In 2018, while teaching her kids to swim and working on urban river restoration projects, Hannah S. Palmer began a journal of social encounters with water. As she found herself dangling her feet in a seemingly all-white swimming pool, she started to worry about how her young sons would learn to swim. Would they grow up accustomed to the stubbornly segregated pools of Atlanta? Was it safe for them to wade in creeks laced with urban runoff or dive into the ever-warming, man-made swimming holes of the South? Should they just join the Y?
But these weren't just parenting questions. In the South, how we swim and whether we have access to water at all is tied up in race and class. As she took her sons pool-hopping across Atlanta, Palmer found an intimate lens through which to view the city's neighborhoods. In The Pool Is Closed, she documents the creeks behind fences, the springs in the sewers, the lakes that had all but vanished since her own parents learned to swim. In the process, she uncovers complex stories about environmental history, water policy, and the racial politics of public spaces.
Nothing prepared Palmer for the contamination, sewage, and bodies that appear when you look at water too long. Her search for water became compulsive, a way to make sense of the world. The Pool Is Closed is a book about water: where it flows and where it floods, who owns it, and what it costs. It's also a story about embracing parenthood in a time of environmental catastrophe and political anxiety, of dwindling public space and natural resources. It chronicles a year-long quest to find a place to swim and finding, instead, what makes shared water so threatening and wild.
Industry Reviews
We are the stories we tell. What about the stories we don't? With her heart wide open, Hannah S. Palmer invites us on a journey of tragedy, revelation, exploration, and understanding as she probes the waterways of Atlanta with her children in tow, in an effort to expose the vagaries of racism and our potential to heal. She does so honestly and with a quiet courage that ripples through these pages. We care because she cares. And sometimes, that is enough. Grab your bathing suit because this pool is open. - Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
""Blending memoir, history, and social commentary, The Pool Is Closed offers the reader a stunningly perceptive look at the meaning of race, inequality, and community in contemporary America. Palmer writes with humor, verve, and elegant clarity. She connects past with present, explores many conundrums of modern urban life, and relates her deep affection for aquatic environments. A thoroughly enjoyable read."" - Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America
""Palmer masterfully recounts how pools became the last battleground of segregation. Beautifully written and deeply felt, with a sharp eye for the revealing detail, her story will ensure that you never look at a city pool the same way again. Nor should you."" - John Blake, author of More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered about the White Mother He Never Knew
""Atlanta, and the rest of us, are lucky to have Hannah Palmer as the sympathetic but clear-eyed chronicler of the South's metropolis. In The Pool Is Closed, Palmer is alternately a mom, a tireless shoe-leather reporter, and a troubled daughter of her native city, telling it, and the rest of us, the truths we need to hear."" - John Grammer, director, Center for Southern Studies, University of the South
