Everyone Feels Deeply Alabamian

Cameron Engwall talks with Alexis Okeowo about her second book, “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama.”

By Cameron EngwallNovember 11, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Memoir & Essay

THE EAST VILLAGE blinds today—summer’s choke hold refuses to relinquish Lower Manhattan. Walking the streets, I’m surprised to find that few storefronts have changed in the five years since I moved to Brooklyn. I’m heading to a coffee shop I used to frequent, a deeply serious bistro that once chided me for my order, pointing to a handwritten sign reading “no alternative milks.” I’m happy to see that, upon my arrival, the staff appears to have lightened up. Maybe it’s that they’re a bit younger, or that I’m a bit older; maybe it’s that I know better than to ask for alternative milk. Either way, I’m much more at ease as I take my drink and olive oil cake to a corner table to wait for Alexis Okeowo. “I love their olive oil cake,” I’d messaged her earlier. “Gotta get the olive oil cake,” she’d confirmed.

When she steps into the room, I’m greeted with a warmth that is distinctly Southern. Surprising as it may seem, there are plenty of us in New York, and we’re able to clock each other pretty quickly. Her drink arrives and we move to the patio, where we chat about Georgia and Alabama, the homes we didn’t choose but, in retrospect, have come to claim and love. We trade stories—hers of visits to Atlanta, mine of family ties to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. It takes no time for me to gush: “I loved your book.”

In Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama (2025), Okeowo weaves her personal history with Alabama’s past. She goes all the way back to the state’s native tribes and its tenure as both the center of the Civil Rights Movement and the site of violent racism. Drawing on extensive conversations, she offers the personal narratives of a range of fellow Alabamians—a Confederacy apologist, a Mexican immigrant facing deportation. “In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster,” Okeowo writes—and proves. Her book reveals a story seldom heard by those who haven’t spent time in the South: the northern milieu who, more often than not, seem willing to reduce the rarely examined region to something negative and two-dimensional.

Over coffee and olive oil cake, we talk about how Okeowo gathered firsthand Alabamian accounts, the conflicts between Southern and Nigerian femininity, and the need, after all of this self-reflection, to escape the self for something more expansive.

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CAMERON ENGWALL: You’ve said you began this book in 2018. What did the project look like then, in its earliest shape?

ALEXIS OKEOWO: At the start, I wasn’t going to be in it. I planned to stay behind the curtain and gather other people’s stories—firsthand accounts that, together, could represent a cross section of Alabama. It’s not just Black and white: Alabama is also immigrant, Latino, and Native.

We have the Poarch Creek Princess and Confederacy Calvin; Mary, who becomes an activist, and Brandon. Then there’s Tina—how did you seek out these perspectives?

Mary emerged while I was reporting on water and sewage in the Black Belt. She carried a civil rights legacy in her family and was fighting an environmental battle that almost no one outside the region was talking about. Confederacy Calvin I met at a park museum—he was the director, walking groups through glass cases of Confederate artifacts, and I’d just gone there, looking. Brandon I found through immigrant rights organizing. Tina had been in the news around Roy Moore, so I was able to track her down, and Stephanie was also very willing to speak, as the first female chief of the Poarch Creek.

Mary’s chapter pushed me to rethink what I thought I knew about environmental crises in the South. We hear about Flint; we don’t hear about rural Alabama.

Exactly. The Black Belt’s water crisis is decades-long and largely invisible to national media. In Mary’s story, environmental justice sits alongside civil rights lineage. And Tina, in relation to the Roy Moore sexual abuse scandal, was also willing to share a history of sexual abuse that she hadn’t really talked about before.

Have the people you profiled read the book yet?

I don’t think any of them have read early copies, but when it was fact-checked, all of the details were read out to them, so they got a sense of what I was including from their stories. And of course, with Tina, an excerpt of an earlier version ran that was mostly her story.

You write about Alabama as both insular and rapidly changing. Do you see the state evolving toward something like Atlanta?

I mean, Montgomery is already quite liberal. I guess I see Atlanta and the surrounding areas as a place where there’s incredible demographic diversity, and where those liberal leanings have been harnessed. I think that could eventually—maybe not now, but eventually—be possible in Alabama too, because the demographics are changing. What I find interesting about all these groups—from Latinos to Native American people to immigrants—is that everyone feels deeply Alabamian. They’re so proud.

You can tell, when you share your own story, that you’re proud too, in your own way. You describe your magnet school as formative. What did that environment give you?

My magnet school was very formative. Now that I look back, it was this little place where I could think freely and was encouraged to speak my mind.

Your reflections on femininity come out of those years too, which to an outsider might seem to conflict with “speaking your mind”—if traditional Southern women’s roles are brought up. You also experience the expectations of Nigerian femininity.

I think of Southern femininity as the practice of making others comfortable and accommodating men. There is a side of that in Nigerian femininity, but less of it: more joy in just wanting to feel good, for yourself. It’s patriarchal as well, but the pressures are different. You still need to be bold—women are expected to be. You’re told, “Look good, do well in school, speak up, get what you want, succeed in life.”

Religion was another impactful force shaping those years. You describe church as both a center of community and a source of division.

At school, sure: I’ll be polite, we’ll eat lunch together, laugh, joke. But then on the weekend, I go to my house with my friends, go to our Evangelical church, and you go over there with yours. It’s preaching togetherness, but outside of school I didn’t see any of my white friends.

Shifting to the present: The section on [Alabama’s] HB 56, on the threat to Brandon’s ability to stay in the Alabama that he loves, hiding from the threat of deportation—

I actually called Brandon recently, just to check on him. HB 56 was designed, not just in Alabama, to force migrants to “self-deport.” We thought we got through it; a lot of the bills were repealed. People managed to stay—like Brandon—and now they’ve established themselves. But now we’re back to square one with these ICE raids.

Compared to your first book, how did it feel engaging with your own history here?

With my first book, which was about people resisting extremism in Africa, I could stay out of the text. It was more journalism—straight journalism. That’s why I originally tried to do this one the same way, where I wasn’t in it. But then I realized: I have to be. People need to know who I am and why I’m telling this story.

Did you have to exorcise things so that you can now write fiction?

Absolutely. The first book didn’t do that. It just kicked it up. This book? I plumbed it all. To the point where I’m like—I need to get out of myself. I want to get out of myself.

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Alexis Okeowo is an American journalist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Okeowo the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa (2017).

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 Featured image: Photo of Alexis Okeowo by Maya Fuhr.