Don't Hate --book title by Houston Baker, Jr. past is never dead. It's not even William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for Nun (73). His assumption--that southern writer is chronicler accessing essence of wholly objective place, transparently explaining history to outsiders who misunderstand it--has been undermined by theorizing in New Southern Studies. To chronicle historical South as special space enacts social construction positing an ideologically reductive, essentialist regional myth. As Richard Gray argues, invented South is an imagined community as well as real and given space (xix). Diane Roberts terms it the South of mind (371). Faulkner, conflicted and ghost-haunted by memories of past, saw himself in grip of concrete reality so palpable that it could not be wiped away with time. But multiple communities, genders, and races lived in that past, and they stimulate divergent takes on it. Thus Houston Baker, Jr., borrowing from Faulkner's Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, ambivalently titled recent book I Don't Hate South. Black writers ghost-haunted by southern past are highly wary of being possessed by grip of mythical mystique that marginalized black experience into historical invisibility. They know, as Martyn Bone argues, that idealized southern geography rested economically on social geography of slavery and it sequel segregation--realities that were suppressed in definitions of southern. As Bone notes, strategic exclusion is structural and ideological necessity for Agrarian-derived mythmaking (3). For black writers, then, to perform southern chronicling one must enter history as self-aware, reconfiguring maker of history. Resourcefully imaginative excavations are required to recover materials deeply buried and long suppressed. The result is an ongoing birthing of multi-vocal history that presupposes chronicler engages not in neutral reception but in constructive act. The past is never past, and yet it must be newly conceived. Two contemporary black chroniclers, Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey, interrogate nature of South with highly revealing metaphors of southern space and soil. They diverge from familiar anxiety that region is losing distinctiveness and that its culture is coming to an end. Against that fear of dispossession--of being uprooted from one's communal memory by time and new cultural infusions--they express need to take possession of soil, to put roots into it so as to occupy new space instead of tenuous space apart. Their poetry thus reflects literary sensibility of black writers born after civil rights gains of mid-1960s. Growing up during profound cultural transitions--a social order of change and adaptive adjustments--they came to perceive historical inquiry not as monumentalizing past into granite fixity but as excavation of pliable materials for revised narratives. Their poems are keen moments of individual consciousness in which poet feels free to find and reshape clay sediments of dug-up history. In this respect they crack barrier that confronted earlier black writers, namely problem of occupying what I term a space apart, on margin, where black life was kept out of history. In post-bellum era, Charles W. Chesnutt's dialect conjure tales ironically undermined white nostalgic plantation tradition while tapping into oral black folk traditions. Yet, in adopting plantation tale convention of white frame narrator (his publisher Houghton Mifflin not indicating his racial identity due to his request that work be judged on its merits rather than author's social status), Chesnutt subtly marginalized himself. Unfortunately this approach, tactic of an era of accommodation, enfolded black materials inside dominant white discourse domain, subtly distancing folk life to quaint space apart. …