New York Metropolis has its bodegas. The South has its fuel stations.

While you cease for motor oil in Mississippi, you can too seize fried rooster on a stick. In North Carolina, you should buy a steamy bowl of pozole together with batteries and a five-pound bag of White Lily flour.

There may be shawarma subsequent to the shotgun shells, or wedges of gentle hoop cheese and packets of saltines on the market on the counter together with lottery tickets and pecan pie that the proprietor’s sister made.

Documenting these impartial Southern temples of commerce and neighborhood has develop into a singular focus for the photojournalist Kate Medley, who, like most children raised in Mississippi, grew up consuming at rural fuel stations.

Now dwelling in Durham, N.C., Ms. Medley, 42, has spent greater than a decade accumulating photos for her e book of images, “Thank You Please Come Again,” which the digital journal The Bitter Southerner revealed in December. The e book started with a journalist’s curiosity, however ended up as a method for a daughter of the Deep South to make sense of the gorgeous, brutal, difficult place she got here from.

“These locations maintain nice thriller,” she mentioned. “You’re rolling down the highway and so they catch your visible consideration. Then you definately marvel what’s behind that cup door once you hear that little bell ring. Is it the MAGA South? The welcoming South? Who’s on the money register? Who’s on the grill?”

A dozen years in the past, Ms. Medley found a Citgo in Durham that had develop into a Nicaraguan place known as the Latin America Meals Restaurant. She developed a concept.

“I assumed I might chart the rising immigrant foodways of the South by the use of what was taking place within the backs of those fuel stations,” she mentioned.

Some impartial fuel stations are fading within the fluorescent mild of chains like QuikTrip and RaceTrac, with their low-cost gasoline, hot-dog rollers and limitless banks of soda machines. Some station homeowners let the fuel pumps run dry or take away them altogether as a result of the native economic system is just too depressed. Different fuel stations have develop into church buildings or nightclubs, or have been deserted altogether.

The e book opens with an essay by the Southern author Kiese Laymon, who grew up in a really completely different a part of Jackson, Miss., than Ms. Medley. She didn’t know him when she reached out, however he understood her mission instantly.

“I’d by no means thought of the truth that my favourite eating places, as a toddler, as an adolescent, as an grownup returning to Mississippi, practically all served fuel,” he writes. “And I by no means, ever, considered them as fuel stations that served meals.”

He tells the story of childhood journeys to Jr. Food Mart in Forest, Miss., on Friday nights. His grandmother’s boyfriend, Ofa D, would slip in a Tina Turner tape and drive them in his pickup. They’d order a field of dark-meat rooster, a foam container of fried fish and a brown paper sack full of the fried potato wedges everybody in Mississippi is aware of as potato logs.

It dawned on Ms. Medley that you may research a area by the use of its meals in 2005, when she landed on the University of Mississippi in Oxford, the place she started a grasp’s program in Southern research.

Hurricane Katrina hit the day after she began. She spent the subsequent a number of months touring the state to cowl the devastation for The New York Instances, her journeys fueled by rural fuel stations.

They usually run on a Southern “get ’er carried out” perspective. If prospects need muffins, somebody will begin baking. A cashier in North Carolina found out that she might make a bit more money shopping for some Bojangles sausage biscuits on her strategy to work, marking them up and promoting them to the breakfast crowd.

“It’s simply this ingenuity and resourcefulness you don’t discover different locations,” Ms. Medley mentioned.

That’s notably true for some fuel stations run by immigrants. Ms. Medley shot photos of Nina Patel and her samosas at Tasty Tikka, inside a Shell station in Irmo, S.C., and Gina Nguyen holding a garlic butter shrimp banh mi at Banh Mi Boys, which opened in a family-owned Texaco in Metairie, La.

Two weeks in the past, Ms. Medley took me to a spot in the course of Mississippi Delta farmland that additionally sprang from an immigrant story.

Mark Fratesi’s father opened Fratesi Grocery and Service Center in 1941 in Leland. It’s a wonderland of do-it-yourself pork rinds, pantry staples and bait, with a freezer stuffed with frozen steaks and baggage of unshelled pecans. It runs on the consideration system. You inform the cashier what you had for lunch. Should you’re native, you’ll be able to put your groceries or fuel on a tab.

The restaurant takes up about half the constructing, and the household’s Italian immigration roots are all around the menu. There are grits and burgers, but additionally a rigatoni plate lunch and a po’ boy (their very own invention) made with deep-fried balls of chopped black olives, shredded mozzarella and seasoned breadcrumbs sure along with a bit mayonnaise and ranch dressing. Canvas-wrapped logs of seasoned, salted pork loin known as lonza treatment within the beer cooler.

Mr. Fratesi, 68, doesn’t suppose the place will final a lot previous his retirement. Already, a series fuel station down the highway has undercut his gasoline costs by a dime. And nobody within the household’s subsequent technology is occupied with taking up.

“It’s important to be married to it,” he mentioned.

About 15 miles away in Indianola, the long run is brighter.

Betty Campbell, 69, and her husband opened Betty’s Place in a former fuel station, about 20 years in the past. The restaurant is about two blocks from the BB King Museum. Like her mom, Ms. Campbell was a daily cook dinner for the bluesman and his crew, turning out a playlist of dependable Southern requirements like candy potatoes, baked rooster and caramel cake.

The restaurant partitions are lined within the signatures of vacationers from all over the world who’ve come to study concerning the blues. The household not too long ago lined up the outdated storage bays, and are increasing the eating room to make room for the rising busloads of vacationers.

Her youthful brother, Otha, who is basically the maître d’ at Betty’s, mentioned they wish to disavow vacationers’ preconceived notions about racism within the South.

“Not solely do Black vacationers see Betty’s as a protected place to cease for lunch,” he advised Ms. Medley for her e book, “white vacationers see it as protected place, too.”

Small Southern cities stay informally segregated, however not on the fuel stations that promote meals — or the eating places that promote fuel.

“There’s one thing concerning the accessibility and this coming collectively in an area the entire neighborhood shares nearly out of necessity or not less than comfort,” Ms. Medley mentioned. “All are welcome each time, it doesn’t matter what.”