Introduction. Willa Cather's southern connections / Ann Romines -- Willa Cather and the question of sympathy : an unofficial story / Judith Fetterley -- "Dock burs in yo' pants" : reading Cather through Sapphira and the slave girl / Joseph R. Urgo -- Political silence and hist'ry in Sapphira and the slave girl / Tomas Pollard -- No place like home : reading Sapphira and the slave girl against the great Depression / Shelley Newman -- Whites playing in the dark : southern conversation in Willa Cather's Sapphira and the slave girl / Roseanne V. Camacho -- "A kind of family feeling about Nancy" : race and the hidden threat of incest in Sapphira and the slave girl / Mako Yoshikawa -- "The dangerous journey" : Toni Morrison's reading of Sapphira and the slave girl / Marilyn Mobley McKenzie -- Race, labor, and domesticity in Cather's Sapphira and the slave girl / Gayle Wald -- "The pull of race and blood and kindred" : Willa Cather's southern inheritance / Lisa Marcus -- "A race without consonants" : My mortal enemy as reconstruction narrative / Robert K. Miller -- Henry Colbert, gentleman : bound by the code / Mary R. Ryder -- White dirt : the surreal racial landscapes of Willa Cather's south / Patricia Yaeger -- The interlocking works of Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow / Merrill Maguire Skaggs -- "Aeneas at Washington" and The professor's house : Cather and the southern agrarians / Elsa Nettels -- O'Connor's vision and Cather's fiction / John J. Murphy -- Playing in the mother country : Cather, Morrison, and the return to Virginia / Janis P. Stout -- Dressing for the part : [what's] the matter with clothes / Cynthia Griffin Wolff.