For two years, whenever I ran into Randall Kenan and he gave me an especially big hug in greeting, I worried. It meant he was feeling guilty for not having turned in his essay for Mothers and Strangers, in spite of my regular emails hounding him, as editors are wont to do. But Randall had a mischievous sense of humor, and I appealed to that by comparing him to Michelangelo, who replied to the pope who had commissioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, that “he would be done when he was done.” In return Randall compared me to “that mean old pope who nagged Michelangelo, but much nicer.” Our UNC Press editor, Lucas Church, even went ahead with the peer review and the board approval, without an essay from Randall; we had faith in him to come through after the eleventh hour. And so he did, with a delightfully breezy essay about food and family and the village it took to raise him. “The mean old pope” quote made it into the Acknowledgments at the back of the book when it was published. The great talent and sweet spirit that was Randall Kenan passed away on August 26th. Today I cherish that permanent record of our playful exchanges.
