In the same storage bin as his parents' World War II letters, Chuck Reece found the scrapbook his mother ordered before he started the first grade in 1967. As thousands of Southern children head into first grade, he considers the one box on that page he has never quite finished checking.

Erika Council makes the only biscuit in the Michelin Guide — three years running. But behind that improbable honor stand two grandmothers, a church soup kitchen in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and a question her mother once asked that changed everything: were the Black women who built Southern food hidden, or erased?

Chuck Reece visits Bomb Biscuit Company in Atlanta to talk with Council about inheritance and recognition, the twenty-year IT career she walked away from, being priced out of a historically Black neighborhood, and the morning a stranger from Alabama reminded her what a biscuit can do that a history book can't. A story about food, memory, and refusing to let people disappear.

What does a cartoon sailor have to do with Pride Month? More than you might think. In this commentary, Chuck Reece traces a line from Popeye’s stubborn self-acceptance to the urgent realities facing LGBTQ+ young people today—and to the power of Pride celebrations in the South, where the simple act of saying “this is who I am” does important, mind-changing work.