ball for the rest of his life.
Enter → 02 / Live · ExhibitThe Hornet Gazette
Cook County High, Class B state champions, 1949. The clippings, the lineups, the train ride home, and the Hornets who brought the title back to Adel — Alan Parrish among them.
Enter →The Wiregrass People
Forty-seven pages of foundation: the wiregrass ecology, Native dispossession, the Georgia land lotteries, the Coffee Road migration, the founding families, the 1836 Indian Wars, the making of Cook County in 1918, and the Otranto.
Publishing soonStoryteller Cook County
Two hundred and twenty questions about the ground you are standing on. Minnie Shaw’s history, Brushy Creek, Puddleville, the 9th and 10th land districts — put back into the hands of the people living on top of it.
Publishing soonDead Man Coming
The unfinished investigative work of my father, Charles Postell — award-winning reporter, and my first editor. Carried forward, with its own reporting and its own reckoning.
Site comingEverything I Know
I learned on a porch
A screen door is the most honest thing in a Southern house. It lets the air through and it keeps the flies out. You can see who is coming and they can see you seeing them. It never once pretended to be a wall.
It is also the only door in the house that announces you. It slaps shut behind every child who ever ran out of a kitchen. That sound is the reason I am writing any of this down.