Michael Sigalas

(An excerpt from The Song Poet) Author note This is an early chapter from my novel-in-progress, The Song Poet. The story is told here by Malachi Cochrane, looking back on the summer of 1927 in the South Carolina mountains. It’s the true beginning of everything that follows. — This story starts on Carolina Day, 1927, at a church picnic over at Issaqueena Falls, right by the Stumphouse Tunnel. Teddi was just twelve then, and I was just six. The Goodlet sisters, Essie and Fleda, eight and nine...

Osceola, oil on canvas, by Robert John Curtis (1816–1867). Painted from life at Fort Moultrie, Sullivan's Island, January 1838, for Dr. R.L. Baker. Curtis and Osceola developed a close friendship during the painting sessions, conversing at length while Osceola sat for the portrait. The clothing depicted is in the style of the Creek Indians, itself influenced by British military uniforms of the eighteenth century. The original hangs in the Charleston Museum. This is the portrait painted in the...

The former home of Joe Jackson's liquor store is still a place of business in West Greenville, SC. “A name is just a story people tell about you,” says Teddi in The Song Poet. By 1937, Shoeless Joe Jackson ran a liquor store on Pendleton Street in West Greenville, nearly twenty years removed from the roar of packed ballparks and the shadow of the Black Sox scandal. To most Americans, he was already becoming myth: outlaw slugger, banned natural genius, ghost of what baseball might have been....