In 1927, A. P. Carter, his wife, Sara, and Sara’s cousin Maybelle, who happened to be married to A. P.’s brother, made the 30-mile trek from their home in Hiltons, Virginia, to Bristol, Tennessee, to record a few songs. The resulting Bristol Sessions not only marked the commercial debut of the Carter Family, they catapulted country music into the American canon. Almost 50 years after those first recordings, Janette Carter, daughter of A. P. and Sara, established the Carter Family Fold. It was A. P.’s dying wish that the Carter Family’s legacy be carried on, so Janette opened the small concert hall to celebrate her family and its contribution to country music, as well as the rich musical traditions of Appalachia. Janette played host to music fans every Saturday night for more than 30 years, opening shows with her brother Joe and son Dale and singing the songs like “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “Wildwood Flower” that her parents made famous.
Meanwhile, Janette’s homemade soup beans and cornbread were flying out the concession stand window. That’s because the Carter Family Fold is not just about music. It’s about family. And when you’re entertaining family, you want to keep them fed.
Today, Janette’s daughter Rita Forrester welcomes friends, family, and music fans to the Fold. When her mother passed away in 2006, Rita took the helm and never looked back. Still, not much has changed. Rita sits in with the band each Saturday night to welcome the crowd and pay tribute to her family through song. But before the music even starts, Rita, other members of her family, and a smattering of friends work in the kitchen at the Fold, cooking the food that will be served that night. The traditional Appalachian staples of soup beans and cornbread are still at the top of the menu, but so is egg salad that’s made from Janette’s recipe and a menagerie of cakes that are baked by women in the community. A night at the Carter Family Fold is like a reunion—a reunion of music, family, and food.
Amy Evans
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Upcoming SFA Events
The SFA calendar is full and running over with food-focused events. This summer, we’ll travel the South (and beyond) as we document, study, and celebrate local flavor. Won’t you join us?
Begin your summer with the SFA and the State of Mississippi on June 12 at the Astor Center New York for a discussion and celebration of the life and work of Craig Claiborne, the Sunflower, Mississippi, native who, over the course of a 25-plus-year career at the New York Times, catalyzed and catalogued an American culinary renaissance. Wake up Saturday morning, June 13, in New York and follow your nose to Madison Square Park for the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. Look for the debut of SFA filmmaker Joe York’s North Carolina BBQ film. Listen as SFA members Lolis Eric Elie, Calvin Trillin, and Fred Thompson hold forth on all things barbecue. And, of course, eat a little (or a lot) of the BBQ offered by one of the 14 pit masters who will line the streets around the park.
Travel to the Appalachian South June 26–28 for The Mountain Empire: Fast Cars in Bristol and Cornbread at the Carter Fold, the annual SFA summer Field Trip. Explore the foodways and musicways of northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia as we travel to the birthplace of country music.
Say goodbye to summer in Athens,Georgia, for Potlikker: Athens, August 22, 2009. The Potlikker Film Festival is an opportunity to showcase SFA documentaries, alongside local food films. Expect an evening with live music and short films, refreshing libations, and SFA snacks (including a potlikker shot with cornbread, handed as you walk in the door).
Begin your summer with the SFA and the State of Mississippi on June 12 at the Astor Center New York for a discussion and celebration of the life and work of Craig Claiborne, the Sunflower, Mississippi, native who, over the course of a 25-plus-year career at the New York Times, catalyzed and catalogued an American culinary renaissance. Wake up Saturday morning, June 13, in New York and follow your nose to Madison Square Park for the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. Look for the debut of SFA filmmaker Joe York’s North Carolina BBQ film. Listen as SFA members Lolis Eric Elie, Calvin Trillin, and Fred Thompson hold forth on all things barbecue. And, of course, eat a little (or a lot) of the BBQ offered by one of the 14 pit masters who will line the streets around the park.
Travel to the Appalachian South June 26–28 for The Mountain Empire: Fast Cars in Bristol and Cornbread at the Carter Fold, the annual SFA summer Field Trip. Explore the foodways and musicways of northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia as we travel to the birthplace of country music.
Say goodbye to summer in Athens,Georgia, for Potlikker: Athens, August 22, 2009. The Potlikker Film Festival is an opportunity to showcase SFA documentaries, alongside local food films. Expect an evening with live music and short films, refreshing libations, and SFA snacks (including a potlikker shot with cornbread, handed as you walk in the door).
Mississippi Shows Well at the 2009 James Beard Awards
Winners were announced on Monday, May 4, for the 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards, the nation’s most prestigious recognition program honoring professionals in the food and beverage industries. During a ceremony hosted by Cat Cora, Emeril Lagasse, and Stanley Tucci at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, John Currence of Oxford, Mississippi, owner of City Grocery, Bouré, Big Bad Breakfast, and Snackbar, was named Best Chef: South. Martha Hall Foose of Pluto and Greenwood, Mississippi, took home the award for the Best Cookbook about American Cooking for her book Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook. John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, contributing editor for Gourmet, and monthly columnist for the New York Times, was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America. Though members represent a diverse cross section of the food and beverage industry—from chefs to journalists to farmers to business executives to scholars—each has been identified by his or her peers as having displayed remarkable talent and achievement. Every member of the Who’s Who has contributed in some substantial way to America’s constantly evolving culinary scene.
Melissa Booth Hall
Melissa Booth Hall
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Reading the South
A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation As You Go.
By David W. Beckwith.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 384 pages. Cloth $29.95.
The trouble with David Beckwith’s fascinating memoir about his year (1969–1970) spent teaching in Leland, Mississippi, as one of the first white teachers in a black high school is the ending—regrettably after an apparently successful transition to teaching, Beckwith left it behind and support for public schools in the Delta eroded precipitously as the region embarked upon school desegregation. While scholarly readers may view Beckwith’s work with uncertainty because it comes from his diary turned manuscript nearly 40 years later, he offers, at the very least, an instructive tale of one white man’s awakening to the liberal conscience via teaching across a racial divide in an ostensibly transformative time. Arguably, Beckwith offers more—including a window into the contemporary as a prologue to challenges facing educators today.
From the perspective of an educational historian, Beckwith’s account provides an invaluable daily record of school happenings in a black high school as Mississippi school districts embarked upon desegregation first by mixing teachers, a final act of desperation to stall progress in a longstanding history of massive resistance to racial equality in education. Beckwith, who earned bachelor’s degree in business administration and had neither teacher certification nor experience, became an unwitting participant in this diversion. When desperate for postgraduation employment and motivated to save money for graduate study, he signed on to teach English or history in a Leland public high school. Unbeknownst to him, he was soon assigned to teach history at Lincoln Attendance Center (the historically black high school).
The essence of Beckwith’s story involves the day-today of his experience and newfound collegiality with African American teachers and students in close proximity. As the distant and strange become familiar to each, both black and white, barriers melt away. A bittersweet story emerges, one sated with the semishocking tribulations of classroom management, student discipline, and school politics inherent to novice teaching in a high poverty area. Aside from oral histories, Beckwith’s enhanced journalistic account fills an important gap in the materials made available to educational researchers who often find so little about what was actually happening in schools from school board records and official documents. Some aspects, such as corporal punishment or that we called schools “attendance centers” may shock contemporary sensibilities but, suffice it say, Beckwith’s is a good but sobering read.
A New Day in the Delta appears upon the heels of a growing body of literature about the negative effects of school desegregation policy and its implementation. One genre of this literature explores teachers’ experiences of transition after Brown v. Board of Education and during desegregation. Advanced by Vanessa Siddle Walker and Adam Fairclough, among others, this work seeks to measure the real “costs” of Brown to the black community. Thinking in terms of the community leadership that black teachers and school principals brought to their communities through black schools, some of this work, but not all, expresses a tone of lament for the past. Albeit with a slightly different twist as Beckwith is white, his book shares a bit of this tone when through his overpowering examples from his interactions with black students he questions the ability of white teachers and desegregation to meet the cultural needs of black students.
Tapping into another genre, Beckwith’s account demonstrates the fallibility of educational policy and policy-making, in the spirit of scholarly studies advanced by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, for example. This work shows how segregated housing patterns, standardized testing, and a “color-blind” judiciary along with other forces has accelerated resegregation of American schools in many places across the country, a pattern signaling the abysmal failure of federal efforts to promote equality. Given the gravity of the host of consequences that arise from public policy, including those that are intended, unintended, and dysfunctional, Beckwith’s subtitle, "Inventing School Desegregation As You Go," highlights the vacuum of planning and leadership that often marks federal educational initiatives that play out quite dubiously on local levels—in this case, school desegregation.
That school desegregation in the Delta occurred ostensibly “on the fly” from Beckwith’s perspective comes as little surprise. In addition to an entrenched resistance to racial progress, paternalistic leadership models diminished the participation and voice of many school teachers and especially black teachers and black schools in policy implementation on the local level. Most certainly, Beckwith’s account demonstrates that he and his colleagues did have questions and strategies to offer up, but in the heat of the day-to-day they lacked any sort of mechanism for broad-based planning, consultation, or insider role in school or district governance at the time. Thus, Beckwith’s story shows how teachers in public schools became left behind, as work spaces inadequate for attracting and retaining young teachers who might otherwise want to have a say in how to establish and maintain good schools took shape.
Given the recurrent nature of inequality and segregation despite our nation’s presumptive “best” efforts, scholars are asking whether or not the South should “turn back” from desegregation. Even if he does not offer a regional remedy, Beckwith’s A New Day in the Delta does give pause to consider his capability for turning back time to provide us with such an expressive take on local history. To the extent that his “new” day strikes a familiar semblance with the often overwhelming challenges faced by novice teachers related to classroom management, student discipline, and facilitation of meaningful student learning experiences, we can learn important lessons about the nature of schools and teachers’ work. He sounded to me like a pretty good teacher . . . if only we could have kept him around.
Amy Wells
By David W. Beckwith.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 384 pages. Cloth $29.95.
The trouble with David Beckwith’s fascinating memoir about his year (1969–1970) spent teaching in Leland, Mississippi, as one of the first white teachers in a black high school is the ending—regrettably after an apparently successful transition to teaching, Beckwith left it behind and support for public schools in the Delta eroded precipitously as the region embarked upon school desegregation. While scholarly readers may view Beckwith’s work with uncertainty because it comes from his diary turned manuscript nearly 40 years later, he offers, at the very least, an instructive tale of one white man’s awakening to the liberal conscience via teaching across a racial divide in an ostensibly transformative time. Arguably, Beckwith offers more—including a window into the contemporary as a prologue to challenges facing educators today.
From the perspective of an educational historian, Beckwith’s account provides an invaluable daily record of school happenings in a black high school as Mississippi school districts embarked upon desegregation first by mixing teachers, a final act of desperation to stall progress in a longstanding history of massive resistance to racial equality in education. Beckwith, who earned bachelor’s degree in business administration and had neither teacher certification nor experience, became an unwitting participant in this diversion. When desperate for postgraduation employment and motivated to save money for graduate study, he signed on to teach English or history in a Leland public high school. Unbeknownst to him, he was soon assigned to teach history at Lincoln Attendance Center (the historically black high school).
The essence of Beckwith’s story involves the day-today of his experience and newfound collegiality with African American teachers and students in close proximity. As the distant and strange become familiar to each, both black and white, barriers melt away. A bittersweet story emerges, one sated with the semishocking tribulations of classroom management, student discipline, and school politics inherent to novice teaching in a high poverty area. Aside from oral histories, Beckwith’s enhanced journalistic account fills an important gap in the materials made available to educational researchers who often find so little about what was actually happening in schools from school board records and official documents. Some aspects, such as corporal punishment or that we called schools “attendance centers” may shock contemporary sensibilities but, suffice it say, Beckwith’s is a good but sobering read.
A New Day in the Delta appears upon the heels of a growing body of literature about the negative effects of school desegregation policy and its implementation. One genre of this literature explores teachers’ experiences of transition after Brown v. Board of Education and during desegregation. Advanced by Vanessa Siddle Walker and Adam Fairclough, among others, this work seeks to measure the real “costs” of Brown to the black community. Thinking in terms of the community leadership that black teachers and school principals brought to their communities through black schools, some of this work, but not all, expresses a tone of lament for the past. Albeit with a slightly different twist as Beckwith is white, his book shares a bit of this tone when through his overpowering examples from his interactions with black students he questions the ability of white teachers and desegregation to meet the cultural needs of black students.
Tapping into another genre, Beckwith’s account demonstrates the fallibility of educational policy and policy-making, in the spirit of scholarly studies advanced by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, for example. This work shows how segregated housing patterns, standardized testing, and a “color-blind” judiciary along with other forces has accelerated resegregation of American schools in many places across the country, a pattern signaling the abysmal failure of federal efforts to promote equality. Given the gravity of the host of consequences that arise from public policy, including those that are intended, unintended, and dysfunctional, Beckwith’s subtitle, "Inventing School Desegregation As You Go," highlights the vacuum of planning and leadership that often marks federal educational initiatives that play out quite dubiously on local levels—in this case, school desegregation.
That school desegregation in the Delta occurred ostensibly “on the fly” from Beckwith’s perspective comes as little surprise. In addition to an entrenched resistance to racial progress, paternalistic leadership models diminished the participation and voice of many school teachers and especially black teachers and black schools in policy implementation on the local level. Most certainly, Beckwith’s account demonstrates that he and his colleagues did have questions and strategies to offer up, but in the heat of the day-to-day they lacked any sort of mechanism for broad-based planning, consultation, or insider role in school or district governance at the time. Thus, Beckwith’s story shows how teachers in public schools became left behind, as work spaces inadequate for attracting and retaining young teachers who might otherwise want to have a say in how to establish and maintain good schools took shape.
Given the recurrent nature of inequality and segregation despite our nation’s presumptive “best” efforts, scholars are asking whether or not the South should “turn back” from desegregation. Even if he does not offer a regional remedy, Beckwith’s A New Day in the Delta does give pause to consider his capability for turning back time to provide us with such an expressive take on local history. To the extent that his “new” day strikes a familiar semblance with the often overwhelming challenges faced by novice teachers related to classroom management, student discipline, and facilitation of meaningful student learning experiences, we can learn important lessons about the nature of schools and teachers’ work. He sounded to me like a pretty good teacher . . . if only we could have kept him around.
Amy Wells
Reading the South
The Missing.
By Tim Gautreaux.
By Tim Gautreaux.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. 378 pages. $24.95 cloth.
In The Missing, author Tim Gautreaux returns to the fictional landscape of early 20th-century Louisiana that he so successfully portrayed in his critically acclaimed 2003 novel, The Clearing. As he did in that earlier work, Gautreaux delivers a compelling piece of literature dealing with people struggling against the land, each other, and the irreversible advance of time.
The Missing’s jacket blurb suggests that the book is a kind of detective story set aboard a Mississippi riverboat. To a superficial degree, this promotional copy is true. The plot begins unfolding when a band of rustic malcontents abduct the precocious daughter of two excursion boat musicians in a New Orleans department store. Because the child has been lost under his watch, its central character, World War I veteran and store floorwalker Sam Simoneaux, makes it his personal quest to recover the little girl. He takes a job aboard the Ambassador, the aging showboat aboard which the missing child’s parents perform, and it is here where much of the novel’s storyline unfolds. As the vessel plies the water between New Orleans and Cairo, Simoneaux not only pieces together clues that lead him to the missing girl, but also to the men responsible for the wholesale murder that had left him orphaned as an infant.
It does not take long to discover, however, that the girl’s disappearance and the Simoneaux family killings are primarily a vehicle for discovering what is “missing” in the lives of the novel’s central characters. Underneath its suspenseful narrative, The Missing probes the moral and philosophical underpinnings of human loss, mutability, and emotional separation. Questions of the unknown and unknowable permeate the novel’s smallest details. The author’s description of Simoneaux’s thoughts on a daytime cruise full of Confederate veterans offers a sense of this aesthetic: “Most of the men were animated, wore their old uniforms or some version of those gray markings, but he wondered about the ones who’d stayed at home, who wanted nothing of the remembering, who’d gotten in the mail a two-cent postcard announcing the veterans’ excursion and thrown it in the stove and then maybe looked out the window, gladdened by the fact that people weren’t shooting each other down in the street.” Gautreaux frequently proves himself a master of what historians call “interpreting silences.”
New Orleans and the jazz-infused Mississippi riverboat culture of the 1920s provide the backdrop for The Missing, and the deft touch with which Gautreaux renders his historical portrait reveals a world of steam locomotion, muddy river water, and passengers eager for a few hours’ escape on the dance floor. Yet the boat and its crew supply only half of the narrative’s tension. Every drop of the gangplank sets in motion a confrontation between the rustic and urbane, rich and poor, good and evil. Unlike the protagonist’s piano playing, Gautreaux’s prose never strikes a false note, carefully avoiding the clichéd references that readers of Louisiana and jazz culture must so often endure. To wit, his portrayal of the showboat era’s twilight is so convincing because he never oversells his enormous knowledge of the subject matter. Instead, Gautreaux seamlessly transports the reader into a different time, to a world with deadly disease epidemics, without air conditioning, and where simple folk collide with the inevitable advance of modernity.
Works that engage themes of familial duty and love, guilt, human frailty, cowardice, and vengeance are seldom as witty, literate, and, above all, entertaining as Gautreaux’s new novel. The Missing manages to ask vital questions of Southern culture, particularly with regard to class tension, but consistently does so in a way that neither patronizes nor panders. Perhaps, then, Gautreaux’s greatest triumph has been to deliver profound moral commentary without beating anyone over the head in the process. Readers will likely find themselves on the last page recalling the author’s imagery of a bygone era and culture and contemplating his novel’s deeper message.
Justin Nystrom
Reading the South
Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.
By Jacqueline Jones.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
528 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Jacqueline Jones’s 2008 Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War is a seamless account of life in late 19th-century Georgia, incorporating well-known events, snapshots of culture, analysis of politics and economics, and richly evocative descriptions of the landscape of the city and surrounding Lowcountry. Saving Savannah is a confrontation of a past most often remembered with an acute sense of injury by the city’s residents, who share a collective memory defined by the mythology of the Lost Cause and stories of suffering during Sherman’s occupation. These attitudes obscure the violent reality of slavery and its legacy of inequality. Jones presents a complicated view of the city, drawing the reader through bustling streets where a desire for order clashes with an uncontrollable environment, ambitious citizens, and the trauma of war.
Jones sets out to explore the “larger African-American freedom struggle that shaped the streets and households of Savannah and the rice and cotton fields of lowcountry Georgia,” skillfully situating this struggle within the context of the complex social structure of Savannah. Jones’s expansive and inclusive work provides a comprehensive analysis of Savannah that is not limited to African American residents, free or enslaved. Her focus on the struggle for equality allows for a revealing analysis of the power dynamics of a rapidly changing city. Her close reading of letters, diaries, and newspapers from the period is exhaustive, and the conclusions drawn from the materials are insightful. Jones presents incisive commentary on a wide range of subjects, including a fascinating discussion of the politics of performance and display of the frequent parades of the city, analysis of the conflict between white elites and laborers encamped at Fort Pulaski in the opening days of the war, and ideas about the social status of white overseers on remote rice plantations.
Jones examines a world that “defie[s] urban-rural, black-white, enslaved-free distinction” and by doing so provides an incisive analysis of urban slavery in which movement through space is constantly negotiated. For this reason, Jones’s attention to the landscape is particularly compelling. The city of Savannah is most often thought of as a place of awe-inspiring beauty, but Saving Savannah redirects our gaze, creating images of a city that foreground illness, slavery, and multiple wars in what has throughout its history been a highly contested space. Within Jones’s frame, she brings into focus ordered squares surrounded by dustfilled streets, fetid swamps, and bustling docks lining the riverfront. Her rendering of the landscape is visceral, and appropriate as the setting for an unstable and rapidly changing society. Jones’s attention to elements such as the prevalence of wooden homes and the humid and bacteria-laden marshes provides fascinating points of departure for larger discussions. What role do enslaved firefighters play in a city dominated by wooden structures and constantly threatened by fire? How can elite young Confederate soldiers function while stationed on sea islands, long conceived as uninhabitable by whites during the summer months?
A central question for Jones is what threatens the city—from what does it need to be saved? For the African American community, the demise of slavery signaled the redemption of the city, the saving of their right to self-assertion and protection of their families. For white leaders of the city, however, emancipation troubled the already shaky hierarchy dividing white and black, free and enslaved, and rich and poor. To save Savannah from the scourge of “freedom and equality” white elites acted “creatively and violently” to maintain white supremacy. As saviors, elites were forced to appeal to whites of the laboring class in a way that further disrupted the social hierarchy. This “larger project of white supremacy” had important implications for politics in the city, evident in Jones’s analysis of the evolution of the local and national Democratic parties.
The complex economy of Savannah, formed at the juncture of slavery and free enterprise, was one of the greatest challenges to ordered hierarchy. Jones provides a valuable examination of urban slavery in a city where some slaves were able to hire themselves and participate in an economy in which the “commercial spirit” blurred racial distinctions and those between the free and enslaved. Jones presents a particularly fascinating analysis of the role of enslaved fire companies, which were essential to protect the wooden city from the constant threat of fire. In addition to legitimate trade as skilled laborers, slaves and free blacks participated in a profitable underground economy that had the tacit or explicit sanction of white city leaders. This economy in combination with loosely segregated housing, Jones contends, attested to elites largely unsuccessful efforts to maintain a caste system.
The book is divided into three sections—antebellum, in bello, and postbellum. Saving Savannah begins on the docks of the Savannah River in 1851, as the enslaved mason Thomas Simms stows away on a ship bound for New York. Jones frames her work through the personalities of Savannahians such as Simms, who move through a richly described city where one is made to feel the heaviness of oppressive humidity and the rhythm of streets entwined around Oglethorpe’s famed squares. By telling the story of Simms, who is ultimately seized in Boston and returned to Savannah under the Fugitive Slave Act, Jones is able to connect Savannah to events of national importance.
Jones also follows the life of Charles C. Jones Jr., an attorney and son of a minister and slaveowner. Charles Jones served as mayor in the prewar years and as an officer in the Confederate army. In the Jones family, one sees the evolution from paternalistic slaveholding to the tensions underlying tenancy and sharecropping in the 1870s. Readers first encounter Susie Baker King as she walks to a clandestine school for black children run by free woman Mary Woodhouse in downtown Savannah, and follow her progression as a 14-year-old teacher in the independent black settlement on St. Simon’s Island in 1862. King worked as a teacher, laundress, and domestic servant and later moved to Boston. By following persons such as Simms, Jones, and King, Jones creates a narrative thread that brings to life the history of the Georgia Lowcountry and illuminates the challenges faced by each before, during, and after the war.
The postwar section of Saving Savannah follows the black struggle for self-determination as the lands of the barrier islands are at first claimed by recently freed slaves as part of Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15. Black families staked claims on land and began to reunite families long separated, actively engaging in politics and building schools, churches, and strengthening mutual aid societies. When these lands again come under the control of planters, freedmen and women were faced with the prospect of tenancy, tightening segregation, and the continual threat of violence. This book by Jones, winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, appeals both to a general audience and a more scholarly one. Her cast of characters, such as Simms, the nurse and schoolteacher Susie Baker King, and lawyer Charles C. Jones Jr. privileges individual experience in a way that illuminates the lives of many and their place within the complex social structure of the city. Though her work is highly localized, Jones employs contemporary Savannah newspapers and personal correspondence to great effect as a screen through which to understand national and international events such as the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the anniversary of Liberian independence. Jones is successful in providing a clear and approachable view into the complex political and social atmosphere of Savannah while also placing scholars in conversation with each other. The work of Maurie McInnis on the politics of taste and urban slavery, Peter Kolchin’s analysis of specific labor systems intrinsic to rice culture, Michael Gomez on the resilience of Islam in some coastal slave communities, and Richard Slotkin’s work on the regeneration of violence resonate through the work without being off-putting to a more casual reader.
Jones, at the conclusion of Saving Savannah, turns to the present-day landscape of the city, searching for the imprint of slavery and emancipation on streets more often wandered in search of beautiful homes and eccentric residents made known through John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The tourism industry has in many ways created a city that is all surface, and Jones notes that the city’s poverty and persistent crime are confronted by preservationists and business leaders as a problem of “aesthetics.” Such an attitude indicates a resistance to the exploration of deeper causes of historic inequality. The city is the victim of an exclusive and selective history that willfully obscures the lives of many persons who have walked on the famed squares. Saving Savannah is an antidote to these selective views and should serve as a guide for educational institutions in the city as they seek to understand the lives of all Savannahians.
Becca Walton-Evans
By Jacqueline Jones.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
528 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Jacqueline Jones’s 2008 Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War is a seamless account of life in late 19th-century Georgia, incorporating well-known events, snapshots of culture, analysis of politics and economics, and richly evocative descriptions of the landscape of the city and surrounding Lowcountry. Saving Savannah is a confrontation of a past most often remembered with an acute sense of injury by the city’s residents, who share a collective memory defined by the mythology of the Lost Cause and stories of suffering during Sherman’s occupation. These attitudes obscure the violent reality of slavery and its legacy of inequality. Jones presents a complicated view of the city, drawing the reader through bustling streets where a desire for order clashes with an uncontrollable environment, ambitious citizens, and the trauma of war.
Jones sets out to explore the “larger African-American freedom struggle that shaped the streets and households of Savannah and the rice and cotton fields of lowcountry Georgia,” skillfully situating this struggle within the context of the complex social structure of Savannah. Jones’s expansive and inclusive work provides a comprehensive analysis of Savannah that is not limited to African American residents, free or enslaved. Her focus on the struggle for equality allows for a revealing analysis of the power dynamics of a rapidly changing city. Her close reading of letters, diaries, and newspapers from the period is exhaustive, and the conclusions drawn from the materials are insightful. Jones presents incisive commentary on a wide range of subjects, including a fascinating discussion of the politics of performance and display of the frequent parades of the city, analysis of the conflict between white elites and laborers encamped at Fort Pulaski in the opening days of the war, and ideas about the social status of white overseers on remote rice plantations.
Jones examines a world that “defie[s] urban-rural, black-white, enslaved-free distinction” and by doing so provides an incisive analysis of urban slavery in which movement through space is constantly negotiated. For this reason, Jones’s attention to the landscape is particularly compelling. The city of Savannah is most often thought of as a place of awe-inspiring beauty, but Saving Savannah redirects our gaze, creating images of a city that foreground illness, slavery, and multiple wars in what has throughout its history been a highly contested space. Within Jones’s frame, she brings into focus ordered squares surrounded by dustfilled streets, fetid swamps, and bustling docks lining the riverfront. Her rendering of the landscape is visceral, and appropriate as the setting for an unstable and rapidly changing society. Jones’s attention to elements such as the prevalence of wooden homes and the humid and bacteria-laden marshes provides fascinating points of departure for larger discussions. What role do enslaved firefighters play in a city dominated by wooden structures and constantly threatened by fire? How can elite young Confederate soldiers function while stationed on sea islands, long conceived as uninhabitable by whites during the summer months?
A central question for Jones is what threatens the city—from what does it need to be saved? For the African American community, the demise of slavery signaled the redemption of the city, the saving of their right to self-assertion and protection of their families. For white leaders of the city, however, emancipation troubled the already shaky hierarchy dividing white and black, free and enslaved, and rich and poor. To save Savannah from the scourge of “freedom and equality” white elites acted “creatively and violently” to maintain white supremacy. As saviors, elites were forced to appeal to whites of the laboring class in a way that further disrupted the social hierarchy. This “larger project of white supremacy” had important implications for politics in the city, evident in Jones’s analysis of the evolution of the local and national Democratic parties.
The complex economy of Savannah, formed at the juncture of slavery and free enterprise, was one of the greatest challenges to ordered hierarchy. Jones provides a valuable examination of urban slavery in a city where some slaves were able to hire themselves and participate in an economy in which the “commercial spirit” blurred racial distinctions and those between the free and enslaved. Jones presents a particularly fascinating analysis of the role of enslaved fire companies, which were essential to protect the wooden city from the constant threat of fire. In addition to legitimate trade as skilled laborers, slaves and free blacks participated in a profitable underground economy that had the tacit or explicit sanction of white city leaders. This economy in combination with loosely segregated housing, Jones contends, attested to elites largely unsuccessful efforts to maintain a caste system.
The book is divided into three sections—antebellum, in bello, and postbellum. Saving Savannah begins on the docks of the Savannah River in 1851, as the enslaved mason Thomas Simms stows away on a ship bound for New York. Jones frames her work through the personalities of Savannahians such as Simms, who move through a richly described city where one is made to feel the heaviness of oppressive humidity and the rhythm of streets entwined around Oglethorpe’s famed squares. By telling the story of Simms, who is ultimately seized in Boston and returned to Savannah under the Fugitive Slave Act, Jones is able to connect Savannah to events of national importance.
Jones also follows the life of Charles C. Jones Jr., an attorney and son of a minister and slaveowner. Charles Jones served as mayor in the prewar years and as an officer in the Confederate army. In the Jones family, one sees the evolution from paternalistic slaveholding to the tensions underlying tenancy and sharecropping in the 1870s. Readers first encounter Susie Baker King as she walks to a clandestine school for black children run by free woman Mary Woodhouse in downtown Savannah, and follow her progression as a 14-year-old teacher in the independent black settlement on St. Simon’s Island in 1862. King worked as a teacher, laundress, and domestic servant and later moved to Boston. By following persons such as Simms, Jones, and King, Jones creates a narrative thread that brings to life the history of the Georgia Lowcountry and illuminates the challenges faced by each before, during, and after the war.
The postwar section of Saving Savannah follows the black struggle for self-determination as the lands of the barrier islands are at first claimed by recently freed slaves as part of Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15. Black families staked claims on land and began to reunite families long separated, actively engaging in politics and building schools, churches, and strengthening mutual aid societies. When these lands again come under the control of planters, freedmen and women were faced with the prospect of tenancy, tightening segregation, and the continual threat of violence. This book by Jones, winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, appeals both to a general audience and a more scholarly one. Her cast of characters, such as Simms, the nurse and schoolteacher Susie Baker King, and lawyer Charles C. Jones Jr. privileges individual experience in a way that illuminates the lives of many and their place within the complex social structure of the city. Though her work is highly localized, Jones employs contemporary Savannah newspapers and personal correspondence to great effect as a screen through which to understand national and international events such as the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the anniversary of Liberian independence. Jones is successful in providing a clear and approachable view into the complex political and social atmosphere of Savannah while also placing scholars in conversation with each other. The work of Maurie McInnis on the politics of taste and urban slavery, Peter Kolchin’s analysis of specific labor systems intrinsic to rice culture, Michael Gomez on the resilience of Islam in some coastal slave communities, and Richard Slotkin’s work on the regeneration of violence resonate through the work without being off-putting to a more casual reader.
Jones, at the conclusion of Saving Savannah, turns to the present-day landscape of the city, searching for the imprint of slavery and emancipation on streets more often wandered in search of beautiful homes and eccentric residents made known through John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The tourism industry has in many ways created a city that is all surface, and Jones notes that the city’s poverty and persistent crime are confronted by preservationists and business leaders as a problem of “aesthetics.” Such an attitude indicates a resistance to the exploration of deeper causes of historic inequality. The city is the victim of an exclusive and selective history that willfully obscures the lives of many persons who have walked on the famed squares. Saving Savannah is an antidote to these selective views and should serve as a guide for educational institutions in the city as they seek to understand the lives of all Savannahians.
Becca Walton-Evans
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Reading the South
Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching.
By Paula J. Giddings. New York: Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2008. 800 pages.
$35.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.
In 1990, when first-class postage cost a quarter, I knew one fact about the figure on the new Black Heritage stamp: Ida B. Wells was involved in the antilynching movement at the end of the 19th century. The stamp inspired a visit to the campus library, where I was startled to learn that Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, 25 miles north of the University of Mississippi. Ida B. Wells should be a household name, at least in every Mississippi house. Yet, few of my students can identify her, even now; and the audience was small at Square Books last year when Smith College professor Paula J. Giddings, on a national book tour, gave a gripping account of her subject.
At 800 pages, Giddings’s life of this great Mississippian provides a hefty remedy to the prevailing lack of knowledge. Recently released in paperback, Ida: A Sword among Lions won the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award and was a 2008 National Book Critics
Circle finalist. The title echoes the Psalmist’s image of the tongue as a “sharp sword,” an apt metaphor for Wells’s skill on the speaker’s platform and in her exchanges with Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, Susan B. Anthony, and other famous colleagues. At Square Books, the biographer also pointed out the pen-as-sword symbolism in the tiny Victorian engraving of a woman’s hand directing a feather quill beneath the word Ida on the dust jacket. Giddings explained that the teenaged Wells taught in a rural school near Holly Springs to support her orphaned siblings; but, after she moved to Memphis for a better teaching position, she “found herself in journalism” and became involved in “every progressive movement of her time.”
In fact, the biography’s scope is much more comprehensive than the subtitle "Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching" suggests. For decades, Wells wrote news columns and published pamphlets against this horrible form of racial injustice, exposing the barbaric treatment of victims from several Southern states. The 1892 lynchings of three Memphis men, including her good friend Thomas Moss, were sickeningly close to home. But Wells’s lifelong concerns also included women’s suffrage, early childhood education, unions, prisoners’ rights, political corruption, and other hotly debated issues. She was an investigative reporter before that phrase became commonplace, and Giddings traces her career in absorbing detail, citing scores of archival collections, from Holly Springs’ Rust College Library to the Library of Congress. Repeatedly, she quotes from period newspapers, including the Memphis Commercial, which described the controversial Wells as a “saddle-colored Sapphira,” a “notorious courtesan,” and “the wench.” In contrast, the Christian Recorder compared her to Joan of Arc.
Like Wells’s journalism, Ida: A Sword among Lions is thoroughly documented—dense with names, dates, and statistics. In relating the deaths of Wells’s parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, Giddings recreates the situation in Holly Springs, an elevated area known for its “healthy climate” and the reputed “healing properties” of its springs. After infected refugees arrived from other towns, the mayor was the “first local casualty,” and more than half of the 3,500 residents fled. Giddings categorizes the deaths of adults and children by race and sex. Although African Americans were as likely as whites to catch the disease, their survival rate was much higher because of their “greater immunity to tropicborn diseases.” Giddings combed Holly Springs death notices before concluding that the Wellses were apparently “the only black family to suffer multiple mortalities.”
The narrative of Wells’s life unfolds with great dramatic appeal, and Giddings ends most chapters on an anticipatory note that propels the reader onward. This technique is ideal for portraying Wells, a theater lover who “appalled” a suitor “when she told him that she was studying for a reading of Lady Macbeth—the murderous Scot who begged the gods to ‘unsex’ her sufficiently to do what she had to do.” Gender and sexuality are crucial considerations throughout Ida. Giddings describes Wells, a major supporter of women’s organizations, as a Victorian who courageously rejected any narrow “Victorian way of thinking.” Wells’s straightforward remarks on interracial sexual relationships offended blacks as well as whites; moreover, she was “one of the few women reformers who actually used the word rape, and had learned to do so without apology.” Allegations of rape were often the excuse for torturing, maiming, hanging, and burning African Americans, sometimes in public spectacles that drew women and even children. Giddings says that Wells was “careful not to claim that no black man was guilty of rape”; she nevertheless believed “that the South was using the charge against black men to hide its own deficiencies, particularly from the eyes of the suspicious and investor-laden North.”
Her newspaper office destroyed and her life threatened, Wells became a permanent exile to the North in the violent aftermath of the Memphis lynchings. In Chicago, she married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer, activist, and newspaper founder who—like Wells—“was capable of militant indignation and believed in self defense by any means necessary.” Motherhood (two sons and two daughters) barely slowed the pace of Wells-Barnett’s work, and much of Giddings’s Ida explores campaigns from the second half of her life. “I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches,” she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. In 1930 she was the first African American woman to run for a seat in Illinois’s Third Senatorial District; Wells-Barnett lost but planned to “profit by lessons of the campaign,” her diary reports. When she died of uremic poisoning the next year, the Chicago Defender emphasized her forceful place in “Chicago public life” for almost four decades. The minister who addressed an overflow crowd at her funeral praised “her untiring but almost hopeless war against civic oppression”; and a soloist sang, “I’ve Done My Work.”
Joan Wylie Hall
By Paula J. Giddings. New York: Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2008. 800 pages.
$35.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.
In 1990, when first-class postage cost a quarter, I knew one fact about the figure on the new Black Heritage stamp: Ida B. Wells was involved in the antilynching movement at the end of the 19th century. The stamp inspired a visit to the campus library, where I was startled to learn that Wells was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, 25 miles north of the University of Mississippi. Ida B. Wells should be a household name, at least in every Mississippi house. Yet, few of my students can identify her, even now; and the audience was small at Square Books last year when Smith College professor Paula J. Giddings, on a national book tour, gave a gripping account of her subject.
At 800 pages, Giddings’s life of this great Mississippian provides a hefty remedy to the prevailing lack of knowledge. Recently released in paperback, Ida: A Sword among Lions won the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award and was a 2008 National Book Critics
Circle finalist. The title echoes the Psalmist’s image of the tongue as a “sharp sword,” an apt metaphor for Wells’s skill on the speaker’s platform and in her exchanges with Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, Susan B. Anthony, and other famous colleagues. At Square Books, the biographer also pointed out the pen-as-sword symbolism in the tiny Victorian engraving of a woman’s hand directing a feather quill beneath the word Ida on the dust jacket. Giddings explained that the teenaged Wells taught in a rural school near Holly Springs to support her orphaned siblings; but, after she moved to Memphis for a better teaching position, she “found herself in journalism” and became involved in “every progressive movement of her time.”
In fact, the biography’s scope is much more comprehensive than the subtitle "Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching" suggests. For decades, Wells wrote news columns and published pamphlets against this horrible form of racial injustice, exposing the barbaric treatment of victims from several Southern states. The 1892 lynchings of three Memphis men, including her good friend Thomas Moss, were sickeningly close to home. But Wells’s lifelong concerns also included women’s suffrage, early childhood education, unions, prisoners’ rights, political corruption, and other hotly debated issues. She was an investigative reporter before that phrase became commonplace, and Giddings traces her career in absorbing detail, citing scores of archival collections, from Holly Springs’ Rust College Library to the Library of Congress. Repeatedly, she quotes from period newspapers, including the Memphis Commercial, which described the controversial Wells as a “saddle-colored Sapphira,” a “notorious courtesan,” and “the wench.” In contrast, the Christian Recorder compared her to Joan of Arc.
Like Wells’s journalism, Ida: A Sword among Lions is thoroughly documented—dense with names, dates, and statistics. In relating the deaths of Wells’s parents in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, Giddings recreates the situation in Holly Springs, an elevated area known for its “healthy climate” and the reputed “healing properties” of its springs. After infected refugees arrived from other towns, the mayor was the “first local casualty,” and more than half of the 3,500 residents fled. Giddings categorizes the deaths of adults and children by race and sex. Although African Americans were as likely as whites to catch the disease, their survival rate was much higher because of their “greater immunity to tropicborn diseases.” Giddings combed Holly Springs death notices before concluding that the Wellses were apparently “the only black family to suffer multiple mortalities.”
The narrative of Wells’s life unfolds with great dramatic appeal, and Giddings ends most chapters on an anticipatory note that propels the reader onward. This technique is ideal for portraying Wells, a theater lover who “appalled” a suitor “when she told him that she was studying for a reading of Lady Macbeth—the murderous Scot who begged the gods to ‘unsex’ her sufficiently to do what she had to do.” Gender and sexuality are crucial considerations throughout Ida. Giddings describes Wells, a major supporter of women’s organizations, as a Victorian who courageously rejected any narrow “Victorian way of thinking.” Wells’s straightforward remarks on interracial sexual relationships offended blacks as well as whites; moreover, she was “one of the few women reformers who actually used the word rape, and had learned to do so without apology.” Allegations of rape were often the excuse for torturing, maiming, hanging, and burning African Americans, sometimes in public spectacles that drew women and even children. Giddings says that Wells was “careful not to claim that no black man was guilty of rape”; she nevertheless believed “that the South was using the charge against black men to hide its own deficiencies, particularly from the eyes of the suspicious and investor-laden North.”
Her newspaper office destroyed and her life threatened, Wells became a permanent exile to the North in the violent aftermath of the Memphis lynchings. In Chicago, she married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer, activist, and newspaper founder who—like Wells—“was capable of militant indignation and believed in self defense by any means necessary.” Motherhood (two sons and two daughters) barely slowed the pace of Wells-Barnett’s work, and much of Giddings’s Ida explores campaigns from the second half of her life. “I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches,” she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. In 1930 she was the first African American woman to run for a seat in Illinois’s Third Senatorial District; Wells-Barnett lost but planned to “profit by lessons of the campaign,” her diary reports. When she died of uremic poisoning the next year, the Chicago Defender emphasized her forceful place in “Chicago public life” for almost four decades. The minister who addressed an overflow crowd at her funeral praised “her untiring but almost hopeless war against civic oppression”; and a soloist sang, “I’ve Done My Work.”
Joan Wylie Hall
Friday, June 12, 2009
Reading the South
Toni Morrison. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction.
Edited by Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
215 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Carolyn Denard gets her title for this splendid collection of 29 essays, reviews, and addresses from a luminous parable at the heart of Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture of 1993. The children of a village approach a wise woman with a question that may be a riddle, a trap, or an urgent plea: tell us whether the bird we hold in our hands is living or dead. The woman, old and blind, is skeptical of the children’s motives and replies cautiously, testily. Whereupon the children, surprisingly, upbraid her for the poverty of her response, insisting on the wisdom that is their due: “‘tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. . . . Tell us
what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.’” For Denard, the wise woman is Morrison herself, and the occasional writings gathered here are what move at the margins of her celebrated fiction, what “informs, orders, and gives intellectual energy to her life commitments and to her role as a writer.”
These essays, however, are far from marginal. They are central, vital, and the publication of this book gives them a new visibility and coherence as major elements of the Morrison oeuvre. They are brimming with insights into African American history, literature, and culture, the work of fellow writers and artists, national politics, and the vocation and business of writing. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” adds an important new motif, “the presence of an ancestor,” to the inventory of conceptual tools for mapping the “distinctive elements of African-American writing.” “[T]hese ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective.” The absence of such figures is “frightening,” “threatening,” “caus[ing] huge destruction and disarray in the work itself.” With these words Morrison not only limns the significance of such characters from her own work as Pilate in Song of Solomon or Baby Suggs in Beloved; she also reminds a national culture quick to fetishize youth, freedom, and newness that “[w]hen you kill the ancestor you kill yourself,” that “nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection.” A beautiful autobiographical tribute to two such ancestors, Morrison’s maternal grandparents, can be found in the essay that opens What Moves at the Margin, “A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say),” first published in the bicentennial year of 1976. There Morrison channels her ancestors to comment on the “racial vertigo,” the justified skepticism and optimism, of the black community at the advent of the nation’s third century.
To the ancestor, I would suggest, we might add the stranger as another defining figure in Morrison’s writing, as discussed in “The Fisherwoman,” her weirdly affecting introduction to a collection of photographs by Robert Bergman. There she recounts the lasting impression left by a woman she met only once, a visitor who comes to fish from a neighbor’s seawall and never returns—a figure whose very existence Morrison comes to question. Reflecting on her response to this encounter—wistful, betrayed—Morrison comes “[t]o understand that I was longing for and missing some aspect of myself, and that there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from,” for “it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summon a ripple of alarm.” In the stranger as well as the ancestor, then, Morrison finds “access to me,” an “entrance into my own interior life.”
“The Site of Memory” explores the role of the literary image as the principal means of access to “the unwritten interior life of the people” in Morrison’s creative process: “the image comes first and tells me what the ‘memory’ is about,” as beautifully illustrated by an episode in the composition of Beloved. Morrison’s brilliant reflections in Playing in the Dark on the “Africanist presence” that underlies and organizes “classic” (that is, white) American literature find a complement here in “On the Backs of Blacks,” which notes a similar phenomenon, a marginal-yet-inexorable “presence,” in the histories of American immigrant groups. The “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture” for such groups, she writes, is “negative appraisals of the native-born black population. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open”—a claim supported by subsequent works of historical scholarship such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks. “Rediscovering Black History” recounts the making of The Black Book, perhaps the most significant accomplishment of Morrison’s editorial career at Random House—a work that supplied germinal images, episodes, and epiphanies for Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. An anthology, picture-book, scrapbook, and historical artifact in its own right—all in one—The Black Book was an attempt to document “life as lived—not as imagined—by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak in conventional histories only through their leaders,” an effort “to hold on to the useful past without blocking off the possibilities of the future. To create something that might last, that would bear witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every Ph.D. dissertation.” Like the book itself, the essay succeeds memorably.
I could go on. There are the incisive and sometimes deeply moving appreciations of other writers: Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and especially the Guinean novelist Camara Laye, whose 1954 novel The Radiance of the King is the subject of a brilliant critical essay demonstrating Morrison’s bona fides as a commentator on postcolonial literature. There is the New Yorker essay that hails Bill Clinton as “our first black President” while proceeding to a lacerating deconstruction of the media circus and Capitol Hill feeding frenzy that was the Summer of Monica Lewinsky: “This is Slaughter-gate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d’état. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.” There is the witty and provocative 1971 report from the trenches of second-wave feminism, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” a wry but unfazed account of the ironies attending the peculiar position of black women at the intersection (or was it in the crosshairs?) of the civil rights and women’s movements: “In a way black women have known something of the freedom white women are now beginning to crave. But oddly, freedom is only sweet when it is won. When it is forced, it is called responsibility. The black woman’s needs shrank to the level of her responsibility; her man’s expanded in proportion to the obstacles that prevented him from assuming his. White women, on the other hand, have had too little responsibility, white men too much. It’s a wonder the sexes of either race even speak to each other.”
And of course, there is the Nobel Prize address, whose stubborn, hard-won faith in the efficacy of language is grounded in a communal context that may give it even greater resonance than Faulkner’s famous words on the “puny inexhaustible voice” of the mid-century liberal individual talking back against the “ding-dong of doom.”
Denard deserves credit for organizing these writings in a straightforward three-part scheme—with sections on “Family and History,” “Writers and Writing,” and “Politics and Society”—and for her lucid introduction to the volume. But the real star is Morrison, who seems incapable of an uninteresting thought or a pedestrian sentence. The hazard that a book like this confronts its reviewer with is the temptation simply to let those sentences speak for themselves. Like these words on writing and language: “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political.”
“When you first start writing—and I think it’s true for a lot of beginning writers—you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter—another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it—and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember.”
“The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image, and experience, which may involve both, one, or neither of the first two. Language (saying, listening, reading) can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us, whether they are continental or on the same pillow. . . . Provoking language or eclipsing it, an image can determine not only what we know and feel, but also what we believe is worth knowing and feeling.”
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Magnificent.
Jay Watson
Edited by Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
215 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Carolyn Denard gets her title for this splendid collection of 29 essays, reviews, and addresses from a luminous parable at the heart of Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture of 1993. The children of a village approach a wise woman with a question that may be a riddle, a trap, or an urgent plea: tell us whether the bird we hold in our hands is living or dead. The woman, old and blind, is skeptical of the children’s motives and replies cautiously, testily. Whereupon the children, surprisingly, upbraid her for the poverty of her response, insisting on the wisdom that is their due: “‘tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. . . . Tell us
what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.’” For Denard, the wise woman is Morrison herself, and the occasional writings gathered here are what move at the margins of her celebrated fiction, what “informs, orders, and gives intellectual energy to her life commitments and to her role as a writer.”
These essays, however, are far from marginal. They are central, vital, and the publication of this book gives them a new visibility and coherence as major elements of the Morrison oeuvre. They are brimming with insights into African American history, literature, and culture, the work of fellow writers and artists, national politics, and the vocation and business of writing. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” adds an important new motif, “the presence of an ancestor,” to the inventory of conceptual tools for mapping the “distinctive elements of African-American writing.” “[T]hese ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective.” The absence of such figures is “frightening,” “threatening,” “caus[ing] huge destruction and disarray in the work itself.” With these words Morrison not only limns the significance of such characters from her own work as Pilate in Song of Solomon or Baby Suggs in Beloved; she also reminds a national culture quick to fetishize youth, freedom, and newness that “[w]hen you kill the ancestor you kill yourself,” that “nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection.” A beautiful autobiographical tribute to two such ancestors, Morrison’s maternal grandparents, can be found in the essay that opens What Moves at the Margin, “A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say),” first published in the bicentennial year of 1976. There Morrison channels her ancestors to comment on the “racial vertigo,” the justified skepticism and optimism, of the black community at the advent of the nation’s third century.
To the ancestor, I would suggest, we might add the stranger as another defining figure in Morrison’s writing, as discussed in “The Fisherwoman,” her weirdly affecting introduction to a collection of photographs by Robert Bergman. There she recounts the lasting impression left by a woman she met only once, a visitor who comes to fish from a neighbor’s seawall and never returns—a figure whose very existence Morrison comes to question. Reflecting on her response to this encounter—wistful, betrayed—Morrison comes “[t]o understand that I was longing for and missing some aspect of myself, and that there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from,” for “it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summon a ripple of alarm.” In the stranger as well as the ancestor, then, Morrison finds “access to me,” an “entrance into my own interior life.”
“The Site of Memory” explores the role of the literary image as the principal means of access to “the unwritten interior life of the people” in Morrison’s creative process: “the image comes first and tells me what the ‘memory’ is about,” as beautifully illustrated by an episode in the composition of Beloved. Morrison’s brilliant reflections in Playing in the Dark on the “Africanist presence” that underlies and organizes “classic” (that is, white) American literature find a complement here in “On the Backs of Blacks,” which notes a similar phenomenon, a marginal-yet-inexorable “presence,” in the histories of American immigrant groups. The “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture” for such groups, she writes, is “negative appraisals of the native-born black population. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open”—a claim supported by subsequent works of historical scholarship such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks. “Rediscovering Black History” recounts the making of The Black Book, perhaps the most significant accomplishment of Morrison’s editorial career at Random House—a work that supplied germinal images, episodes, and epiphanies for Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. An anthology, picture-book, scrapbook, and historical artifact in its own right—all in one—The Black Book was an attempt to document “life as lived—not as imagined—by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak in conventional histories only through their leaders,” an effort “to hold on to the useful past without blocking off the possibilities of the future. To create something that might last, that would bear witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every Ph.D. dissertation.” Like the book itself, the essay succeeds memorably.
I could go on. There are the incisive and sometimes deeply moving appreciations of other writers: Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and especially the Guinean novelist Camara Laye, whose 1954 novel The Radiance of the King is the subject of a brilliant critical essay demonstrating Morrison’s bona fides as a commentator on postcolonial literature. There is the New Yorker essay that hails Bill Clinton as “our first black President” while proceeding to a lacerating deconstruction of the media circus and Capitol Hill feeding frenzy that was the Summer of Monica Lewinsky: “This is Slaughter-gate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d’état. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.” There is the witty and provocative 1971 report from the trenches of second-wave feminism, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” a wry but unfazed account of the ironies attending the peculiar position of black women at the intersection (or was it in the crosshairs?) of the civil rights and women’s movements: “In a way black women have known something of the freedom white women are now beginning to crave. But oddly, freedom is only sweet when it is won. When it is forced, it is called responsibility. The black woman’s needs shrank to the level of her responsibility; her man’s expanded in proportion to the obstacles that prevented him from assuming his. White women, on the other hand, have had too little responsibility, white men too much. It’s a wonder the sexes of either race even speak to each other.”
And of course, there is the Nobel Prize address, whose stubborn, hard-won faith in the efficacy of language is grounded in a communal context that may give it even greater resonance than Faulkner’s famous words on the “puny inexhaustible voice” of the mid-century liberal individual talking back against the “ding-dong of doom.”
Denard deserves credit for organizing these writings in a straightforward three-part scheme—with sections on “Family and History,” “Writers and Writing,” and “Politics and Society”—and for her lucid introduction to the volume. But the real star is Morrison, who seems incapable of an uninteresting thought or a pedestrian sentence. The hazard that a book like this confronts its reviewer with is the temptation simply to let those sentences speak for themselves. Like these words on writing and language: “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political.”
“When you first start writing—and I think it’s true for a lot of beginning writers—you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter—another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it—and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember.”
“The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image, and experience, which may involve both, one, or neither of the first two. Language (saying, listening, reading) can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us, whether they are continental or on the same pillow. . . . Provoking language or eclipsing it, an image can determine not only what we know and feel, but also what we believe is worth knowing and feeling.”
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Magnificent.
Jay Watson
USPS Honors Richard Wright with Literary Arts Stamp
Richard Wright (1908–1960) is the third Mississippian and the 25th American author honored with a stamp in the United States Postal Service’s Literary Arts series. The dedication of a first-class 61-cent stamp took place on April 9, 2009, in the lobby of the Chicago Main Post Office, just across the street from the building where the author once worked as a letter sorter.
Unveiling of a first-class 22-cent stamp honoring William Faulkner, another author who was a postal worker, took place in Oxford during the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The first-class 32-cent stamp commemorating Tennessee Williams was unveiled in 1994 in Clarksdale, the author’s childhood home and the setting for many of his plays.
Grandson of former slaves and the son of an illiterate sharecropper, Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez and lived in Jackson, Memphis, and other places before moving to Chicago in 1927. There he worked for the post office from 1928 to 1930, was later hired by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, and organized the South Side Writers’ Group, whose meetings helped to inspire a flowering of African American literature. Wright moved to New York City in 1937 and to Paris in 1947. He published 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction during his lifetime and posthumously, but is best known for his 1938 story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, his 1940 novel Native Son, and his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, books that vividly portray the racism in American society. The first book by an African American to be a best seller and the first to be selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Native Son made a great impact. As literary critic Irving Howe wrote, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever.”
The stamp artwork by Kadir Nelson features a portrait of Richard Wright in front of snowy tenements on the South Side of Chicago, a scene that recalls the setting of Native Son. When asked about the background for the stamp and the place for its unveiling, officials at the U.S. Postal Service said they chose the South Side of Chicago because Wright lived and worked there during a crucial, formative decade. Julia Keller, writing in the Chicago Tribune, explained it this way: “Mississippi made him, but Chicago made him a writer. It was Chicago—with its bright churn of possibilities and its darker realities—that transformed Richard Wright from a shy Southern kid into a popular and internationally acclaimed author. Chicago broke his heart, but it gave him his mission: to illuminate the dehumanizing effects of racial prejudice in 20th-century America.”
“This nation experienced a historical event in our most recent presidential election,” U.S. Postal Service Chicago District/Postmaster Gloria Tyson explained. “It was an event Richard Wright helped to bring about with his often controversial writings; writings of a world view on humanity and politics that were far too forward-thinking for his own generation; writings full of anger, frustration, and indignation stemming from his early life experiences being poor and black in America; writings that appealed to—and appalled—both whites and blacks; writings that eventually helped to direct a change in how America addressed and discussed race relations.”
Richard Wright’s daughter Julia was not able to attend the unveiling, but sent remarks that began with a contemporary reference: “When a young Barack Obama came to Chicago in his 20s to work as a community organizer, he made imaginary chains between his life and the faces he saw, borrowing other people’s memories. ‘In this way’ he wrote in Dreams from My Father, ‘I tried to take possession of the city, make it my own. . . . The mailman I saw was Richard Wright, delivering mail before his first book sold.’”
“In 2009, with the election of the first African American president,” literary scholar Maryemma Graham adds, “Wright would surely be proud to be an American. He continues to inspire because of his belief in writing for the purpose of fostering human understanding and effecting social change.”
Unveiling of a first-class 22-cent stamp honoring William Faulkner, another author who was a postal worker, took place in Oxford during the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The first-class 32-cent stamp commemorating Tennessee Williams was unveiled in 1994 in Clarksdale, the author’s childhood home and the setting for many of his plays.
Grandson of former slaves and the son of an illiterate sharecropper, Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez and lived in Jackson, Memphis, and other places before moving to Chicago in 1927. There he worked for the post office from 1928 to 1930, was later hired by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, and organized the South Side Writers’ Group, whose meetings helped to inspire a flowering of African American literature. Wright moved to New York City in 1937 and to Paris in 1947. He published 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction during his lifetime and posthumously, but is best known for his 1938 story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, his 1940 novel Native Son, and his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, books that vividly portray the racism in American society. The first book by an African American to be a best seller and the first to be selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Native Son made a great impact. As literary critic Irving Howe wrote, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever.”
The stamp artwork by Kadir Nelson features a portrait of Richard Wright in front of snowy tenements on the South Side of Chicago, a scene that recalls the setting of Native Son. When asked about the background for the stamp and the place for its unveiling, officials at the U.S. Postal Service said they chose the South Side of Chicago because Wright lived and worked there during a crucial, formative decade. Julia Keller, writing in the Chicago Tribune, explained it this way: “Mississippi made him, but Chicago made him a writer. It was Chicago—with its bright churn of possibilities and its darker realities—that transformed Richard Wright from a shy Southern kid into a popular and internationally acclaimed author. Chicago broke his heart, but it gave him his mission: to illuminate the dehumanizing effects of racial prejudice in 20th-century America.”
“This nation experienced a historical event in our most recent presidential election,” U.S. Postal Service Chicago District/Postmaster Gloria Tyson explained. “It was an event Richard Wright helped to bring about with his often controversial writings; writings of a world view on humanity and politics that were far too forward-thinking for his own generation; writings full of anger, frustration, and indignation stemming from his early life experiences being poor and black in America; writings that appealed to—and appalled—both whites and blacks; writings that eventually helped to direct a change in how America addressed and discussed race relations.”
Richard Wright’s daughter Julia was not able to attend the unveiling, but sent remarks that began with a contemporary reference: “When a young Barack Obama came to Chicago in his 20s to work as a community organizer, he made imaginary chains between his life and the faces he saw, borrowing other people’s memories. ‘In this way’ he wrote in Dreams from My Father, ‘I tried to take possession of the city, make it my own. . . . The mailman I saw was Richard Wright, delivering mail before his first book sold.’”
“In 2009, with the election of the first African American president,” literary scholar Maryemma Graham adds, “Wright would surely be proud to be an American. He continues to inspire because of his belief in writing for the purpose of fostering human understanding and effecting social change.”
Special Friends-Only Encyclopedia Prices
Dear Friend of the Center,
By now I know you have heard about the landmark New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published by the University of North Carolina Press and sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The original Encyclopedia, published in 1989, was the first book to deal exclusively with an American regional culture. Now, 20 years later, in the wake of profound changes in the South, the Center and the Press have come together to publish a thoroughly revised and updated edition that reflects these changes and includes the newest scholarship about the region.
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is being published in a series of 24 individual volumes, based on the thematic sections of the original. Charles Reagan Wilson is the general editor of the series. To date, 13 volumes have been published, and volume 14 is scheduled for Fall 2009.
Right now, you can order volumes 1–13 at the special discount price of $365. These are jacketed hardcover editions, whose combined retail value is over $500. If you have been wanting to add these valuable books to your collection, the happy news is that they are available at a tremendous savings. If you already have a few of the volumes, as a friend of the Center you can receive the same 30 percent discount off any of the published volumes you would like to purchase individually. With the discount, the price of each hardcover is $28—a saving of $12 on each book.
Once you take advantage of this offer, UNC Press will send you an e-mail as soon as each new volume is published. You will be able to get the same discount price on volumes 14–24, expected to be published over the next three years, so you will find it easy to complete your set of the series. For more information on the series, simply go to www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/583.
You can purchase the full 13-volume set, or add individual volumes to your shopping cart. When you are ready to check out, type in promotion code 01NESCLB in the box at the upper-right-hand corner of the checkout screen to see your discounted totals.
To repeat the details of this offer, you get all 13 published volumes—from volume 1, Religion, to volume 13, Gender, a $500+ value—for only $365. Or you can order individual volumes at a $28, $12 off the retail price. Thanks for considering this offer, and thanks for your support of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.
Sincerely,
Ted Ownby
Center for the Study of Southern Culture
The University of Mississippi
By now I know you have heard about the landmark New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published by the University of North Carolina Press and sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The original Encyclopedia, published in 1989, was the first book to deal exclusively with an American regional culture. Now, 20 years later, in the wake of profound changes in the South, the Center and the Press have come together to publish a thoroughly revised and updated edition that reflects these changes and includes the newest scholarship about the region.
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is being published in a series of 24 individual volumes, based on the thematic sections of the original. Charles Reagan Wilson is the general editor of the series. To date, 13 volumes have been published, and volume 14 is scheduled for Fall 2009.
Right now, you can order volumes 1–13 at the special discount price of $365. These are jacketed hardcover editions, whose combined retail value is over $500. If you have been wanting to add these valuable books to your collection, the happy news is that they are available at a tremendous savings. If you already have a few of the volumes, as a friend of the Center you can receive the same 30 percent discount off any of the published volumes you would like to purchase individually. With the discount, the price of each hardcover is $28—a saving of $12 on each book.
Once you take advantage of this offer, UNC Press will send you an e-mail as soon as each new volume is published. You will be able to get the same discount price on volumes 14–24, expected to be published over the next three years, so you will find it easy to complete your set of the series. For more information on the series, simply go to www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/583.
You can purchase the full 13-volume set, or add individual volumes to your shopping cart. When you are ready to check out, type in promotion code 01NESCLB in the box at the upper-right-hand corner of the checkout screen to see your discounted totals.
To repeat the details of this offer, you get all 13 published volumes—from volume 1, Religion, to volume 13, Gender, a $500+ value—for only $365. Or you can order individual volumes at a $28, $12 off the retail price. Thanks for considering this offer, and thanks for your support of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.
Sincerely,
Ted Ownby
Center for the Study of Southern Culture
The University of Mississippi
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Announces Winners
The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) has announced award winners for works shown or published in 2008 in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, visual arts, poetry, photography, music composition (classical/concert), and music composition (contemporary/
popular). Judges from outside the state chose the winning artists, who must have significant ties to Mississippi and must have been nominated by an MIAL member. The presentations will be made at the annual awards ceremony and banquet on June 13, 2009, at the Lauren Rogers Art Museum in Laurel. This year marks the 30th anniversary of MIAL.
Ann Abadie of Oxford serves as president of MIAL. Jan Taylor of Jackson is treasurer, Margaret Anne Robbins of Pontotoc is secretary, and Noel Polk of Starkville is past president. Among the founders of MIAL were William Winter, Cora Norman, Aubrey Lucas, Noel Polk, and Keith Dockery McLean. Anyone may join MIAL. For more information about joining and about attending the awards ceremony and banquet, visit the Web site www.ms-arts-letters-org.
Dorothy Shawhan
popular). Judges from outside the state chose the winning artists, who must have significant ties to Mississippi and must have been nominated by an MIAL member. The presentations will be made at the annual awards ceremony and banquet on June 13, 2009, at the Lauren Rogers Art Museum in Laurel. This year marks the 30th anniversary of MIAL.
- Howard Bahr of Jackson won in the fiction category with his novel Pelican Road. Published by MacAdams/Cage, the novel is set during the heyday of railroading in this country and focuses on the men who ran the trains. Bahr was born in Meridian.
- The nonfiction award goes to Douglas A. Blackmon for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, published by Doubleday and winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Blackmon grew up in Leland and is currently head of the Atlanta office of the Wall Street Journal.
- In the visual arts category, the award goes to H. C. Porter, who was born in Jackson and now lives in Vicksburg. The traveling exhibition of Porter’s work, Backyards & Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories—The First Year after Katrina, has a companion book for which poet Natasha Tretheway wrote the introduction.
- Greenville native Brooks Haxton won in the poetry category with They Lift Their Wings to Cry published by Alfred A. Knopf. Haxton teaches in the English and writing programs at Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College. He is son of last year’s MIAL Lifetime Achievement Award winner, author Ellen Douglas.
- Jane Rule Burdine won in the photography category for her work published in Delta Deep Down, edited by Wendy McDaris and with an introduction by novelist Steve Yarbrough. Burdine was born in Greenwood and lives now in Taylor.
- "Between Stillness" by composer Steve Rouse was the winning work in the classical/concert music composition category. Rouse was born in Moss Point, has a degree in music composition from the University of Southern Mississippi, and currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
- In contemporary/popular music composition, the group 3 Doors Down won for their album 3 Doors Down. Founder Matt Roberts was born in Pascagoula. Other members are Brad Arnold, Matt Roberts, Todd Harrell, and Chris Henderson.
Ann Abadie of Oxford serves as president of MIAL. Jan Taylor of Jackson is treasurer, Margaret Anne Robbins of Pontotoc is secretary, and Noel Polk of Starkville is past president. Among the founders of MIAL were William Winter, Cora Norman, Aubrey Lucas, Noel Polk, and Keith Dockery McLean. Anyone may join MIAL. For more information about joining and about attending the awards ceremony and banquet, visit the Web site www.ms-arts-letters-org.
Dorothy Shawhan
Book Review
Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain: A Field Guide.
By Ray Neyland. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2009. 352 pages, 535 color photographs,
65 line drawings, 1 map. $34.95 cloth.
As a kindergartener, I developed a real skill at gently tugging the stamen from a honeysuckle flower and letting the pinhead droplet of nectar fall on my tongue. Nowadays my fingers are too big to do it. Or I tug too hard, breaking the flower in half. In truth, I haven’t exactly tried to “eat” a honeysuckle flower in many years, but I have had a chance to sample a cold scoop of honeysuckle sorbet from Crook’s Corner in Carrboro, North Carolina. Thanks to Ray Neyland’s field guide, Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain, I now know that the Japanese honeysuckle from the playground fence is native to Asia and has a fancy Latin name: Lonicera japonica.
When I got older, and needed money for important things like Skittles and Dr Pepper, I organized a plant sale in our front yard on Second Street in Gulfport. I rifled through my mother’s supply of Tupperware, punched holes in the bottoms of a few canisters with a nail, and potted half a dozen or so purple hairy spiderwort (an herb!) and lazy daisy (grazed by deer and cattle!), and sold them to the neighbors. How many white shirts did I ruin with all that juicy spiderwort? I just couldn’t resist picking a fistful for the jar on the kitchen table. They seemed to pop up, overnight, and just as amazingly, multiply by the dozen before lunchtime.
Now I’m all grown up, and just last weekend I sat with my six-month-old daughter, Lucy, in a clump of white clover (Trifolium repens) in the front yard and searched for the lucky four-leaf varieties. Though we didn’t find any, we did tie long chains from the flowers. Lucy grabbed handfuls of clover and tried to eat them while I thought about how it would only be a few years until I could show her how to get the nectar from honeysuckle.
Maybe it sounds silly, but Mr. Neyland’s book, while an excellent guide full of vivid color photographs and descriptions and glossaries, took me back. Now I know a bit more about those old flowers from my childhood, but more important, I will be able to show them, and many more, to Lucy with hope that she loves them as much as I do.
Sally Cassady Lyon
By Ray Neyland. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2009. 352 pages, 535 color photographs,
65 line drawings, 1 map. $34.95 cloth.
As a kindergartener, I developed a real skill at gently tugging the stamen from a honeysuckle flower and letting the pinhead droplet of nectar fall on my tongue. Nowadays my fingers are too big to do it. Or I tug too hard, breaking the flower in half. In truth, I haven’t exactly tried to “eat” a honeysuckle flower in many years, but I have had a chance to sample a cold scoop of honeysuckle sorbet from Crook’s Corner in Carrboro, North Carolina. Thanks to Ray Neyland’s field guide, Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain, I now know that the Japanese honeysuckle from the playground fence is native to Asia and has a fancy Latin name: Lonicera japonica.
When I got older, and needed money for important things like Skittles and Dr Pepper, I organized a plant sale in our front yard on Second Street in Gulfport. I rifled through my mother’s supply of Tupperware, punched holes in the bottoms of a few canisters with a nail, and potted half a dozen or so purple hairy spiderwort (an herb!) and lazy daisy (grazed by deer and cattle!), and sold them to the neighbors. How many white shirts did I ruin with all that juicy spiderwort? I just couldn’t resist picking a fistful for the jar on the kitchen table. They seemed to pop up, overnight, and just as amazingly, multiply by the dozen before lunchtime.
Now I’m all grown up, and just last weekend I sat with my six-month-old daughter, Lucy, in a clump of white clover (Trifolium repens) in the front yard and searched for the lucky four-leaf varieties. Though we didn’t find any, we did tie long chains from the flowers. Lucy grabbed handfuls of clover and tried to eat them while I thought about how it would only be a few years until I could show her how to get the nectar from honeysuckle.
Maybe it sounds silly, but Mr. Neyland’s book, while an excellent guide full of vivid color photographs and descriptions and glossaries, took me back. Now I know a bit more about those old flowers from my childhood, but more important, I will be able to show them, and many more, to Lucy with hope that she loves them as much as I do.
Sally Cassady Lyon
Local Oxford Gardening Updates: Spring 2009 Students Break Ground on 2009 Teaching Garden
The Teaching Garden at the Oxford Boys and Girls Club is already gearing up for the 2009 growing season. Even though it has been a cool, wet spring, students began tending to the garden plots in late March, pulling winter weeds and preparing the soil in order to begin spring planting. The students were excited to find many beneficial worms and crickets that are already making their presence known in the garden beds. Another topic of great interest has been the wild garlic currently thriving throughout the garden and vying to take over the beds. The students all wanted to save each individual stalk and bulb, no matter how small, to take home to their parents.
We’re beginning to see a theme where the students all want to impress their parents with the work they’ve done by sharing the fruits of their labor with their families. This is an important aspect of the Teaching Garden because the vegetables the students bring home will improve the eating habits of everyone in their household. In terms of actual planting, early crops including red and green lettuce, Brussels sprouts, collards, and rainbow chard were put in around Easter, and broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes, and onions are all ready to be planted in the coming weeks.
One of the goals of the 2009 season is to promote more community involvement in the Teaching Garden, and the coming summer holds many opportunities for direct participation. The garden
will be growing from mid-March until late October and daily summer programming runs from late May through late July at the LOU Clubhouse, located on Washington Avenue across the street from Oxford Middle School. Several groups and individuals have already expressed interest in a wide range of volunteer opportunities including assisting with garden tasks and environmental education curriculum, leading nutrition workshops, and helping to improve the garden infrastructure. Anyone interested in suggesting new programming ideas or assisting with current outdoor classroom activities can contact me at cmnicho1@olemiss.edu. We are also currently in the middle of a very loose, open-ended fundraising campaign. Any and all assistance
is always greatly appreciated.
Oxford Community Garden Association Established
Beginning soon, Oxford residents will have a unique gardening opportunity. This spring a group of like-minded individuals established the Oxford Community Garden Association, and in a few short weeks the organization received approval from the city to create Oxford’s first community garden plot. The initiative will work closely with the Oxford Parks Commission to establish a 65-by-155 foot garden space to be located behind the Old Armory Building on University Avenue. The garden will operate much like similar projects in other cities across the country in that families and individuals will be able to pay a small fee to “rent” a specific garden row for a full year. These projects are particularly attractive to people and students who would like to grow their own vegetables but don’t have gardening space at their apartments, dorms, or houses. Community gardens are great opportunities for community members to interact with each other through a shared love of locally grown food and hard, but fulfilling work. Organizers plan to prepare the garden infrastructure this summer so that beds will be ready for planting in spring 2010. To learn more about the Oxford Community Garden, write to oxfordcga@gmail.com or call Association president Susie Adams at 662-234-2744 ext. 267.
Cale Nicholson
We’re beginning to see a theme where the students all want to impress their parents with the work they’ve done by sharing the fruits of their labor with their families. This is an important aspect of the Teaching Garden because the vegetables the students bring home will improve the eating habits of everyone in their household. In terms of actual planting, early crops including red and green lettuce, Brussels sprouts, collards, and rainbow chard were put in around Easter, and broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes, and onions are all ready to be planted in the coming weeks.
One of the goals of the 2009 season is to promote more community involvement in the Teaching Garden, and the coming summer holds many opportunities for direct participation. The garden
will be growing from mid-March until late October and daily summer programming runs from late May through late July at the LOU Clubhouse, located on Washington Avenue across the street from Oxford Middle School. Several groups and individuals have already expressed interest in a wide range of volunteer opportunities including assisting with garden tasks and environmental education curriculum, leading nutrition workshops, and helping to improve the garden infrastructure. Anyone interested in suggesting new programming ideas or assisting with current outdoor classroom activities can contact me at cmnicho1@olemiss.edu. We are also currently in the middle of a very loose, open-ended fundraising campaign. Any and all assistance
is always greatly appreciated.
Oxford Community Garden Association Established
Beginning soon, Oxford residents will have a unique gardening opportunity. This spring a group of like-minded individuals established the Oxford Community Garden Association, and in a few short weeks the organization received approval from the city to create Oxford’s first community garden plot. The initiative will work closely with the Oxford Parks Commission to establish a 65-by-155 foot garden space to be located behind the Old Armory Building on University Avenue. The garden will operate much like similar projects in other cities across the country in that families and individuals will be able to pay a small fee to “rent” a specific garden row for a full year. These projects are particularly attractive to people and students who would like to grow their own vegetables but don’t have gardening space at their apartments, dorms, or houses. Community gardens are great opportunities for community members to interact with each other through a shared love of locally grown food and hard, but fulfilling work. Organizers plan to prepare the garden infrastructure this summer so that beds will be ready for planting in spring 2010. To learn more about the Oxford Community Garden, write to oxfordcga@gmail.com or call Association president Susie Adams at 662-234-2744 ext. 267.
Cale Nicholson
Mississippi Reads Welty
Mississippi Reads is a statewide initiative to encourage schools, book clubs, and libraries as well as all readers to read and discuss a single work by a Mississippi author. Previous choices were William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses in 2007 and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children in 2008. The 2009 Mississippi Reads selection is The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. The project is one of many activities celebrating the author’s 100th birthday.
The Mississippi Library Commission has helped publicize the project by distributing 800 posters and 30,000 bookmarks illustrated with a Welty portrait and the jackets of five editions of her Collected Stories published between 1980 and 1998. Tracy Carr Seabold, Reference Services Director and Center for the Book Coordinator for the Mississippi Library Commission, coordinated distribution of posters and bookmarks and is the contact for libraries participating in the project. Librarians may reach her at tcarr@mlc.ms.us or 601-432-4450.
Nearly 250 libraries and bookstores throughout the state are making copies of the book available to patrons, and many are sponsoring discussion groups, readings, talks, and other programs about Welty’s Collected Stories. Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs prepared an overview of the author’s life and a readers guide for the Mississippi Reads Web site. Details about Centennial activities are located at on the Eudora Welty Foundation Web site (www.eudorawelty.org/index.html). For more information about Mississippi Reads, e-mail mississippireads@gmail.com.
The Mississippi Library Commission has helped publicize the project by distributing 800 posters and 30,000 bookmarks illustrated with a Welty portrait and the jackets of five editions of her Collected Stories published between 1980 and 1998. Tracy Carr Seabold, Reference Services Director and Center for the Book Coordinator for the Mississippi Library Commission, coordinated distribution of posters and bookmarks and is the contact for libraries participating in the project. Librarians may reach her at tcarr@mlc.ms.us or 601-432-4450.
Nearly 250 libraries and bookstores throughout the state are making copies of the book available to patrons, and many are sponsoring discussion groups, readings, talks, and other programs about Welty’s Collected Stories. Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs prepared an overview of the author’s life and a readers guide for the Mississippi Reads Web site. Details about Centennial activities are located at on the Eudora Welty Foundation Web site (www.eudorawelty.org/index.html). For more information about Mississippi Reads, e-mail mississippireads@gmail.com.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Eudora Welty Society Celebrates Author’s 100th Birthday
The Eudora Welty Society marked the writer’s 100th birthday with a Centennial Conference and Celebration in Jackson, Mississippi, April 16–19, a meeting organized and directed by Harriet Pollack, Bucknell University. More than 70 Welty scholars from around the world gathered to hear and deliver papers and discuss Welty’s fiction. Peggy Prenshaw, Humanities Scholar in Residence at Millsaps College, opened the plenary with “The Writing Life.” Session topics included “From the Archives,” “Welty and Aesthetics,” “Welty and Race,” and “On The Optimist’s Daughter.” Many young scholars, new to the field, attended, and others traveled from as far as France, Israel, and Austria.
The EWS celebration collaborated with the Southern Literary Festival, hosted by Millsaps College and directed by Austin Wilson, professor of English. The SLF brought writers Richard Ford, Alfred Uhry, Elizabeth Spencer, and Ann Patchett to speak and read. It also offered a “Remembering Eudora” panel that included Mary Alice White (Welty’s niece, now director of the Eudora Welty House), Patti Carr Black (Welty’s Escapades, University Press of Mississippi), former Mississippi Governor William Winter, and Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs.
In preconference events, the Eudora Welty House welcomed visitors to her home and garden. Forrest Galey, director of the Welty Collection of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, offered sessions introducing scholars to the new archives. Evening events included a Mississippi Museum of Art reception to highlight an exhibition recreating Welty’s 1936 Lugene Gallery photography show. The New Stage Theater followed a performance of Welty’s The Ponder Heart with a “talk back” featuring the production cast. In a concert planned by Karen Redhead of the Welty House and Jeanne Luckett of the Welty Foundation, folksingers Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kate Campbell, Caroline Herring, and Claire Holley performed songs inspired by Welty’s fiction at the Belhaven Center for the Performing Arts. A Mississippi Symphony Orchestra tribute program “Bravo V: Adoring Eudora” included Welty favorites, the Schubert “Unfinished” Symphony and Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto—but also two recent compositions inspired by her work: MSO Music Director Crafton Beck’s The Whistle and Mississippi composer James Sclater’s Concerto for Orchestra, subtitled “Images from Welty,” originally written for the writer’s 80th birthday. The three movements of the Concerto for Orchestra are titled with phrases from her work. A gala luncheon at the Fairview Inn and a tour of Welty’s Jackson led by Suzanne Marrs ended the conference.
Daniéle Pitavy-Souques, Université de Bourgogne, who with her husband, Faulkner scholar François Pitavy, traveled from France to attend, called the conference “truly challenging and brain-invigorating” and an “incredibly joyous whirlwind of celebration.” Susan Donaldson, College of William and Mary, termed it “a testimony to Welty’s work and the way it has inspired all of us.” Pollack—who joked that, when working on the conference, she was “first trying to get its parts to move together, and then trying not to get caught in its moving parts”—was grateful that the powerful collaboration had unfolded gracefully. “Events like these foster the sense of community that sustains our work together and apart.”
The EWS celebration collaborated with the Southern Literary Festival, hosted by Millsaps College and directed by Austin Wilson, professor of English. The SLF brought writers Richard Ford, Alfred Uhry, Elizabeth Spencer, and Ann Patchett to speak and read. It also offered a “Remembering Eudora” panel that included Mary Alice White (Welty’s niece, now director of the Eudora Welty House), Patti Carr Black (Welty’s Escapades, University Press of Mississippi), former Mississippi Governor William Winter, and Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs.
In preconference events, the Eudora Welty House welcomed visitors to her home and garden. Forrest Galey, director of the Welty Collection of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, offered sessions introducing scholars to the new archives. Evening events included a Mississippi Museum of Art reception to highlight an exhibition recreating Welty’s 1936 Lugene Gallery photography show. The New Stage Theater followed a performance of Welty’s The Ponder Heart with a “talk back” featuring the production cast. In a concert planned by Karen Redhead of the Welty House and Jeanne Luckett of the Welty Foundation, folksingers Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kate Campbell, Caroline Herring, and Claire Holley performed songs inspired by Welty’s fiction at the Belhaven Center for the Performing Arts. A Mississippi Symphony Orchestra tribute program “Bravo V: Adoring Eudora” included Welty favorites, the Schubert “Unfinished” Symphony and Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto—but also two recent compositions inspired by her work: MSO Music Director Crafton Beck’s The Whistle and Mississippi composer James Sclater’s Concerto for Orchestra, subtitled “Images from Welty,” originally written for the writer’s 80th birthday. The three movements of the Concerto for Orchestra are titled with phrases from her work. A gala luncheon at the Fairview Inn and a tour of Welty’s Jackson led by Suzanne Marrs ended the conference.
Daniéle Pitavy-Souques, Université de Bourgogne, who with her husband, Faulkner scholar François Pitavy, traveled from France to attend, called the conference “truly challenging and brain-invigorating” and an “incredibly joyous whirlwind of celebration.” Susan Donaldson, College of William and Mary, termed it “a testimony to Welty’s work and the way it has inspired all of us.” Pollack—who joked that, when working on the conference, she was “first trying to get its parts to move together, and then trying not to get caught in its moving parts”—was grateful that the powerful collaboration had unfolded gracefully. “Events like these foster the sense of community that sustains our work together and apart.”
Southern Writers, Southern Writing
The 15th Annual Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate Conference is set for July 16–18, 2009, at the University of Mississippi. Both critical and creative pieces will be accepted, dealing with all aspects of Southern culture. Submissions to the conference are not limited to literary studies—we are interested in all interdisciplinary approaches to Southern culture. Scott Romine, University of North Carolina–Greensboro, will give the plenary lecture. Students whose papers are accepted may register for the 36th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at a reduced rate of $100 registration fee. Contact swswgradconference@gmail.com or visit www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner for more information.
FAULKNER & YOKNAPATAWPHA “Faulkner and Mystery” July 19–23, 2009
For over half a century now, the literary version of what Faulkner called “the best of all talking” has been the hunting down of the mystery of his fiction. The sentences have been parsed, chronologies ordered, plots and character genealogies summarized and treed—yet what might be called the controlling vision, the sense of human meaning in the world that Faulkner articulates, is as elusive as ever. As more than one critic has put it, “we ain’t got the dog yet.”
A recent discovery in Faulkner studies is the extent to which this high modernist reached out to what might be considered unlikely sources for his material and his strategies for making use of it. One of the most prevalent is the popular detective fiction of his time, particularly of the “hard-boiled” variety, as well as the film version of the genre. Once we attend to the typical convolutions of detection, the theme of “mystery” in Faulkner’s fiction begins to swell disproportionately.
Indeed, is there a Faulkner novel that lacks it? Why exactly does Addie Bundren wish to be buried in Jefferson, her only stated memory of which is a single sardonic sentence spoken by her father? What is Joe Christmas’s racial identity, and is that the object of his quest? And, of course, why did Thomas Sutpen reject Charles Bon for his son-in-law, a fatal decision still being pondered in Jefferson 50 years later? These and similar questions have been with us so long that we sometimes forget that they are a common staple of Faulkner’s work, and that none of them is ever definitively resolved.
The 36th Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore for five days “mystery” in Faulkner. In addition to the scholars announced in the previous issue of the Southern Register—Hosam Aboul-Ela, University of Houston, Susan V. Donaldson, College of William and Mary, Richard Godden, University of California, Irvine, Michael Gorra, Smith College, Donald M. Kartiganer, University of Mississippi, Sean Mc- Cann, Wesleyan University, Noel Polk, Mississippi State University, and Philip Weinstein, Swarthmore College—there will be 12 panelists: Kelley Hayden, University of Nevada, Lisa Hinrichsen, University of Arkansas, Margaret Rayburn Kramar, University of Kansas, Sarah Mahurin Mutter, Yale University, John Padgett, Brevard College, Daniel Pecchenino, University of California, Santa Barbara, Conor Picken, Louisiana State University, Marta Puxan, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Rachel Watson, University of Chicago, Rachel Walsh, Stony Brook University, and Randall Wilson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. topics will be Michael Gorra on Faulkner’s plots about plots, narratives designed to explore a world of secrecy and desires; Sean McCann on the tension between Mystery (spiritual) and mysteries (epistemological), which in Sanctuary, Knight’s Gambit, and Intruder in the Dust becomes the tension between law and justice; a reading by Richard Godden of the mythologies of “Red Leaves” as they are manifested in red-heeled shoes, the body of Moketubbe, the snake called “Grandfather,” and the story’s odd title.
Other topics will be the trope of the detective-as-bachelor in The Town and The Mansion (Daniel Pecchenino), alcohol and prohibition in Sanctuary (Conor Picken), the forensic trail in “The Bear” and Intruder in the Dust (Rachel Watson), and repetition and the uncanny in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses (Rachel Walsh). One of the benefits of approaching Faulkner’s work through the perspective of mystery is that it increases the range of critical speculation to cover not only the standard texts but some of those less often studied.
Adding to the discussion of mystery in Faulkner and in their own work will be a panel of three notable practitioners of crime fiction: Ace Atkins, Jere Hoar, and Daniel Woodrell. There will also be a showing of The Story of Temple Drake, a rarely seen film made two years after the sensational arrival of Faulkner’s Sanctuary on the literary scene.
Other program events will include sessions on “Teaching Faulkner,” conducted by James Carothers, University of Kansas, Charles Peek, Emeritus, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Terrell Tebbetts, Lyon College, and Theresa Towner, University of Texas at Dallas; a discussion of “Collecting Faulkner” by Seth Berner; and an exhibition of Faulkner books, manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia at the John Davis Williams Library. There will also be guided daylong tours of north Mississippi, the Delta, and Memphis; a picnic served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak; and “Faulkner on the Fringe”—an “open mike” evening at the Southside Gallery.
Discount rates for the conference are available for groups of five or more students. Inexpensive dormitory housing is available for all registrants. Contact Robert Fox at rfox@olemiss.edu for details. There are also a limited number of waivers of registration for graduate students. Contact Donald Kartiganer at dkartiga@olemiss.edu for details. Further information on the program, registration, course credit, accommodations, and travel can be found on the conference Web site: www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner.
Donald Kartiganer
A recent discovery in Faulkner studies is the extent to which this high modernist reached out to what might be considered unlikely sources for his material and his strategies for making use of it. One of the most prevalent is the popular detective fiction of his time, particularly of the “hard-boiled” variety, as well as the film version of the genre. Once we attend to the typical convolutions of detection, the theme of “mystery” in Faulkner’s fiction begins to swell disproportionately.
Indeed, is there a Faulkner novel that lacks it? Why exactly does Addie Bundren wish to be buried in Jefferson, her only stated memory of which is a single sardonic sentence spoken by her father? What is Joe Christmas’s racial identity, and is that the object of his quest? And, of course, why did Thomas Sutpen reject Charles Bon for his son-in-law, a fatal decision still being pondered in Jefferson 50 years later? These and similar questions have been with us so long that we sometimes forget that they are a common staple of Faulkner’s work, and that none of them is ever definitively resolved.
The 36th Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore for five days “mystery” in Faulkner. In addition to the scholars announced in the previous issue of the Southern Register—Hosam Aboul-Ela, University of Houston, Susan V. Donaldson, College of William and Mary, Richard Godden, University of California, Irvine, Michael Gorra, Smith College, Donald M. Kartiganer, University of Mississippi, Sean Mc- Cann, Wesleyan University, Noel Polk, Mississippi State University, and Philip Weinstein, Swarthmore College—there will be 12 panelists: Kelley Hayden, University of Nevada, Lisa Hinrichsen, University of Arkansas, Margaret Rayburn Kramar, University of Kansas, Sarah Mahurin Mutter, Yale University, John Padgett, Brevard College, Daniel Pecchenino, University of California, Santa Barbara, Conor Picken, Louisiana State University, Marta Puxan, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Rachel Watson, University of Chicago, Rachel Walsh, Stony Brook University, and Randall Wilson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. topics will be Michael Gorra on Faulkner’s plots about plots, narratives designed to explore a world of secrecy and desires; Sean McCann on the tension between Mystery (spiritual) and mysteries (epistemological), which in Sanctuary, Knight’s Gambit, and Intruder in the Dust becomes the tension between law and justice; a reading by Richard Godden of the mythologies of “Red Leaves” as they are manifested in red-heeled shoes, the body of Moketubbe, the snake called “Grandfather,” and the story’s odd title.
Other topics will be the trope of the detective-as-bachelor in The Town and The Mansion (Daniel Pecchenino), alcohol and prohibition in Sanctuary (Conor Picken), the forensic trail in “The Bear” and Intruder in the Dust (Rachel Watson), and repetition and the uncanny in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses (Rachel Walsh). One of the benefits of approaching Faulkner’s work through the perspective of mystery is that it increases the range of critical speculation to cover not only the standard texts but some of those less often studied.
Adding to the discussion of mystery in Faulkner and in their own work will be a panel of three notable practitioners of crime fiction: Ace Atkins, Jere Hoar, and Daniel Woodrell. There will also be a showing of The Story of Temple Drake, a rarely seen film made two years after the sensational arrival of Faulkner’s Sanctuary on the literary scene.
Other program events will include sessions on “Teaching Faulkner,” conducted by James Carothers, University of Kansas, Charles Peek, Emeritus, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Terrell Tebbetts, Lyon College, and Theresa Towner, University of Texas at Dallas; a discussion of “Collecting Faulkner” by Seth Berner; and an exhibition of Faulkner books, manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia at the John Davis Williams Library. There will also be guided daylong tours of north Mississippi, the Delta, and Memphis; a picnic served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak; and “Faulkner on the Fringe”—an “open mike” evening at the Southside Gallery.
Discount rates for the conference are available for groups of five or more students. Inexpensive dormitory housing is available for all registrants. Contact Robert Fox at rfox@olemiss.edu for details. There are also a limited number of waivers of registration for graduate students. Contact Donald Kartiganer at dkartiga@olemiss.edu for details. Further information on the program, registration, course credit, accommodations, and travel can be found on the conference Web site: www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner.
Donald Kartiganer
Take One
Deborah Freeland, senior designer for Outreach and Continuing Studies at the University, recalls working as still photographer for the filming of Barn Burning, based on a Faulkner story. Her photographs will be exhibited during the 2009 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.
The winter of 1979 brought the film crew of William Faulkner’s Barn Burning to Oxford. There is always excitement when a film crew arrives in town. Oxonians welcome the change from routine and roll out the red carpet. The usual talk over coffee shifts to “who” saw “what” star eating at “which” restaurant on the Square. Details are noted such as “She lives off carrot sticks!” and “Did he get the accent right?”
Barn Burning was one of the PBS popular American Short Stories series adapted for television. The support and interest of the citizens became an important part in the making of the movie. Several locals were cast as extras on the set or hired to work on the crew, perhaps most notably Jimmy Faulkner, who was cast in a key role as Major De Spain. There was certainly no problem with the accent.
At the time, I was a graduate student working in Archives and Special Collections at the University. I was fortunate to be with the crew for the burning barn scene. The perfect old barn had already been located in the nearby community of Paris. Careful planning was required. There could be no retakes. Though it was a night scene and freezing cold, everyone in town turned out to watch the action. The fire department was present to prevent the blaze from getting out of hand. My job was to stand in one place and shoot still images of the barn as it burned to the ground. In contrast to modern digital cameras, the camera I used had no auto focus and no auto light meter.
By nightfall all was ready. The barn was prepped and the camera crew was in place. Jimmy Faulkner mounted his horse and rode back and forth behind the crew anxiously awaiting his cue. The fire was lit, and the pyrotechnics scattered into the dark. As the barn began to glow, the cameras rolled, and De Spain (Jimmy) charged forward waving a Civil War–era pistol. There had been some concern that the fire would spook the horse, but Jimmy had complete control. De Spain was seen only briefly, but dramatically in silhouette against the light of the blaze. The rafters of the barn fell in, sending sparks into the night sky. The fire department rushed in to put out the remaining embers. Then it was over. I didn’t expect so much action to happen so fast. I had exposed the entire roll of film wondering if I had captured anything at all. The next day I developed the photographs in a makeshift student dark room—a windowless bathroom with a towel under the door to block the light. When I held the images up to the light, I smiled.
One of my photographs was chosen for the publicity for the film and is reproduced on the cover of the VHS tape. A selection of the Barn Burning photographs taken that night will be exhibited during the 2009 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The opening will be held in conjunction with “Faulkner on the Fringe”—an open-mike evening at the Southside Gallery. I hope Oxonians and conference attendees can recapture that exciting, fleeting moment in the photos 30 years later.
Deborah Freeland
The winter of 1979 brought the film crew of William Faulkner’s Barn Burning to Oxford. There is always excitement when a film crew arrives in town. Oxonians welcome the change from routine and roll out the red carpet. The usual talk over coffee shifts to “who” saw “what” star eating at “which” restaurant on the Square. Details are noted such as “She lives off carrot sticks!” and “Did he get the accent right?”
Barn Burning was one of the PBS popular American Short Stories series adapted for television. The support and interest of the citizens became an important part in the making of the movie. Several locals were cast as extras on the set or hired to work on the crew, perhaps most notably Jimmy Faulkner, who was cast in a key role as Major De Spain. There was certainly no problem with the accent.
At the time, I was a graduate student working in Archives and Special Collections at the University. I was fortunate to be with the crew for the burning barn scene. The perfect old barn had already been located in the nearby community of Paris. Careful planning was required. There could be no retakes. Though it was a night scene and freezing cold, everyone in town turned out to watch the action. The fire department was present to prevent the blaze from getting out of hand. My job was to stand in one place and shoot still images of the barn as it burned to the ground. In contrast to modern digital cameras, the camera I used had no auto focus and no auto light meter.
By nightfall all was ready. The barn was prepped and the camera crew was in place. Jimmy Faulkner mounted his horse and rode back and forth behind the crew anxiously awaiting his cue. The fire was lit, and the pyrotechnics scattered into the dark. As the barn began to glow, the cameras rolled, and De Spain (Jimmy) charged forward waving a Civil War–era pistol. There had been some concern that the fire would spook the horse, but Jimmy had complete control. De Spain was seen only briefly, but dramatically in silhouette against the light of the blaze. The rafters of the barn fell in, sending sparks into the night sky. The fire department rushed in to put out the remaining embers. Then it was over. I didn’t expect so much action to happen so fast. I had exposed the entire roll of film wondering if I had captured anything at all. The next day I developed the photographs in a makeshift student dark room—a windowless bathroom with a towel under the door to block the light. When I held the images up to the light, I smiled.
One of my photographs was chosen for the publicity for the film and is reproduced on the cover of the VHS tape. A selection of the Barn Burning photographs taken that night will be exhibited during the 2009 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The opening will be held in conjunction with “Faulkner on the Fringe”—an open-mike evening at the Southside Gallery. I hope Oxonians and conference attendees can recapture that exciting, fleeting moment in the photos 30 years later.
Deborah Freeland
Designation of Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area Announced
Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker has officially announced the federal designation of the Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area.
“Gaining national heritage area designation for the Mississippi Hills will boost our state’s economy by increasing tourism opportunities,” Senator Wicker said in a press conference in Tupelo. “There are unique stories of cultural and historical significance all across northeast Mississippi. I am glad this cultural history is being recognized by Congress so that this area of Mississippi can be promoted and shared with a larger audience.”
The boundaries of the 30-county Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area are Interstate 55, Missississippi Highway 14, and the Tennessee and Alabama state lines. The Mississippi Hills Heritage Area Alliance (MHHAA) is the coordinating entity for the heritage area and will be working with communities across the region to develop a management plan.
The Mississippi Hills Area joins a network of 48 other National Heritage Areas across the country, which are charged with preserving, conserving, and interpreting some of America’s greatest treasures, including the Atchafalaya and Cane River National Heritage Areas in Louisiana, the Mississippi Gulf National Heritage Area on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area, and the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area in Western North Carolina. For lists of attractions, travel tips, history, and cultural aspects of the Mississippi Hills, visit www.mississippihills.org. MHHAA project coordinator Kent Bain can be reached at 662-844-1276 or kentbain@mshills.org. Contact program manager Bobby King at 662-844-1277 or bobbyking@mshills.org. For a complete listing of all National Heritage Areas, visit nationalheritageareas.com.
“Gaining national heritage area designation for the Mississippi Hills will boost our state’s economy by increasing tourism opportunities,” Senator Wicker said in a press conference in Tupelo. “There are unique stories of cultural and historical significance all across northeast Mississippi. I am glad this cultural history is being recognized by Congress so that this area of Mississippi can be promoted and shared with a larger audience.”
The boundaries of the 30-county Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area are Interstate 55, Missississippi Highway 14, and the Tennessee and Alabama state lines. The Mississippi Hills Heritage Area Alliance (MHHAA) is the coordinating entity for the heritage area and will be working with communities across the region to develop a management plan.
The Mississippi Hills Area joins a network of 48 other National Heritage Areas across the country, which are charged with preserving, conserving, and interpreting some of America’s greatest treasures, including the Atchafalaya and Cane River National Heritage Areas in Louisiana, the Mississippi Gulf National Heritage Area on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area, and the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area in Western North Carolina. For lists of attractions, travel tips, history, and cultural aspects of the Mississippi Hills, visit www.mississippihills.org. MHHAA project coordinator Kent Bain can be reached at 662-844-1276 or kentbain@mshills.org. Contact program manager Bobby King at 662-844-1277 or bobbyking@mshills.org. For a complete listing of all National Heritage Areas, visit nationalheritageareas.com.
New Encyclopedia Volume 13: Gender
Entitled Gender, the 13th volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, came out in April. Like its 12 predecessors, each published by the University of North Carolina Press, Gender has the goal of updating scholarship with new and improved entries from the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published in 1989.
Envisioning an encyclopedia around the concept of gender posed intriguing challenges. “Our main goal,” according to coeditor Ownby, “was to show the ways a generation of good scholarship on gender issues has changed the way we think about the South.” Topics that have become crucial in Southern Studies became the subjects of new entries. Much of the best new scholarship uses the lens of gender to rethink older questions. As series editor Charles Reagan Wilson states in his introduction, “This volume charts ways that men and women have had differing experiences of manhood and womanhood.” The volume has new articles on topics like antimiscegenation laws, the politics of respectability, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the Scottsboro Boys, the capture of Jefferson Davis, paternalism, Bubba, Lottie Moon, the myth of matriarchy, manly independence, NASCAR, visiting, single mothers, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the blues, and “I Am a Man!”
While entries on emerging topics might attract the most attention, other entries chart the gendered components of some of the most crucial elements of Southern cultural life. “Southern historians have put gender on the map,” according to coeditor Nancy Bercaw. “Over the past 30 years, they’ve shown us how gender is central to understanding key moments in the history of the South and the nation.”
The encyclopedia covers these new ways of thinking about slavery, agriculture, the Civil War, emancipation, racial segregation and desegregation, citizenship, industry, religion, the civil rights movement, poverty, and education. The book has entries discussing various definitions of family life and sexuality, and new entries on various forms of politics join older but updated entries on feminism and antifeminism, suffrage, and voting rights activists. Other entries track the roles gender issues have played in the ways Southerners express themselves through autobiography, literature, humor, photography, and foodways. Entries on gender issues among American Indians, Hispanics, Appalachian people, whites, and African Americans note the intersections of race, diversity, and region.
The editors say they could have added the phrase “and gender” to almost any topic in Southern Studies and made it an entry. As Bercaw and Ownby state on page 1, “This collection of encyclopedia entries is fairly large, but it could be far larger, because one can find gender components in virtually any element of human life.” The volume, with Walter Anderson’s drawing of Adam and Eve on the cover, is available now.
Envisioning an encyclopedia around the concept of gender posed intriguing challenges. “Our main goal,” according to coeditor Ownby, “was to show the ways a generation of good scholarship on gender issues has changed the way we think about the South.” Topics that have become crucial in Southern Studies became the subjects of new entries. Much of the best new scholarship uses the lens of gender to rethink older questions. As series editor Charles Reagan Wilson states in his introduction, “This volume charts ways that men and women have had differing experiences of manhood and womanhood.” The volume has new articles on topics like antimiscegenation laws, the politics of respectability, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the Scottsboro Boys, the capture of Jefferson Davis, paternalism, Bubba, Lottie Moon, the myth of matriarchy, manly independence, NASCAR, visiting, single mothers, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the blues, and “I Am a Man!”
While entries on emerging topics might attract the most attention, other entries chart the gendered components of some of the most crucial elements of Southern cultural life. “Southern historians have put gender on the map,” according to coeditor Nancy Bercaw. “Over the past 30 years, they’ve shown us how gender is central to understanding key moments in the history of the South and the nation.”
The encyclopedia covers these new ways of thinking about slavery, agriculture, the Civil War, emancipation, racial segregation and desegregation, citizenship, industry, religion, the civil rights movement, poverty, and education. The book has entries discussing various definitions of family life and sexuality, and new entries on various forms of politics join older but updated entries on feminism and antifeminism, suffrage, and voting rights activists. Other entries track the roles gender issues have played in the ways Southerners express themselves through autobiography, literature, humor, photography, and foodways. Entries on gender issues among American Indians, Hispanics, Appalachian people, whites, and African Americans note the intersections of race, diversity, and region.
The editors say they could have added the phrase “and gender” to almost any topic in Southern Studies and made it an entry. As Bercaw and Ownby state on page 1, “This collection of encyclopedia entries is fairly large, but it could be far larger, because one can find gender components in virtually any element of human life.” The volume, with Walter Anderson’s drawing of Adam and Eve on the cover, is available now.
Library Exhibition Features Walter Anderson
Artwork by renowned artist, writer, and naturalist Walter Inglis Anderson is on exhibit at the J. D. Williams Library through January 2010. The 60-piece display, Walter Anderson and World Literature, is hosted by the Department of Archives and Special Collections on the library’s third floor.
Featuring line drawings, watercolors, and panels inspired by great works of literature such as Don Quixote, The Iliad, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, The Magic Carpet, and block prints from Anderson’s books An Alphabet and Robinson—created for his own children—the exhibition stretches along three walls.
“There are many artists who explored a story but few who fused with it,” said Patricia Pinson, former curator of exhibitions at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs. “The book to Anderson was a way of life, part of the quest to find realization and meaning. It was the distillation of the timeless epics that gave him the grasp of the significance of the moment. Great books and great art are about insight, and Anderson gives us insight into both.” A voracious reader, Anderson created nearly 10,000 pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate page after page of the books as he would read them.
“It’s exciting for the library to showcase this wonderful exhibit of work by Walter Anderson,” said Jennifer Ford, head of Archives and Special Collections. “His genius can be clearly seen, as well as his love for literature. We hope that our patrons will be able to get a glimpse into his world.”
While Anderson’s “world” stretched from his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to faraway places such as China and South America, he found solace in being alone, often immersed in the imaginary world of books. “Daddy was essentially on a quest—he was pursuing the Holy Grail,” said Anderson’s son John Anderson, curator of the library exhibition.
Sponsored in conjunction with the 16th annual Oxford Conference for the Book, which was dedicated to Walter Anderson, the exhibition was the focus of the conference’s opening session March 26. Following its close at the library, plans call for the exhibit to travel to other libraries, cultural centers, and schools for years to come.
“This exhibit might be little explosions if allowed to be shown in schools where children can look at the work and say, ‘Wait a minute, I see something another way,’” John Anderson said.
Featuring line drawings, watercolors, and panels inspired by great works of literature such as Don Quixote, The Iliad, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, The Magic Carpet, and block prints from Anderson’s books An Alphabet and Robinson—created for his own children—the exhibition stretches along three walls.
“There are many artists who explored a story but few who fused with it,” said Patricia Pinson, former curator of exhibitions at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs. “The book to Anderson was a way of life, part of the quest to find realization and meaning. It was the distillation of the timeless epics that gave him the grasp of the significance of the moment. Great books and great art are about insight, and Anderson gives us insight into both.” A voracious reader, Anderson created nearly 10,000 pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate page after page of the books as he would read them.
“It’s exciting for the library to showcase this wonderful exhibit of work by Walter Anderson,” said Jennifer Ford, head of Archives and Special Collections. “His genius can be clearly seen, as well as his love for literature. We hope that our patrons will be able to get a glimpse into his world.”
While Anderson’s “world” stretched from his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to faraway places such as China and South America, he found solace in being alone, often immersed in the imaginary world of books. “Daddy was essentially on a quest—he was pursuing the Holy Grail,” said Anderson’s son John Anderson, curator of the library exhibition.
Sponsored in conjunction with the 16th annual Oxford Conference for the Book, which was dedicated to Walter Anderson, the exhibition was the focus of the conference’s opening session March 26. Following its close at the library, plans call for the exhibit to travel to other libraries, cultural centers, and schools for years to come.
“This exhibit might be little explosions if allowed to be shown in schools where children can look at the work and say, ‘Wait a minute, I see something another way,’” John Anderson said.
Southern Studies Musicians
Beginning with the Spring 2009 issue, Southern Studies master’s student I’Nasah Crockett will highlight various alumni and faculty who sing, play, market, or otherwise have something to do with music. This issue’s installment features one current faculty member and two alums. If you are a Southern Studies alum or a past faculty member (visiting or full-time) and you have musical connections, you should expect to hear from us soon.
Spring has arrived, which means that here in the South music festival season is officially under way. In light of the melody-soaked atmosphere, we took a look at Southern Studies faculty and alumni who are involved both in music making and the music business.
“During the 1990s I was part of a blues duo in New York called Satan and Adam,” says Adam Gussow, associate professor of English and Southern Studies. “We began as a street act but were lucky enough to pick up a record producer and a recording contract in 1991, and also get picked
up by major management. We ended up becoming a mid-level regional/national touring act—weekend warriors who played blues clubs in the Eastern U.S. and did a handful of blues and jazz festivals every summer. After working for tips on the street, it was nice to have some industry muscle behind us!” Gussow is happy to report that Satan and Adam have recently reunited and are proudly self-managed. Additionally, since joining the program in 2002, he has managed to link his interest in music making with his academic interests, from assembling and chairing the Blues Today Symposium (also in 2002), to teaching classes in blues and African American studies. “Both my English and Southern Studies courses reflect my experience as a professional blues musician and my academic interest in Southern music as a whole. I’ve taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the blues literary tradition and what I’ll call the “discourse tradition” of the blues—the languages in which scholars, folklorists, and journalists talk about the music.”
Alumnus Mitch A. Palmer (MA 1999) is a lawyer who juggles being a full-time lawyer with being a member of not one, but two New Orleans–based bands, the Happy Talk Band and the Haunted Hearts. The first, he says, is “more of a modern, roots rock band and the latter being a traditional hillbilly string band complete with upright bass and sans drums. I play guitar, steel guitar, banjo, and piano in both.” Over the past five years or so, both bands have played shows throughout the country and at the famed South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. He’s also part of an organization called the Mystic Knights of Mau Mau, a nonprofit group in New Orleans that puts on the annual Ponderosa Stomp, an American roots music festival. Palmer says that his time in the Southern Studies program was foundational in shaping his music interests. “I came to Oxford from college in New Jersey looking for immersion in things Southern. I think just being in Mississippi and absorbing the state’s music heritage was important. After Ole Miss, I came to Louisiana and haven’t looked back. The musical education here rivals Mississippi and the learning never ends; Southern Studies, in large part, taught me what to look for and how to use it.”
Another Southern Studies graduate who has made his musical fortunes in New Orleans is Walker Lasiter (MA, 1996). “My first two jobs were in the music industry. I answered an ad in the paper that asked, “Can you sell the blues?” Having interned at Living Blues magazine I was sure I could. It turned out to be an advertising sales position at a blues radio station.” After working in promotions at the famed music venue Tipitina’s for about a year, he landed his current job at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. “As director of grants I am involved with projects that explore the cultural significance of music through interpretive ‘informances’ such as Louisiana Crossroads, where musical performances are paired with scholarly interviews to create entertainment that is also educational. We also offer documentary film and radio grants, and I ave been able to work closely with public radio stations like WWOZ.” Lasiter, ho while in the program sang with a psychedelic band called Heavy Jelly, says that “Through Southern Studies I learned to appreciate music as a cultural expression. My degree has given me the tools to continue to explore indigenous Southern music both through my job and in my spare time.”
These are just three Southern Studies folks who made their livings at least in part through music. In future issues of the Southern Register, we will highlight world-traveling keyboardist and singer Billy Stevens, the impossible-to-categorize songwriter/mandolinist Dent May, guitarist Warren Black, singer-songwriter Caroline Herring bassist Justin Showah, trumpeter and music teacher Jacques de Marche, singer-songwriter Jimmy Phillips, singer-bassist Susan Bauer Lee, blues performer Steve Cheseborough, roots musician Angela Watkins, and guitarist Jake Fussell.
I’Nasah Crockett
Spring has arrived, which means that here in the South music festival season is officially under way. In light of the melody-soaked atmosphere, we took a look at Southern Studies faculty and alumni who are involved both in music making and the music business.
“During the 1990s I was part of a blues duo in New York called Satan and Adam,” says Adam Gussow, associate professor of English and Southern Studies. “We began as a street act but were lucky enough to pick up a record producer and a recording contract in 1991, and also get picked
up by major management. We ended up becoming a mid-level regional/national touring act—weekend warriors who played blues clubs in the Eastern U.S. and did a handful of blues and jazz festivals every summer. After working for tips on the street, it was nice to have some industry muscle behind us!” Gussow is happy to report that Satan and Adam have recently reunited and are proudly self-managed. Additionally, since joining the program in 2002, he has managed to link his interest in music making with his academic interests, from assembling and chairing the Blues Today Symposium (also in 2002), to teaching classes in blues and African American studies. “Both my English and Southern Studies courses reflect my experience as a professional blues musician and my academic interest in Southern music as a whole. I’ve taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the blues literary tradition and what I’ll call the “discourse tradition” of the blues—the languages in which scholars, folklorists, and journalists talk about the music.”
Alumnus Mitch A. Palmer (MA 1999) is a lawyer who juggles being a full-time lawyer with being a member of not one, but two New Orleans–based bands, the Happy Talk Band and the Haunted Hearts. The first, he says, is “more of a modern, roots rock band and the latter being a traditional hillbilly string band complete with upright bass and sans drums. I play guitar, steel guitar, banjo, and piano in both.” Over the past five years or so, both bands have played shows throughout the country and at the famed South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. He’s also part of an organization called the Mystic Knights of Mau Mau, a nonprofit group in New Orleans that puts on the annual Ponderosa Stomp, an American roots music festival. Palmer says that his time in the Southern Studies program was foundational in shaping his music interests. “I came to Oxford from college in New Jersey looking for immersion in things Southern. I think just being in Mississippi and absorbing the state’s music heritage was important. After Ole Miss, I came to Louisiana and haven’t looked back. The musical education here rivals Mississippi and the learning never ends; Southern Studies, in large part, taught me what to look for and how to use it.”
Another Southern Studies graduate who has made his musical fortunes in New Orleans is Walker Lasiter (MA, 1996). “My first two jobs were in the music industry. I answered an ad in the paper that asked, “Can you sell the blues?” Having interned at Living Blues magazine I was sure I could. It turned out to be an advertising sales position at a blues radio station.” After working in promotions at the famed music venue Tipitina’s for about a year, he landed his current job at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. “As director of grants I am involved with projects that explore the cultural significance of music through interpretive ‘informances’ such as Louisiana Crossroads, where musical performances are paired with scholarly interviews to create entertainment that is also educational. We also offer documentary film and radio grants, and I ave been able to work closely with public radio stations like WWOZ.” Lasiter, ho while in the program sang with a psychedelic band called Heavy Jelly, says that “Through Southern Studies I learned to appreciate music as a cultural expression. My degree has given me the tools to continue to explore indigenous Southern music both through my job and in my spare time.”
These are just three Southern Studies folks who made their livings at least in part through music. In future issues of the Southern Register, we will highlight world-traveling keyboardist and singer Billy Stevens, the impossible-to-categorize songwriter/mandolinist Dent May, guitarist Warren Black, singer-songwriter Caroline Herring bassist Justin Showah, trumpeter and music teacher Jacques de Marche, singer-songwriter Jimmy Phillips, singer-bassist Susan Bauer Lee, blues performer Steve Cheseborough, roots musician Angela Watkins, and guitarist Jake Fussell.
I’Nasah Crockett
Director's Column
Perhaps we should see this edition of the Southern Register as our music issue. The articles on the new Documenting the Blues marker on the east lawn of Barnard Observatory, the Blues Today Symposium, the Southern Foodways Alliance’s food and music event at the Carter family establishment near Bristol, Tennessee, and Southern Studies students and alumni who are musicians only begin to introduce the musical sides of Southern Studies.
Congratulations to Living Blues for publishing its 200th issue. Putting out a magazine gets more difficult in an online age, and putting one out from a university setting has its own challenges. Cheers to Brett Bonner, Mark Camarigg, and the staff members, writers, volunteers, and subscribers over the years who have made it a quality publication. It was good to see past editors Jim O’Neal, Amy van Singel, David Nelson, Scott Barretta, and current editor Brett Bonner together at the unveiling of the blues marker.
Throughout our history, numerous Southern Studies faculty members, such as past and present professors Bill Ferris, Adam Gussow, Warren Steel, Robbie Ethridge, and Michael Bertrand, have either played music or taught about it, or both. Through his own work and his encouragement of Living Blues and the Blues Archive, Ferris worked to establish the University of Mississippi as a place to study the blues. Gussow teaches and writes about blues and literature, has written a blues memoir, and continues to play blues harmonica. Steel continues to teach a Music Department course, African American Musical Traditions, that is popular with Southern Studies students. Ethridge plays bass in several Oxford bands, and Bertrand, who now teaches history at Tennessee State University, wrote an important book on the life of Elvis Presley. Former Living Blues editor Barretta teaches a popular class, initiated by Peter Aschoff, on the anthropology of the blues.
Even Southern Studies faculty who cannot carry a tune (or don’t do so in public) have studied music. Charles Wilson has written on Elvis and religion, and I wrote an article about 1970s Southern rock and gender. A few people will remember English/Southern Studies professor Bob Brinkmeyer’s radio program in African music. Our newest faculty member studies music, especially hip hop, as part of her larger study of regional identity among African Americans in the urban South. Zandria Robinson, who is finishing her PhD at Northwestern University, will join us in the fall as the new McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology.
Upcoming Center programs also have musical themes. In May, David Wharton will, for the third year, teach a Southern Studies course in conjunction with staff members from the Library of Congress about how to document musical traditions. In October the Southern Foodways Symposium will feature connections between foodways and the music of the South. Our students have benefited from assistantships through the American Music Archive and from close relationships with Living Blues, Media Productions, and the Highway 61 radio program.
Despite all of the teaching and scholarship by the faculty, it is often the interests of Southern Studies students that push the Center into new interests in music. According to the Center’s Web site, at least 23 MA students have completed theses on topics in Southern music, with topics ranging from Austin to Nashville, to blues education, to Elvis and sexuality, to Hee Haw, to Thacker Mountain Radio, to European fascination with African American music, to Bo Carter, Doug Sahm, the Drive-By Truckers, and the Vaughn songbooks. Several other students have pursued internships related to music topics. Undergraduates have often turned to music for research topics, and current students are studying, among other things, Southern hip hop, blues tourism, and Southern themes in the work of Bob Dylan. And, as I’Nasah Crockett’s article in this issue attests, numerous students and alumni are talented and dedicated musicians.
Over the years, Southern Studies students have started bands and disbanded them, served in the house bands for Oxford institutions ranging from the Gin to Thacker Mountain Radio, performed at birthday events for luminaries from Charles Wilson to Eudora Welty, written hundreds of songs, recorded albums, created videos, lived on the road, stayed up too late, and made their parents worry about them. They have been lead singers and backup singers and deejays, sung in and recorded gospel choirs, and played everything from the guitar, mandolin, and banjo to trumpet, violin, keyboards, and magic ukulele. They have written the leading guide for blues tourists, edited the Music volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, documented the life of folklorist John Work, made films about musicians, run blues museums, booked acts for blues clubs, edited and copyedited Living Blues, written for music publications from Oxford to Atlanta to New Orleans, worked at radio stations and jazz festivals, documented shape-note singing schools, and taught and interpreted music in the schools. They have played music, much of it with Southern roots, all over the world. Maybe someday they’ll all come back to Oxford and put on a show.
One can speculate about what brings so many people with music interests to Southern Studies. Perhaps it is the music of the South and especially Mississippi, and we can hope the Blues Archive and Living Blues, and the encouragement from faculty members and the examples of other students, are in part responsible. Beyond that, studying music from a cultural perspective raises questions of the relationships between authenticity and innovation, musicians and their audience, poetry and melody, sacred and secular, performance and setting, youth and age, and men and women, and all of those dichotomies offer promising beginnings for study. Music can both challenge social boundaries and establish new ones, so it is ideal for considering issues of cultural politics. And my guess is that a lot of people study music for the same reason that they play it—because they love it so much that they couldn’t stop even if they wanted.
I am happy to report that despite the current economic problems, Southern Studies graduates are being accepted into impressive graduate programs in history, English, and American Studies and are heading into divinity schools, film schools, architecture schools, and law schools. They
are entering teaching programs, writing books (and, of course, songs) and finding positions doing something close to what they want.
Ted Ownby
Congratulations to Living Blues for publishing its 200th issue. Putting out a magazine gets more difficult in an online age, and putting one out from a university setting has its own challenges. Cheers to Brett Bonner, Mark Camarigg, and the staff members, writers, volunteers, and subscribers over the years who have made it a quality publication. It was good to see past editors Jim O’Neal, Amy van Singel, David Nelson, Scott Barretta, and current editor Brett Bonner together at the unveiling of the blues marker.
Throughout our history, numerous Southern Studies faculty members, such as past and present professors Bill Ferris, Adam Gussow, Warren Steel, Robbie Ethridge, and Michael Bertrand, have either played music or taught about it, or both. Through his own work and his encouragement of Living Blues and the Blues Archive, Ferris worked to establish the University of Mississippi as a place to study the blues. Gussow teaches and writes about blues and literature, has written a blues memoir, and continues to play blues harmonica. Steel continues to teach a Music Department course, African American Musical Traditions, that is popular with Southern Studies students. Ethridge plays bass in several Oxford bands, and Bertrand, who now teaches history at Tennessee State University, wrote an important book on the life of Elvis Presley. Former Living Blues editor Barretta teaches a popular class, initiated by Peter Aschoff, on the anthropology of the blues.
Even Southern Studies faculty who cannot carry a tune (or don’t do so in public) have studied music. Charles Wilson has written on Elvis and religion, and I wrote an article about 1970s Southern rock and gender. A few people will remember English/Southern Studies professor Bob Brinkmeyer’s radio program in African music. Our newest faculty member studies music, especially hip hop, as part of her larger study of regional identity among African Americans in the urban South. Zandria Robinson, who is finishing her PhD at Northwestern University, will join us in the fall as the new McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology.
Upcoming Center programs also have musical themes. In May, David Wharton will, for the third year, teach a Southern Studies course in conjunction with staff members from the Library of Congress about how to document musical traditions. In October the Southern Foodways Symposium will feature connections between foodways and the music of the South. Our students have benefited from assistantships through the American Music Archive and from close relationships with Living Blues, Media Productions, and the Highway 61 radio program.
Despite all of the teaching and scholarship by the faculty, it is often the interests of Southern Studies students that push the Center into new interests in music. According to the Center’s Web site, at least 23 MA students have completed theses on topics in Southern music, with topics ranging from Austin to Nashville, to blues education, to Elvis and sexuality, to Hee Haw, to Thacker Mountain Radio, to European fascination with African American music, to Bo Carter, Doug Sahm, the Drive-By Truckers, and the Vaughn songbooks. Several other students have pursued internships related to music topics. Undergraduates have often turned to music for research topics, and current students are studying, among other things, Southern hip hop, blues tourism, and Southern themes in the work of Bob Dylan. And, as I’Nasah Crockett’s article in this issue attests, numerous students and alumni are talented and dedicated musicians.
Over the years, Southern Studies students have started bands and disbanded them, served in the house bands for Oxford institutions ranging from the Gin to Thacker Mountain Radio, performed at birthday events for luminaries from Charles Wilson to Eudora Welty, written hundreds of songs, recorded albums, created videos, lived on the road, stayed up too late, and made their parents worry about them. They have been lead singers and backup singers and deejays, sung in and recorded gospel choirs, and played everything from the guitar, mandolin, and banjo to trumpet, violin, keyboards, and magic ukulele. They have written the leading guide for blues tourists, edited the Music volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, documented the life of folklorist John Work, made films about musicians, run blues museums, booked acts for blues clubs, edited and copyedited Living Blues, written for music publications from Oxford to Atlanta to New Orleans, worked at radio stations and jazz festivals, documented shape-note singing schools, and taught and interpreted music in the schools. They have played music, much of it with Southern roots, all over the world. Maybe someday they’ll all come back to Oxford and put on a show.
One can speculate about what brings so many people with music interests to Southern Studies. Perhaps it is the music of the South and especially Mississippi, and we can hope the Blues Archive and Living Blues, and the encouragement from faculty members and the examples of other students, are in part responsible. Beyond that, studying music from a cultural perspective raises questions of the relationships between authenticity and innovation, musicians and their audience, poetry and melody, sacred and secular, performance and setting, youth and age, and men and women, and all of those dichotomies offer promising beginnings for study. Music can both challenge social boundaries and establish new ones, so it is ideal for considering issues of cultural politics. And my guess is that a lot of people study music for the same reason that they play it—because they love it so much that they couldn’t stop even if they wanted.
I am happy to report that despite the current economic problems, Southern Studies graduates are being accepted into impressive graduate programs in history, English, and American Studies and are heading into divinity schools, film schools, architecture schools, and law schools. They
are entering teaching programs, writing books (and, of course, songs) and finding positions doing something close to what they want.
Ted Ownby
Sixth Annual Blues Symposium
Crowds of blues enthusiasts gathered in Oxford as the University of Mississippi and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture played host to the sixth annual Blues Today Symposium February 26–27, 2009. This year’s symposium, themed “Documenting the Blues,” featured such panelists, speakers, friends, and veteran folklorists as David Evans, George Mitchell, Art Rosenbaum, and Sylvester Oliver. Highlights included an all-blues Thacker Mountain Radio show, an unveiling of our own Blues Trail marker on the lawn of Barnard Observatory, and a coinciding performance by gospel great Mavis Staples at the Gertrude Castellow Ford Center.
After a prekickoff Brown Bag lecture with Mark Camarigg (Living Blues), Scott Barretta (Highway 61 radio, Mississippi Blues Trail), and Greg Johnson (Blues Archive) on Wednesday, audiences on Thursday heard a lecture by Evan Hatch (MA 2002) entitled John Work III and saw the unveiling of an exhibition of Work’s recordings. Johnson also unveiled the newly digitized audio and video from the Alan Lomax Archive, noting that “much of what we know about the history and development of blues music and culture was passed along to us through the research of David Evans, George Mitchell, Alan Lomax, Jim O’Neal, and others.” According to many participants and visitors alike, the blues edition of Thacker Mountain Radio on Thursday, February 26, was exceptional. George Mitchell, who first recorded R. L. Burnside in 1967, shared his love for the blues and the Blues Today Symposium with his kind words and music. Additionally performing on Thacker Mountain Radio was Grammy-winning symposium participant Art Rosenbaum, who performed on the fiddle with accompaniment from Oxford guitarist and incoming Southern Studies master’s student Jake Fussell. Local bluesmen Kenny Brown and Cedric Burnside with Lightnin’ Malcolm performed a tribute to Mitchell for his recordings of the earliest notable Burnside.
“The community support was particularly strong this year, especially for the special blues-themed Thacker Mountain Radio show, which had a standing-room-only crowd at the Lyric Theater,” Camarigg said. “The symposium is a great opportunity for scholars, fans, and musicians to come together and share their knowledge and passion for blues music and culture,” he added. In addition to the general celebration of the blues, this year’s event also specifically celebrated those who have contributed to the blues by recording, producing, and documenting. Nearly all of the former editors of Living Blues were in attendance, along with many who continue to work in the Blues Archive and on blues research elsewhere. Southern Studies graduate student Alan Pike said, “Having a blues marker placed at Barnard Observatory made this year’s symposium especially exciting among blues enthusiasts here at the University. The marker and the unveiling ceremony served to honor the great folks at Living Blues magazine and the various faculty and blues scholars that have helped to make Ole Miss the best place to study the blues.” Another graduate student, Duvall Osteen, continued, “It was an honor to see the marker unveiled at the Center, a place so devoted to creating ways for people to discover and explore Southern culture in a variety of ways.”
The Mississippi Blues Trail features more than 125 historical markers and interpretive sites located throughout the state. The unveiling of the most recent blues marker, entitled “Documenting the Blues,” became a celebratory event on the symposium schedule. It is the first trail marker in Lafayette County and is sponsored in part by the Oxford Tourism Council. As student remarks might suggest, this marker was particularly special to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the University of Mississippi. Similar markers will continue to be developed and identified in phases as funding becomes available.
Though not officially part of the Blues Today Symposium, Mavis Staples put on an outstanding performance Friday evening. The Blues Today Symposium official finale was a Big Jack Johnson show at Rooster’s Blues House on the Square in Oxford, but many symposium visitors still continued on a tour of the B. B. King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi, guided by blues scholar Scott Barretta, who served as a consultant in the museum’s creation.
Symposium sponsors include the Oxford Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, Mississippi Development Authority, the University of Mississippi’s Department of Archives and Special Collections in the J. D. Williams Library, Austin’s Music in Oxford, and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Jen Lawrence
After a prekickoff Brown Bag lecture with Mark Camarigg (Living Blues), Scott Barretta (Highway 61 radio, Mississippi Blues Trail), and Greg Johnson (Blues Archive) on Wednesday, audiences on Thursday heard a lecture by Evan Hatch (MA 2002) entitled John Work III and saw the unveiling of an exhibition of Work’s recordings. Johnson also unveiled the newly digitized audio and video from the Alan Lomax Archive, noting that “much of what we know about the history and development of blues music and culture was passed along to us through the research of David Evans, George Mitchell, Alan Lomax, Jim O’Neal, and others.” According to many participants and visitors alike, the blues edition of Thacker Mountain Radio on Thursday, February 26, was exceptional. George Mitchell, who first recorded R. L. Burnside in 1967, shared his love for the blues and the Blues Today Symposium with his kind words and music. Additionally performing on Thacker Mountain Radio was Grammy-winning symposium participant Art Rosenbaum, who performed on the fiddle with accompaniment from Oxford guitarist and incoming Southern Studies master’s student Jake Fussell. Local bluesmen Kenny Brown and Cedric Burnside with Lightnin’ Malcolm performed a tribute to Mitchell for his recordings of the earliest notable Burnside.
“The community support was particularly strong this year, especially for the special blues-themed Thacker Mountain Radio show, which had a standing-room-only crowd at the Lyric Theater,” Camarigg said. “The symposium is a great opportunity for scholars, fans, and musicians to come together and share their knowledge and passion for blues music and culture,” he added. In addition to the general celebration of the blues, this year’s event also specifically celebrated those who have contributed to the blues by recording, producing, and documenting. Nearly all of the former editors of Living Blues were in attendance, along with many who continue to work in the Blues Archive and on blues research elsewhere. Southern Studies graduate student Alan Pike said, “Having a blues marker placed at Barnard Observatory made this year’s symposium especially exciting among blues enthusiasts here at the University. The marker and the unveiling ceremony served to honor the great folks at Living Blues magazine and the various faculty and blues scholars that have helped to make Ole Miss the best place to study the blues.” Another graduate student, Duvall Osteen, continued, “It was an honor to see the marker unveiled at the Center, a place so devoted to creating ways for people to discover and explore Southern culture in a variety of ways.”
The Mississippi Blues Trail features more than 125 historical markers and interpretive sites located throughout the state. The unveiling of the most recent blues marker, entitled “Documenting the Blues,” became a celebratory event on the symposium schedule. It is the first trail marker in Lafayette County and is sponsored in part by the Oxford Tourism Council. As student remarks might suggest, this marker was particularly special to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the University of Mississippi. Similar markers will continue to be developed and identified in phases as funding becomes available.
Though not officially part of the Blues Today Symposium, Mavis Staples put on an outstanding performance Friday evening. The Blues Today Symposium official finale was a Big Jack Johnson show at Rooster’s Blues House on the Square in Oxford, but many symposium visitors still continued on a tour of the B. B. King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi, guided by blues scholar Scott Barretta, who served as a consultant in the museum’s creation.
Symposium sponsors include the Oxford Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, Mississippi Development Authority, the University of Mississippi’s Department of Archives and Special Collections in the J. D. Williams Library, Austin’s Music in Oxford, and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Jen Lawrence
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)