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THE NEWSLETTER OF THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE • FALL 2005 THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI

gSouthern Register

An ominous foreboding settledupon many of us who livenear the Gulf Coast duringthe last weekend of August.We knew that Hurricane

Katrina was out there, stoking its poweron the warm Gulf waters, as hurricaneforecasters warned that it could be anunprecedented force of hurricanedestruction for the United States.

And so it was. The Category 4Katrina blasted ashore in southMississippi, leveling buildings blocksinland. The storm surge blew awayhouses that had survived Mississippi’sgreatest previous storm, the Category 5Camille, in 1969. New Orleans did nottake the direct blow that had been

feared by its residents, but the next daydisaster of a different nature hit—thelevees broke and the city flooded.

Like most Americans, those of us inMississippi were transfixed with thenews, watching on cable television theagonizing scenes of suffering peopleunable to escape the rising waters inNew Orleans. We listened toMississippi Public Broadcasting’scoverage that gradually revealed, in thewords of officials tending the stormvictims, just how awfully the state’scoastal communities had been hit.

Oxford experienced pounding rains,howling winds, and power outages butnothing like the rest of the state. Theexperience of the storm’s effects this far

inland connected us, though, to those onthe Coast. Jackson, 150 miles from theCoast, was hit hard. Katrina blew withCategory 1 winds by the time it reachedthere, causing extended power outagesand physical damage. Hattiesburg, 90miles southeast of Jackson, sufferedmassive numbers of downed trees, roofdamage, and power outages that lastedweeks. Gasoline shortages soonappeared, making travel difficult.

Inevitably, those of us at the Centerand in Oxford began fearing for familyand friends, and we exchanged stories.My assistant Sally’s parents weretrapped in their attic in Gulfport duringthe storm, feeling its frightening power.I worried about many friends of mine inNew Orleans. Two of them, Barbaraand Jerry, finally called days later fromBarbara’s mother’s home in Baker,Louisiana, to say they had escaped butfeared for their house and were unsureof their immediate future. One formerstudent, Dannal, was away from NewOrleans, but suffered some damage ather home. I saw other former students,Scott and Ursula, at a coffee shop inOxford one morning, evacuees whohad just bought a house a month beforein New Orleans but now were here towait.

Communities across the nationsheltered such evacuees, and Oxfordsoon had between 2,000–3,000 newresidents, at least temporarily. The

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Katrina

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Fall 2005 The Southern Register

I N T H I S I S S U EFall 2005

Published Quarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture

The University of MississippiTelephone: 662-915-5993

Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: [email protected]

Internet: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south

Southern RegisterFeelings of shock at the power of nature, fear for the safety offriends, anger at the slow government response in places, awe at the scale ofdestruction, and grief at the loss of life—all these emotions affected me at the newsof Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

By now the story of the hurricane is no longer news, but the impact on the livesof the people on the Coast, the South, and the nation continues. Estimates in lateSeptember were that 1.3 million Gulf Coast households had been displaced, withevery state in the nation housing evacuees. Some families joined family memberselsewhere, while others went where their church networks found sanctuaries. Thisdisplacement and migration will surely rank as one of the South’s greatestdemographic changes.

In fact, the possible regional and cultural effects of Katrina are important. Thecharacter of the Gulf Coast has long included an intimate familiarity with tropicalstorms, and the unusual number and power of them the last few years have made allof us who live near the Coast more aware of our ties to the beaches nearby. TheCoast attracts tourists from around the nation and the world, but Southerners havea special relationship to the region. The South’s predominant evangelicalProtestantism may be moralistic, but our people flock to the casinos, music venues,and sun culture of the beaches.

Katrina may promote a newly intense regional identity among those on the GulfCoast itself. Their shared experience of destruction and hoped-for recovery maynurture ties beyond state and local boundaries. President George W. Bush hasproposed a “Gulf Opportunity Zone,” which would be the basis for distribution ofpublic and private resources aimed at recovery and renewal. This opportunitycreates the possibility for regional planning on a scale not seen perhaps since theTennessee Valley Authority transformed that economically and socially depressedregion in the 20th century.

On a less grand scale, Katrina made people of the Gulf Coast appreciate parts oftheir culture that survived. One of my favorite examples is the New Orleans Saints,who have long been one of the Deep South’s cultural institutions, their NationalFootball League games broadcast across the region. Now, the Saints have a historyof disappointing their fans; cynics might say the Saints have been the South’s latestlost cause. But those fans are diehard. In the aftermath of Katrina, the Gulf Coastembraced the Saints anew. In their first game of the season, the Saints pulled off amiraculous last-minute victory. One newspaper headline read: “One for theHomefolks: Saints Give Their Battered Region Reason to Smile.” DeuceMcAllister, who scored two touchdowns in the win, was quoted as saying, “We wereplaying for the entire Gulf South region.” Another player, Fred McAfee, said, “Allwe know is that we’re playing for people from Pensacola, to Jackson, to LakeCharles, and especially New Orleans.”

The Center’s forthcoming conference, “Katrina: The Future of the Gulf Coast,”December 2–3, will assess the state of recovery on the Coast by then, and we willalso explore such issues as the special character and identity of the Coast and howto preserve them in its rebuilding. We invite our friends to attend as we provide aforum for policymakers and cultural observers to share their ideas and dreams. Wehope the conference will fulfill the Endowment for the Future of the South’smission of making the Center a meeting place, bringing together authorities to planfor the South’s development, even if it is in the face of disaster.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

D I R E C T O R ’ S C O L U M N

Editor: Ann J. Abadie

Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee

Mailing List Manager: Mary Hartwell Howorth

Editorial Assistant: Sally Cassady Lyon

Lithographer: RR Donnelley Magazine Group

The University complies with all applicable lawsregarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in allits activities and programs and does not discriminateagainst anyone protected by law because of age, color,disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status asa veteran or disabled veteran.

REGISTER STAFF

1 Katrina2 Director’s Column3 Katrina: Gulf Coast Conference 4 2005-2006 Events Calendar4 Living Blues News5 Bohemia’s Last Frontier7 Cotton Museum in Memphis8 In Memoriam8 2006 F&Y Call for Papers9 2006 Oxford Conference for the Book9 2006 Mississippi Delta Literary Tour

10 Thacker Mountain Radio Show10 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule11 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters12 Bercaw Attends NEH Summer Institute12 New Southern Studies Graduate

Students 13 Sally Graham: SST Superstar on CNN13 Student Photographs Library

Exhibitions 14 Amy Evans on Southern Artistry Web

Site 14 New Addition to Southern Studies

Empire 15 Angel Gets His Wings15 Center Gift Honors Edmonds 15 New Ventress Order Members 16 2005 Faulkner Conference Report17 Southern Foodways Alliance News21 Reading the South: Reviews & Notes31 Music of the South Conference31 2006 Natchez Literary Celebration32 Square Table: Oxford’s New Cookbook34 Notes on Contributors35 Southern Culture Catalog Items 36 Address Section/Mailing List

Form/Friends Information and Form

The Southern Register Fall 2005

town government, the university, thechurches, and endless families cametogether to staff shelters and arrangeactivities to assist the often shell-shocked victims of the storm.

The loss of life rose to over 1,000,and the image of bloated bodies floatingin New Orleans waters will long hauntus. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbournoted that “a breathtaking amount ofinfrastructure” had been destroyed insouth Mississippi, including roads,bridges, rail lines, water and sewersystems, and communications facilities.New Orleans had virtually lockeddown, with the failure of most publicservices and the unprecedented totalevacuation of an American city.

Race and class injustices becameespecially apparent in New Orleans, asthe poorest and a disproportionatenumber of blacks were trapped onrooftops and left in dangerousconditions in the Superdome and atthe Convention Center. PresidentBush noted that the New Orleans scenecould be traced back to the history ofracial injustice under Jim Crow, andissues of Southern history now had adisturbing new relevancy.

The cultural and environmentalimpact of the storm on the MississippiCoast was almost inconceivable. Historicbuildings were devastated. Beauvoir,Jefferson Davis’s home in Biloxi, wasseverely damaged but survived, probablythe only antebellum building stillstanding on the Coast, which was one ofthe earliest areas of the United Statessettled by Europeans. Trees and shrubswere uprooted, creating an eerie starklandscape. Statues to historic events and

figures were toppled. Over half theCoast’s restaurants were no longer there.Casino barges were lifted off mooringsand dumped on the land. Half of itsphysicians were without offices orequipment, and many of them had left tostart new practices elsewhere. The loss ofvalued artwork was dreadful. Museumswere damaged or worse. The WalterAnderson Museum in Ocean Springssurvived, but nearby Shearwater Potteryand the Anderson family compoundholding much of Walter Anderson’swork were destroyed, leaving the familysearching in debris for watercolors anddrawings to salvage.

Thoughts have now turned torecovery. Governor Barbour appointedbusinessman and philanthropist JimBarksdale to head the Governor’sCommission on Recovering, Rebuilding,and Renewal, which hopes to make itsreport by the end of this year. NewOrleans’s recovery was hampered by theeffects of another storm, Hurricane Rita,which hit Texas three weeks afterKatrina but brought enough rain to

New Orleans to lead to more flooding.Still, hopes were strong that the FrenchQuarter and Business District would beup and running in October, withtourists welcomed back to help jump-start the economy.

The Center will hold its next Futureof the South conference December 2-3,and the topic will be “Katrina: TheFuture of the Gulf Coast.” We willbring together public policy analysts,mayors of affected cities, tradeassociation leaders, and culturalcommentators to report on the state ofrecovery of the Coast and also to sharevisions of the new Gulf Coast. Thatregion has long been one thatwelcomed visitors and provided thepleasures of vacation holidays. Itscultural resources, historical treasures,and environmental wonders havealways been part of its charm, and wewill use our Future of the South forumto envisioning ways to recover as muchas possible of that charm, in the face ofnatural disaster.


Katrina: The Future of the Gulf Coast ConferenceDecember 2–3, 2005The Center and the University’s Department of Political Science will host aconference December 2–3 on the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coastand ideas for rebuilding. The conference will have sessions on the state ofeconomic and social recovery and will bring together a diverse group ofcommentators to share their visions of a new Coast. We have planned themeeting with the assistance of William Winter, and we hope to provide a forumfor the Governor’s Commission on Rebuilding, Recovery, and Renewal, ofwhich Governor Winter is a member.

The conference is a project of the Center’s Future of the South initiative,supported by a grant from the Phil Hardin Foundation and matchingcontributions from Center friends.


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High-quality unpublished poems sought for anthologyHurricane Blues: Poems on How Katrina and Rita Ravaged a Nation

Edited by Philip Kolin and Susan Swartwout.To be published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in Fall 2006.

Send 1 to 4 poems to Southeast Missouri State University Press, MS 2650 One University Plaza, Cape Girardeau, MO 63701.

No e-submissions.

Proceeds Go to Hurricane Relief.


Living Blues NewsThe latest issue of Living Blues magazinefocuses on Texas blues and includes profileson Little Joe Washington, Earl Gilliam, andTutu Jones, as well as an extensive review ofnew music releases by Texas blues artists. Atribute to blues great Little Milton, whorecently passed away, is also included withcomments from his friends and fellowmusicians.

Last month, Living Blues unveiled thenew Web site (www.livingblues.com),allowing users to subscribe to the magazine,purchase T-shirts and directories, andperuse back issues of Living Blues online.The Web site is Verisign secured and willfeature contests and giveaways in the nearfuture. Furthermore, on campus, LivingBlues hosted a “Blues in the Grove” concert with thelegendary “Stoop Down Man” Chick Willis on Friday, October 21, 2005, during theOle Miss v. Kentucky football weekend.

Finally, the Fourth Annual Blues Today: A Living Blues Symposium is scheduled forFebruary 10 and 11, 2006, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. The theme“Blues: The Devil’s Music?” will be explored through panel discussions, interviews

with musicians, photo displays, and live music. WilliamFerris, the Joel Williamson Professor of History at theUniversity of North Carolina, will deliver the EarlyWright Lecture on Saturday, February 11. Thesymposium will also feature a day excursion toClarksdale, Mississippi, including museum tours andlive music. A reunion of the famed “Satan and Adam”guitar/harmonica duo is also in the works. Make your

plans now and please check the Web site for details and program updates or contactMary Beth Lasseter at [email protected] for further details.

MARK CAMARIGG

Mark YourCalendars

December 2–3, 2005Future of the South Initiative

“Katrina: The Future of the GulfCoast”

www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/

February 10–11, 2006Blues Today: A Living BluesSymposium

“Blues: The Devil’s Music?”

www.outreach.olemiss.edu/livingblues/bluestoday/

March 27–30, 2006Mississippi Delta Literary Tour


March 30–April 1, 2006Oxford Conference for the Book


May 5–6, 2006Southern Gardens Symposium

www.outreach.olemiss.edu/gardening/

June 10, 2006Mississippi Institute of Arts andLetters Awards

Oxford, Mississippi

www.ms-arts-letters.org

July 23–27, 2006 Faulkner and YoknapatawphaConference

www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/

Look for other spring events:

Conference on the Civil War

Double Decker Bookend Events


This article by Curtis Wilkie appeared inThe Nation on October 3, 2005, and isreprinted here courtesy of the editors.

If the restoration of New Orleans failsas miserably as its rescue, the nationwill have lost a cultural treasure as wellas an important enclave of progressivevalues and Democratic strength in theDeep South.

From the time French explorersclaimed a clearing for a settlementalong the massive river three centuriesago, New Orleans existed as a placedistinctly different from the rest of thecountry. There was never anythingremotely Puritanical about its earlyyears. A strong hint of the pagan couldbe smelled in the air, and in moderntimes the city became a refreshingdetour off the Bible Beltway. While therest of the region exercised piety, NewOrleans honored tolerance. In NewOrleans, wine, women, and song werenot synonymous with sin; gay peoplefound refuge; and racially mixedcouples were acceptable at a time whenthere were laws against miscegenationin neighboring states.

New Orleans was not without theracial tensions and urban problems thatgrip other American municipalities. Itspublic schools had deteriorated badly,presenting an image as shameful as itsgang-infested housing projects. In thedays since Katrina struck, the world hasbeen exposed to New Orleans’ saddestand seamiest side: the inequities thattrapped the poor in neighborhoodsvulnerable to flooding, the distrust thattroubled relations between blacks andwhites. New Orleans was always a poorplace; that’s why the blues resonated soclearly here. Yet a dogged live-and-let-live spirit helped the city transcend itsdifficulties and persevere as one of thelast resorts for romantics.

Though a polyglot army of pirates andmilitiamen fought a famous battle a fewmiles down the river at the end of theWar of 1812, New Orleans was notknown to be bellicose like its sister cities

in the South. The city surrenderedwithout a fight at the beginning of theCivil War and endured its occupationwith characteristic élan. Residentspainted the visage of Union GeneralBenjamin Butler on the bottom of theirchamber pots and dumped the morningcontents on the heads of Yankee soldiersfrom the same balconies where theirdescendants would fling Mardi Grasbeads a century later. That was theextent of the resistance. New Orleansdid not suffer from the hard-coreConfederacy complex that stillcontributes to the South’s conservatism.The city got over the war and wentabout the business of growing as acosmopolitan port.

The city harbored slave markets in thefirst half of the 19th century. But evenbefore Emancipation, New Orleans had abourgeois class known as “free gentlemenof color.” Many came from theCaribbean, spoke French, and supporteda network of educators, musicians, andwriters. After Reconstruction, AfricanAmericans and Creoles gained a footholdin New Orleans more rapidly thanelsewhere in the South. Well before the

Voting Rights Act of 1965, New Orleansblacks voted in large numbers,encouraged by the quirky populist regimeof Huey P. Long, which controlledLouisiana during the Depression. Thecity’s black society sent out two sons,Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young,who became mayors of Atlanta. By themid-1970s the black majority gainedpolitical supremacy in New Orleans aswell, resulting in a succession of blackmayors that continues to this day.

Disgruntled whites shuffled off tosuburbs in Jefferson and St. Tammanyparishes, and their departure left thecity increasingly in the hands of blacksand whites unperturbed by racial fears.When David Duke, the wizard of afaction of the Ku Klux Klan, wound upin a run-off for governor of Louisiana in1991, he was rejected overwhelminglyin New Orleans, where a stunning 87percent of the voting population (thecount against Duke was 173,744 to25,921) supported the eventual winner,Edwin Edwards. A year the NewOrleans vote provided Bill Clinton’smargin of victory in Louisiana.

Politics in New Orleans has been a

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Horse and Airport Van in French Quarter, New Orleans


byproduct of a way of life that grew outof the city’s history. While much of theSouth was being settled by CalvinisticScots-Irish immigrants, New Orleansdeveloped as home for a mélange ofethnic backgrounds. French and Spanishflags flew over the city before theLouisiana Purchase in 1803. Slaverybrought thousands from Africa. Thencame the Irish and Italian laborers,German businessmen, Greek restau-rateurs, and merchants from the MiddleEast. By the beginning of the 20thcentury New Orleans stood as a largelyRoman Catholic island in a sea ofSouthern Baptists. A strong, stableJewish population provided moreleavening. The Rev. Jimmy Swaggartmight prosper down Airline Highway inBaton Rouge, but New Orleans washostile territory for the tent revivalistsand braying fundamentalist demagogues.

From its site in the deepest part ofthe South, New Orleans acted as ananti-Montgomery, offering antithesis tothe Southern stereotypes of rednecksheriffs, moonlight and magnolias. Andit stubbornly resisted modernhomogenization. New Orleans was acity of idiosyncrasies, sweeping fromthe palatial mansions along the St.Charles Avenue streetcar line to therundown bungalows and shotgunhouses in the working-class wards.Much of the architecture in the fabledFrench Quarter either reflected aSpanish influence or consisted ofCreole cottages built in the Caribbeanstyle. Despite its name, the FrenchQuarter was actually a residentialneighborhood for Sicilian families formost of the past century, until it wasdiscovered by artists and writers andantiestablishment characters such asRuthie the Duck Girl, an elderlywoman who kept a duck on a leash andcadged drinks in the corner bars.

In Faulkner, Joseph Blotner’sbiography, the author writes of how theaspiring Mississippi novelist and otherswere attracted to New Orleans afterWorld War I. These “young artists inrevolt and champions of the arts” werereacting, Blotner says, to H. L.Mencken’s scornful 1917 essay “TheSahara of the Bozart.” They felt

Mencken’s theory could be disprovedin New Orleans.

The South, Mencken had claimed,was a cultural wasteland. “In all thatgargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate,”Mencken wrote, “there is not a singlepicture gallery worth going into, or asingle orchestra capable of playing thenine symphonies of Beethoven, or asingle opera house, or a single theaterdevoted to decent plays, or a singlemonument that is worth looking at.” Yetin New Orleans there were museums andorchestras and theaters. And the citynurtured writers, from Kate Chopin andLillian Hellman to early Faulkner andSherwood Anderson and, later, toWalker Percy and Richard Ford. Tennessee Williams called the FrenchQuarter, the neighborhood he chose ashis home, “the last frontier of Bohemia.”

Before the storm, New Orleanshosted two literary festivals: one linkedto Faulkner, the other to Williams. Thelatter featured a contest for those whofelt they could shout “Stella!” theloudest, a slightly refined example ofstreet theatre.

New Orleans could be raunchy. Thestriptease joints on Bourbon Streetwere tolerated for tourists’ sake. ButNew Orleans preferred its own kind ofspectacle, using the slightest excuse fora parade. St. Patrick’s Day. St. Joseph’sDay. Anybody’s birthday. Hundreds oftransvestites in outrageous dragmarched every Labor Day inconnection with an event called“Southern Decadence Weekend.” Totweak the wealthy barons of Uptown,who bankrolled Mardi Gras throughtheir private krewes—as they called theorganizations responsible for the lavishcarnival floats—commoners organizeda rump parade called the “Krewe ofBarkus.” It involved several thousandhounds of all description paradingthrough the French Quarter. Mostfamously, New Orleans turned areligious event into a bacchanal,spending the two weeks leading to Lentin revelry as boisterous as thecelebrations in Venice and Rio deJaneiro. Lent, when it came, was notobserved faithfully, abstinence notbeing in the New Orleans manner. Bars

were open 24/7 and drinking waspermitted on the street. The cityactually had an ordinance requiringbartenders to furnish plastic containersknown locally as Go-cups.

The celebrities in New Orleans werechefs, men and women who enjoyed ahigher place in the city’s pantheonthan sports figures or political leadersor television personalities. NewOrleanians talked about eating likeBostonians talk baseball. Visitors mighthave known about Antoine’s andCommander’s Palace, but locals knewMandina’s and Casamento’s. Thenative cuisine was Creole—not to beconfused with Cajun—and many of theingredients came from the nearby Gulf.There was nothing bland about it.Even the lesser dishes were unique: thegigantic Muffaletta sandwich, builtwith cold-cut salami and ground olives,the Po’ Boys bulging with fried oysters,the Lucky Dogs that gave sustenance tomillions of late-night drunks. (Oh, thatIgnatius J. Reilly, the purveyor of LuckyDogs in Confederacy of Dunces, couldsee his city now. )

As much as New Orleans loved goodfood, it moved to music. Gospel. Folk.Funk. Blues. Rock ’n’ roll. Jazz was bornhere, and when someone died herethere was no better sendoff than a jazzfuneral beginning with soulful dirgesand ending in an explosion of colorfulumbrellas and an upbeat version of“When the Saints Go Marching In.”New Orleanians appreciated goodmusic—Mencken be damned. Theywere connoisseurs of the improvisationor the backbeat. They knew thatKermit Ruffins blew his horn onThursday night at an out-of-the-wayspot in the Bywater section. ThatAaron Neville sang carols a cappella onChristmas Eve at a church on RampartStreet.

Suddenly, the sounds are silent, thestreets still, the people dispersed.Merriment has given way tolamentation, and no one knows whenthe good times will roll again.


In January 2006 the Memphis CottonExchange building on Front Street willopen its main floor as a museumdedicated to telling the story of thispowerful industry, from field to factory,and of how this one plant has affectedso many lives and cultures throughouthuman history, especially in theAmerican South.

Once the economic center of thiscotton culture, the Exchange floor willnow house exhibitions dedicated tocapturing the world of cotton, throughthe creative efforts of architectWilliamson Pounders Architects, Design500, Counterpoint Communications andDesign, Memphis Pink Palace Museum,and the videos and productions of theWilliam Bearden Company. Highlightswill include a restoration of the floor tothe 1940s era, oral histories viewed in theoriginal phone booths used for cottontrades, the original Western Union officewith telegraph equipment, a CottonMuseum Hall of Fame, a mural of thecotton story by a leading Memphis artist,and exhibitions and films that presentthe history of the cotton industry andFront Street, especially from the 1800s tothe present.

The University of Mississippi’s Centerfor the Study of Southern Culture iscurrently taking part in the developmentof the Cotton Museum through agraduate student assistantship funded bythe Museum. The work involves directparticipation in various aspects of themuseum’s creation, from film productionto exhibit research. An advisory panelmade up of professors and professionalsfrom the Center is also working inpartnership with the museum to provideguidance, archival research, and theproduction of temporary exhibits thatwill focus on specific themes, issues,personalities, or narratives that revealthe impact of the cotton industry. Thefirst exhibition will feature stories andphotographs of the Delta cottonplantations that shaped the experiences,perspectives, and creative energies ofvarious renowned musicians, fromMuddy Waters to Johnny Cash. Afterbeing displayed in the Cotton Museum,these exhibitions will travel to libraries

and schools throughout the area, toeducate students and the public on howcotton has influenced many aspects oflife in the South.

The story of the cotton industry is richand deep, and resonates throughout themusic, art, literature, social life, andpolitics in Memphis, the AmericanSouth, the nation, and the world. The

Cotton Museum will provide a uniqueopportunity to define this story for thepublic and portray the role of the CottonExchange as a true crossroads of thisprofoundly influential culture.

For more information, visitwww.memphiscottonmuseum.org or e-mail [email protected].

MARY BATTLE

The Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange

The Story of CottonIn the barbecue joints and plate-lunch cafés off Memphis’s Front Street, a mostly

hidden society exists. The view into this world is slightly opaque to all but those in theknow, but in its glory days it wielded a measure of influence that is unheard of intoday’s world. It was a society peopled with characters and cads, the big and the smalltime, the rich and the richer, the hangers-on, the anointed, the powerful, and thebusted. It created empires in agriculture, transportation, banking, warehousing, and ahundred other businesses. And even though much of the day-to-day dealings havemoved to manicured office parks, high-rise office buildings, and other nondescriptlocales, its influence remains at the core of the Memphis economy and Memphissociety. It was the entity that propelled technological advances that changed the faceand the soul of the South. It was the wellspring from which no less than modern musicand much of our popular culture came into being. It triggered migrations by millions ofblacks and whites, changing forever the culture of Northern cities like Chicago,Detroit, and St. Louis. Its allure has called out to writers, artists, photographers, andother cultural chroniclers from around the world, drawing the curious to plumb thedepths of its strength and energy. It spawned its own literature in the writings ofWilliam Faulkner, Walker Percy, Richard Wright, Willie Morris, and dozens of others.Its influence is the nucleus of what popular music, through blues and jazz and rock androll, has become. This all-powerful entity is cotton.

WILLIAM BEARDEN

The “floor” of the Memphis Cotton Exchange is a high-ceilinged room with largewindows opening onto both Front Street and Union Avenue. The other two walls of theroom were completely covered with the “boards,” where quotations of all future markets,the current spot prices, ginnings, acreage, consumption, and any statistic necessary to theconduct of the cotton industry were posted.


Thomas D. ClarkJuly 14, 1903 - June 28, 2005Thomas Dionysius Clark was born in Louisville, Mississippi, and after receivinghis baccalaureate degree from Ole Miss in 1928, moved to Lexington,Kentucky, where he stayed for more than 75 years. He taught history at theUniversity of Kentucky for 36 years and authored, coauthored, or edited threedozen books, including A History of Kentucky. He wrote scores of scholarlyarticles and many of the entries in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, The Encyclopediaof Louisville, and the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, for which he served aseditor of the agriculture section.

Milburn James CroweMarch 15, 1933 - September 10, 2005Milburn Crowe was born in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the all-blackmunicipality that his father and other ex-slaves founded in 1887. He served ascommissioner for the Mississippi Delta Empowerment Zone Alliance and asMound Bayou’s city clerk and election commissioner and manager. He was theunofficial historian of the town and gathered an enormous archive ofdocuments and photographs documenting its history. He was a member of theMississippi Historical Society Board of Directors, the State Historical RecordsAdvisory Board, and committees for the Old Capitol Museum and the plannedMuseum of Mississippi History.

James Earl FisherDecember 24, 1947 - August 23, 2005James Earl Fisher, or “Fisher” as he was widely known, was a descendant ofsome of the earliest African American settlers in Oxford and LafayetteCounty. A fun loving person who knew no stranger, he loved gospel singing,cooking, collecting antiques, buying and selling clothes, and mainly talkingabout his family’s history.

Shelby FooteNovember 7, 1916 - June 27, 2005Shelby Foote, a native of Greenville, Mississippi, and a longtime resident ofMemphis, Tennessee, was the author of six novels and the three-volume TheCivil War: A Narrative, which the Modern Library ranked as Number 15 onits 1999 list of the 20th century’s 100 best works of nonfiction in the Englishlanguage. He gained national prominence for his role as commentator in the11-hour television documentary on the Civil War, produced and directed byKen Burns and first shown on the Public Broadcast System in 1990.

M. B. MayfieldApril 26, 1923 - June 3, 2005Artist M. B. Mayfield was a native of Ecru, Mississippi, where he spent thelatter part of his life. He studied art while an unofficial custodian at theUniversity of Mississippi from 1949 to 1952 and then moved to Memphis,Tennessee, where he served as custodian of the Brooks Art Museum for years.He became known for his paintings depicting scenes of African American lifeduring his childhood. Later, he also painted portraits of famous figures such asWilliam Faulkner, Oprah Winfrey, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis Presley. Many of hispaintings are reproduced in his autobiography, Baby Who Crawled Backwards.

In MemoriamFriends of the Center

Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha:July 23-27,2006

“Global Faulkner”One of the results of recent literary andhistorical investigation of the UnitedStates South is to reveal a world rich inparadox. It is a world deeply conscious of itsown colonization–its defeat, occupation,and exploitation by the North–even as ithas been the site of a sustained period ofcolonization by one segment of its ownpopulation. It is a world that throughout itshistory has been regarded, and has regardeditself, as exceptional, and yet, as aplantation economy, as the victim andpractitioner of forms of imperialism, as aculture characterized by racial suspicionand racial intimacy, the South has a historythat shares significant common groundwith the United States as a whole and withthe rest of the hemisphere to the south andto the north. Moreover, the perennialfascination with the United States Southdemonstrated by countries and culturesoutside North and South America suggestsa larger global dimension, the recognitionof a representativeness even wider than wehave imagined.

The 33rd annual Faulkner andYoknaptawpha conference will examineFaulkner’s fiction in terms of its depiction ofthe South as a representative “global”culture. How does Faulkner realize itsapparent contradictions, and to whatextent does he propose their reconciliation?Is Faulkner’s “global” understanding of theSouth a source of hope or of tension andeven tragedy within his fiction? How mightthis approach to Faulkner affect theteaching of his work, particularly outsidethe U.S. South?

We are inviting 40-minute plenarypapers and 20-minute panel papers.Plenary papers consist of approximately5,000 words and will be published by theUniversity Press of Mississippi. Panelpapers consist of approximately 2,500words; a selection of these papers forpublication in the conference volumewill be made by a jury of the conferenceprogram committee.

For plenary papers three copies ofmanuscripts must be submitted by January

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CALL FOR PAPERS


The 13th Oxford Conference for the BookThe University of Mississippi • Oxford, MississippiMarch 30 - April 1, 2006Notable authors, editors, publishers, and others in the trade as well as educators,literacy advocates, readers, and book lovers will gather for the 13th OxfordConference for the Book, set for March 30–April 1, 2006. Beginning on Thursdayafternoon with two sessions and a special conference edition of Thacker MountainRadio, the program will continue through Saturday afternoon with addresses,panels, and readings. A fiction and poetry jam, an Elderhostel program, a marathonbook signing at Square Books, and an optional literary tour of the Mississippi Delta(March 27–April 1) are also part of the festivities.

The 2006 conference is dedicated to novelist and historian Shelby Foote (1916-2005), a native of Greenville, Mississippi, and a longtime resident of Memphis,Tennessee. Ellen Douglas, novelist and friend since their days in Greenville, willopen the conference with a talk about Foote as a fiction writer. Gary W. Gallagher,professor of history at the University of Virginia, will discuss Foote’s three-volumehistory of the Civil War. There will also be a panel with members of the Memphisbook club in which the author participated for more than a quarter of a century.

The slate of speakers is not yet final, but already signed up are poet JuliannaBaggott; fiction writers Brian Keith Jackson, Jack Pendarvis, George Saunders,Michael Knight; art historians Patti Carr Black, Mary Lynn Kotz, Mark Stevens,Annalyn Swan; and journalists James Gill and Thomas Oliphant. Novelist,journalist, and playwright Larry L. King will be here to unveil his memoir of WillieMorris, to be published in March 2006.

Once again, the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, the Lafayette County Literacy Council,Square Books Jr., and other collaborators will bring local fifth graders to the campus tomeet an author of books for young readers. The program is being expanded in 2006 toinclude a session for ninthgraders with Sharon M.Draper, author of The Battle ofJericho and other award-winning books. Regular panelslike “The Endangered Species:Readers Today andTomorrow” and “Finding aVoice/Reaching an Audience”are also scheduled.

The conference is open tothe public without charge.To assure seating space,those interested in attendingshould preregister bycontacting the Center forthe Study of SouthernCulture. Reservations andadvance payment arerequired for two optionalevents honoring conferencespeakers: a cocktail buffet at Isom Place ($50) and a country dinner at TaylorCatfish ($25). Special registration is required for the Delta Literary Tour. Call 662-925-5993, e-mail marybeth@olemiss, or visit www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/ formore information or to register for conference programs.

Detailed information about the program, speakers, and registration will soon beavailable on the Center’s Web site (www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/) or the SquareBooks site (www.squarebooks.com).

An easy way to attend the Oxford Conferencefor the Book is through Elderhostel, aninternational program of educational travel foradults 55 and older. For $444 per person,everything is provided: the conference, threenights’ lodging at the newly renovatedDowntown Oxford Inn and Suites, all mealsfrom dinner March 30 through breakfast April 2,and local transportation to and from conferenceactivities. To register, call toll-free, 877-426-8056, or go to www.elderhostel.org, and refer to“So You Love Books? Get between the Pages atthe Oxford Conference for the Book,” programnumber 12317-033006. For information, callCenter Advisory Committee member andlongtime Elderhostel provider Carolyn VanceSmith in Natchez, 601-446-1208, or e-mail herat [email protected].

Mississippi DeltaLiterary TourMarch 27 - 30, 2006The Mississippi Delta is the site of aspring tour organized by the Center forthe Study of Southern Culture.Focusing on the area’s legendary blues,writers, and food—along with itstumultuous history–the program isbased in Greenwood, home ofplaywright Endesha Ida Mae Hollandand memoirist Mildred Topp, and willinclude day trips to three other towns.

Scheduled for Monday, March 27, is abus trip to the historic town of Carrollton,ancestral and early home of novelist,story writer, and memoirist ElizabethSpencer. On Tuesday, March 28, thegroup will travel to Greenville, home ofWilliam Alexander Percy, Ellen Douglas,Shelby Foote, Bern Keating, WalkerPercy, Julia Reed, Ben Wasson, and manyother writers. On Wednesday, March 29,the group will go to Sumner, where theEmmett Till murder trial took place andthe scene of Lewis Nordan’s novel WolfWhistle, based on the Till case.

Also scheduled are meals at notableDelta restaurants as well as live blues andgospel performances. On March 30, afterbreakfast at the Alluvian–Viking RangeCorporation’s boutique hotel–partici-pants will be free to travel on their own tothe Oxford Conference for the Book,which will begin that afternoon.

The Delta tour is $475 per person forall program activities, eight meals, andlocal transportation. The fee does notinclude lodging. To register, visit theCenter’s Web site (www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/). Remember to sign upearly. Only 35 spots are available, andthey will go fast.

Group accommodations have beenarranged at the Alluvian, in downtownGreenwood. [www.thealluvian.com]Rooms at the Alluvian require aseparate registration and are priced at adiscounted rate of $145. Rooms may bereserved by calling 866-600-5201 andasking for the special “Literary Tour”rate. In the event that the Alluvian sellsout before you get a chance to book aroom, call the Greenwood Best Western,662-455-5777.

Fall 2005 The Southern RegisterPage 10 Fall 2005 The Southern Register

Thacker Mountain Radio, in its earlyincarnation, debuted on October 15,1997. First billed as the Words andMusic Community Radio Hour, the showrose in the midst of a radio renaissancein Oxford at a time when four differentlive radio shows were being broadcastfrom various venues around town.Words and Music began as acollaboration between Square Booksowner Richard Howorth and twoambitious local musicians, BryanLedford and Caroline Herring, whoseband The Sincere Ramblers hosted theshow in Howorth’s cavernous usedbookshop, Off Square Books. The freeadmission and diverse program, mixingauthor readings and live musical

performances, was an instantattraction, and the show quicklyevolved into Thacker Mountain Radio.

While the show was designed as afree community radio program for thepeople of Oxford and Lafayette County,Thacker Mountain Radio widened itscontent to attract a statewide audiencewhen Mississippi Public Broadcastingbegan airing the program in the fall of2002. From its inception, the show hasbenefited from Oxford’s far-reachingappeal, which draws authors andmusicians from all over the world. Thisyear that appeal was recognized whenThacker Mountain Radio was presentedwith the Governor’s Award forExcellence in the Arts in Mississippi.

As Thacker Mountain Radio has grownand developed over the years, thenonprofit show has received supportfrom many sources. Mississippi PublicBroadcasting moved it to the prime slotof 7:00 p.m. on Saturday night followingGarrison Keillor’s Prairie HomeCompanion. Thacker has benefited frominvaluable assistance from the Center forthe Study of Southern Culture at theUniversity of Mississippi and grants fromthe Mississippi Arts Commission,Mississippi Humanities Commission, theNational Endowment for the Arts, andthe Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, aswell as donations from individuals andprivate foundations.

Friends of Thacker MountainThacker Mountain Radio • c/o Square Books • 160 Courthouse Square • Oxford, MS 38655

I would like to become a Friend of Thacker Mountain and am including a season donation of

o $10 (student) o $40 o Other $_____ (Please make checks payable to Friends of Thacker Mountain.)

Name _____________________________________________________________________________________________

Address ___________________________________________________________________________________________

City ____________________________________________ State _____________ Zip _________________

Telephone _______________________________________________

o I would like to have my gift acknowledged in show literature.

o Contact me about having an announcement made during a show.

Thacker Mountain Radio Grows and Grows

September 26 - November 11,2005Southern Food in conTEXTSAmy Evans

November 14, 2005 - January 13,2006The Religious Landscape ofSouthern RoadsidesJoe York

January 15 - March 22, 2006Sacred Steel: The Music andCulture of the House of God andChurch of the Living GodBob Stone

Exhibition Schedule

The Gammill Gallery, located in Barnard Observatory, is open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.,except for University holidays. Telephone: 662-915-5993.


The Mississippi Institute of Arts andLetters (MIAL) will acceptnominations for 2005 artist awardsfrom now until January 15, 2006.Awards to Mississippi’s outstandingartists in the categories of Fiction,Music Composition (Concert andPopular), Nonfiction, Photography,Poetry, and Visual Arts will bepresented at MIAL’s annual galascheduled for June 10, 2005, in Oxford. The awards honor the achievements ofliving Mississippians (current residentsor former ones with continuing,significant ties to the state). Artists arenominated on the basis of work shown,published, or performed in 2005.

Only members of MIAL maynominate. Anyone may join;

membership dues start at $35 for anindividual (students at $15). VisitMIAL’s Web site at www.ms-arts-letters.org for complete instructionsabout joining and about nominating anartist for an award.

MIAL is now in its 27th year, havingbegun in 1978. Among its founderswere Governor William Winter, CoraNorman, Aubrey Lucas, Noel Polk, andKeith Dockery McLean. Their purposewas to establish a way to support,nurture, and recognize one ofMississippi’s most important resources,her artists. Recipients are awarded cashprizes and Mississippi-made gifts.

The competition is a juried one, withjudges, prominent in their fields,chosen from out of state. MIAL is

privately funded, self-perpetuating, andnonprofit.

Artists honored in past years includeEllen Douglas, Walker Percy, WillieMorris, Richard Ford, Barry Hannah,Samuel Jones, James Slater, WilliamDunlap, John Stone, GwendolynMagee, and Birney Imes III.

Plans are under way for a day of eventspreceding the annual awards gala at theOxford Conference Center. A tour ofRowan Oak and an exhibit at theUniversity Museum by Gwen Magee, aformer MIAL award winner and currentmember of the MIAL Board ofGovernors, are two of the specialhighlights being planned. Magee’sexhibition is called Journey of the Spiritand draws its inspiration from the hymn“Lift Every Voice and Sing.” AnnAbadie, Oxford, is chair of the programcommittee planning the gala. Otherprogram committee members are BonnieDavidson, Tupelo; Sandra Shellnut, PassChristian; Patty Lewis, Oxford; JanTaylor and Mark Wiggs, Jackson.

For additional information, contactMargaret Anne Mitchell at 601-366-0761 or write MIAL, P.O. Box 2346,Jackson, MS 39225-2346. The MIALWeb site address is www.ms-arts-letters.org.

MARION BARNWELL

Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Makes Callsfor Awards Nominations, Invites New Members

MIAL MEMBERSHIP FORMName _____________________________________________________________________________________________

Address ___________________________________________________________________________________________

City ____________________________________________ State _____________ Zip _________________

E-mail _________________________________ Daytime Telephone ____________________________

Check membership dues category:

o Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $15 o Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . $35

o Contributing (couples) . . . . . . $60 o Sustaining . . . . . . . . . . . $125

o Institutional. . . . . . . . . . . . . $150 o Patron . . . . . . . . . . . . $1,000Make checks payable to MIAL. Send to Margaret Anne Mitchell, Executive Secretary, P.O. Box 2346, Jackson, MS 39225-2346.

Recipients of 2005MILA awardspictured here are(from left) BrooksHaxton (Poetry),Gretchen Haien(Photography),Justin Sharp(MusicalComposition), andMargaret McMullan(Fiction). Notpictured are SamGilliam (Visual Arts)and Timothy B.Smith (Nonfiction).

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New Southern Studies graduate students pictured atBarnard Observatory are, left to right, front row:Emily Romines (Truman State University), AmySchmidt (Lyon College), Catherine Barnett(University of Florida), Mark Coltrain (University ofNorth Carolina at Greensboro); second row: KatieStevens (Williams College), Georgeanna Milam(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill),Maarten Zwiers (University of Groningen,Netherlands), L. V. McNeil (University ofMississippi); third row: Natoria Kennell (Universityof Mississippi), Mary Margaret Miller (University ofMississippi), J. Arthur Greene (University ofWashington), and Matthew Glass (AuburnUniversity). Not pictured are Kirk Graves (PrincetonUniversity), Odie Lindsey (Art Institute of Chicago),Kate Medley (University of Arkansas), and Velsie Pate(University of Mississippi).

Nancy Bercaw says that studyingWestern history this summer made herrealize how “advanced SouthernStudies is in its thinking about region.”

Bercaw, associate professor of historyand Southern Studies at Ole Miss,spent the five weeks before the fallsemester as a fellow with the NationalEndowment for the HumanitiesSummer Institute titled “TheRedemptive West: Nationhood andHealing in the Post–Civil WarAmerican West.” Bercaw was one of 25college and university faculty fromaround the country awarded grants toattend the institute, based at theHuntington Library in San Marino,California. While there, she and theinstitute’s other fellows spent theirmornings participating in discussionsled by experts in Western history,literature, and art history.

“The institute made me realize thatWestern Studies doesn’t confront suchcomplicated issues as race in assophisticated a manner,” says Bercaw,who specializes in Southern historyduring the time of emancipation.“Reading Western literature made mesee how Southern Studies wouldapproach problems differently.”

Besides the opportunity to study theWest, Bercaw was free each afternoon

to conduct her own research, using thevast resources of the HuntingtonLibrary. She spent hours poring through19th-century medical manuals in anattempt to understand the thinkingbehind medical researchers’ interest incollecting and comparing cadavers ofdifferent races.

“Historians have tended to skip overthe time period from the Civil Waruntil 1890,” Bercaw says. “There’s noclear narrative for that period. It’s astrange time because people areconflicted and are not doing some ofthe racist things that they’ll do later,during Jim Crow. The writings ofdoctors during the 1860s show themindset of how people are dealing withissues of race at the time.”

In coming months Bercaw willcontinue her research—in Januaryshe’ll spend time as a Wood Fellow atthe College of Physicians inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania—beforeshaping it into a book chaptertentatively titled “Collecting ‘Black’Bodies: Medicine, Museums, andRace.” The working title for the bookitself is Disrupting Categories: A CulturalHistory of Black Womanhood in the Ageof Emancipation.

“It’s amazing that 1862, the first yearblack people started freeing themselves

in the South, also marked the first yearthe government began collectingbodies for research,” Bercaw said. “In1867, the year black men voted for thefirst time, the government issued a callfor racialized body types. These werethe first steps of racialized science.”

Bercaw says that exploring themanuals, many of which dealt with thecollection of Indian bodies in the West,and simultaneously participating in theseminar “reaffirmed [her] faith” inSouthern Studies. “I was glad to comeback to Mississippi,” she says. “Much ofthe Western scholarship ignores the factthat their history is very similar toSouthern history as far as issues of race.”

JENNIFER SOUTHALL

Bercaw Attends NEH SummerInstitute at the Huntington Library

Nancy Bercaw

David

Wharton

New Graduate Students in Southern Studies

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Sally Graham has observedpresidential elections in thePhilippines, studied in Kenya andAustralia, taught in the islandRepublic of Palau, and is currentlystarring in Rabbit Hunt, a“mockumentary” about Southernfolk art now being submitted tofilm festivals. But Graham, whoworks in Atlanta as a writer forCNN International, says that shecounts earning her master’s degreein Southern Studies as rewardingas any experience she’s had.

“I consider my SouthernStudies master’s degree as equallyimportant in my personaldevelopment as earning an IvyLeague undergraduate degree,”says Graham, who received herbachelor’s degree from ColumbiaUniversity. “The University ofMississippi’s graduate program inSouthern Studies is the mostcomprehensive of its kind and thefirst program to focus on theAmerican South. They sayimitation is the highest form offlattery—well, other institutions ofhigher learning have similar programsbut nothing beats Oxford and thefaculty at the University of Mississippi.”

Graham says that it was an article inSouthern Living magazine that turnedher on to enrolling in the SouthernStudies MA program at Ole Miss. Shewas driving across the South with hermother, from Macon, Georgia, toGraham’s birthplace of Hot Springs,Arkansas, when she flipped to an articleabout the Center.

“The more I talked with my motheron the long drive, the more I became

intrigued with the work of a placecalled the Center for the Study ofSouthern Culture.” Graham says.“Finally, my mother said, ‘Let’s just goto Oxford!’ So we made a detour.”

Graham liked what she saw in Oxfordand applied immediately for the fall of1990. While in the MA program, sheparticipated in the IchauwayDocumentary Project, a two-year studyof the traditional culture of a 28,000-acrequail hunting reserve and ecologicalresearch site in Baker County, Georgia,

and ultimately based her thesis,which she describes as “anethnography about an AfricanAmerican woman pastor and herchurch community,” on theIchauway work.

Her experience at Ichauwaythen led Graham to DukeUniversity’s Center forDocumentary Studies, whereGraham conducted interviewswith African Americans abouttheir experiences in the Jim CrowSouth. Some of those interviewsare included in the bookRemembering Jim Crow: AfricanAmericans Tell about Life in theSegregated South.

Graham says her work in theMA program was a naturalprogression for her: “I think theSouthern Studies master’s programoffers a solid framework forintellectual inquiry and personaldiscovery. I grew up respecting thestories of my ancestors, visitinggravesites and Alabama

plantations, and asking questions, lotsof questions.”

And of course, as a writer for CNNInternational she’s still asking lots ofquestions, questions she says are alwaysframed by her graduate work at OleMiss.

“From sharing mussels in Brusselswith the poet laureate of Eritrea tovisiting the slave forts of Ghana as aguest of Conservation International, Ihave taken the multidisciplinaryapproach to understanding Southernculture and applied it to my work as awriter.”

JENNIFER SOUTHALL

Sally Graham: Southern Studies Superstar on CNN

Forty-eight photographs made bystudents in last fall’s Southern Studiesdocumentary photography seminarwill be exhibited this fall and winterin the libraries of four of the townsthe class photographed. Organized byAnn King, librarian at the Jesse Yancy

Memorial Library in Bruce,Mississippi, the exhibition will beshown in Bruce during the month ofOctober and then will travel toPontotoc (November 1-30), WaterValley (December 1-January 6), andNew Albany (January 7-February 4).

The students whose photographs areincluded are Robert Caldwell, SeanHughes, Nathan Kosub, AndrewLeventhal, Mary Margaret Miller,Susie Penman, Renna Tuten, andRobin Yekaitis.

Student Photographs to Be Exhibited in Local Libraries

Sally Graham

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Lancy


SFA Oral History WorkRecognized on SouthernArtistry Web SiteThe work of Amy Evans, oral historian for the SouthernFoodways Alliance, was recently selected for inclusion onSouthernArtistry.org, aWeb site dedicated to“outstanding artists of alldisciplines that live andwork in the region.”

“This is great exposurefor the Southern FoodwaysAlliance’s Oral HistoryInitiative and for tellingstories about food arts inthe South,” says Evans,who works out of theUniversity of Mississippi’sCenter for the Study ofSouthern Culture, whereSFA is housed and whereshe received a master’sdegree in Southern Studiesin 2003.

Text and images from Evans’s oral history work on Greekfood in Birmingham, tamales in the Mississippi Delta, thebarbecue of Tennessee, and more can be found on the sitealongside samplings from dozens of other Southern artists,whose disciplines range from dance to the literary arts.

“It’s good to know about these people who are doing suchwonderful and creative work all over the South,” Evans says.“It’s nice for everyone to be recognized in one place, and, ofcourse, it’s nice to be recognized individually.”

This isn’t the first time Evans has been recognizedindividually for her oral history work. She was featured in theNovember 2004 issue of Food & Wine magazine as one of 35recipients of the publication’s “Tastemaker Award.” That listincluded the country’s most “fabulously creative people”involved in the food arts, according to senior editor KateKrader.

John T. Edge, SFA director, says that all of Evans’srecognition “is a validation of her work and above all hersensitivity to her subjects. We’re especially proud since wehired her as a full-time oral historian in July.” (PreviouslyEvans directed the SFA’s Oral History Initiative on afreelance basis.)

Besides samples on the SouthernArtistry Web site, fulltranscripts and images of Evans’s work can be found on SFA’ssite, www.southernfoodways.com. Complete information onthe SFA and the Oral History Initiative can also be foundthere.

JENNIFER SOUTHALL

Amy Evans

Kurt

Streeter

New Addition to theSouthern Studies EmpireCongratulations to Sarah Torian (MA 1997) and BlandWhitley (MA 1996) on the birth of Samuel MasonWhitley on June 17, 2005. Mason is the first offspring oftwo Southern Studies alums. Center faculty, students,and friends are awaiting their visit to Oxford for whatBland describes as “an appropriate ‘southron’ceremony—baptism with the use of Elvis sweat on theporch of City Grocery, perhaps.”

Bland is now a research fellow with the Library ofVirginia, working with a staff that is publishing aDictionary of Virginia Biographies. Sarah is anindependent consultant with the Annie E. CaseyFoundation and provides research and writing supportfor their work to benefit low-income children andfamilies in Atlanta.

Southern Studies alums show off their new baby, MasonWhitley


Angel GetsHis WingsSouthern Studies master’s programgraduate Angel Ysaguirre recentlyjoined the Boeing Company’s head-quarters in Chicago as Community andEducation Relations Specialist. AtBoeing, Ysaguirre will be charged withawarding grants to Chicago nonprofitorganizations, including those focusedon arts and cultural programs as well ascivic education. Previously, Ysaguirrespent six years at the IllinoisHumanities Council as Director ofPrograms and Partnerships.

Ysaguirre earned his master’s inSouthern Studies from Ole Miss in 1996after receiving his undergraduate degreein English from Florida’s StetsonUniversity. He says that although hisprofessional work has not been directlyrelated to his Southern Studiescoursework, he’s put to good use theresearch and writing skills he learned atOle Miss. “The process that one learns iswhat I’ve used at my jobs,” he says.

JENNIFER SOUTHALL

Center Gift Honors EdmondsMike Edmonds, an Ole Miss alumnusand former assistant dean of students,was recently honored with a $10,000 giftin his name to the Center’s Endowmentfor the Future of the South. Given byMatthew Burkley, a friend of Edmonds’sfrom Cambridge, Massachusetts, the giftwill go toward helping support the newinitiative that aims to bring togetherleaders of the American South toexplore collaboratively ways to advancethe region’s development.

Edmonds, who received a bachelor’sdegree in theater arts/speechcommunication as well as master’s anddoctoral degrees in higher educationfrom Ole Miss, served the University asassistant professor of theater, directorof student programming, and StudentUnion programming director beforebeing named assistant dean of students. In 1991 Edmonds left Ole Miss to take onthe roles of dean of students and professor of drama at Colorado College. In August,he was named Colorado College’s vice president for student life/dean of students.

During his career Edmonds has received numerous awards, including the State ofMississippi Joint House and Senate Commendatory Resolution and the AmericanCancer Society’s St. George Medal.

JENNIFER SOUTHALL

Mike Edmonds. Portrait by Jason Bouldin

The Center is pleased to announce thatJim and Ward Sumner of Jackson andMichelle Oakes of Chapel Hill, NorthCarolina, have recently joined theVentress Order, an organization thatadministers gifts to departments withinthe University’s College of LiberalArts. The Sumners and Oakes havedirected their Ventress Order gifts tothe Center.

Jim and Ward Sumner, who arenatives of Greenwood and Winona,respectively, have for the past 11 yearslived in Jackson, where Jim is a U.S.magistrate. Ward, who studied arthistory at Vassar, said that supportingthe arts by way of the Center isimportant to both her and Jim, agraduate of Washington and Lee andthe Ole Miss law school.

“I’ve been a fan of the Center for along time,” says Ward, who recently

joined the Center’s advisorycommittee. “I’ve had friendswhose children were in theSouthern Studies Program atthe very beginning, and I was soimpressed with the Encyclopediaof Southern Culture.”

Michelle Oakes, a New Orleans nativeand Ole Miss graduate, is also a newadvisory committee member as well as alongtime fan of the Center. “The Centeris a center of excellence doing work ofgreat importance,” she says.

Oakes, who moved to Chapel Hilllast year to start her own companyrehabilitating properties after a decadeworking for large corporations, saysthat she gave to the Ventress Orderbecause it’s a “great way to give back”:“The Ventress Order is a terrific vehicleto demonstrate a commitment to boththe Center and Ole Miss.”

Named in honor of James AlexanderVentress, a founding father of theUniversity, the Ventress Orderencourages recognition of the Collegeof Liberal Arts as one of the country’soutstanding centers of learning. Formore information about giving todepartments within the College ofLiberal Arts, please call Josh Davis,advancement associate for the Collegeof Liberal Arts, at 662-915-5944 or800-340-9542.

JENNIFER SOUTHALL

New Ventress Order MembersWard and Jim Sumner

Fall 2005 The Southern RegisterPage 16 Fall 2005 The Southern Register

As a Southern writer and as a writerknown for his representations of historyand of characters obsessed with it, thetheme of “inheritance” in Faulknerseemed not only fitting but inevitable.“Inheritance”—what it is made of, andwhat it means to those who receiveit—had been his primary subject fromthe beginning, and certainly one of thesubjects most studied by scholars.Particularly noteworthy, then, aboutthe 32nd annual Faulkner andYoknapatawpha Conference was theemergence of facets of that inheritancethat had scarcely been touched onbefore.

Adam Gussow put forth a series ofFaulkner texts, including “That EveningSun” and “Pantaloon in Black,” that aresurprisingly susceptible to a readinginformed by the “blues” tradition; JudithSensibar explored the impact on Faulknerof his future wife Estelle’s creative work inthe 1920s, before he had found hisfictional voice; Elizabeth Cornellintroduced the theories of AlbertEinstein as possible background for theQuentin section of The Sound and theFury; Martin Kreiswirth proposed a newdimension of Freud to Faulkner criticismby introducing the “Uncanny” to thereading of Absalom, Absalom!; andReginald Martin raised new questionsregarding the motivation of Charles Bonin the same novel by pointing out thegreat differences between Louisiana’slenient codes for people of Creolebackground and those of Mississippi,where Bon would become “by state lawhis own father’s black slave.”

Other scholars added new layers toFaulkner’s inheritance by reopeningalready treated perspectives: SusanDonaldson on the “culture ofsegregation”; Brittany Powell on theQuixotic hero; Lael Gold on the twostrands of Faulkner’s Bible reading, theoral African American Bible and thewritten white one. Other scholars,including Jay Parini, Peter Robert Brown,Jonathan Howland, Jon Smith, MatthewSutton, and Priscilla Wald, assessed theimpact of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times,oral culture, material culture in andoutside Yoknapatawpha, and Faulkner’s

deep concern with “apocalyptic fear” asan undisclosed quality in the UnitedStates. Finally, Noel Polk complicatedthe idea of inheritance by analyzingFaulkner’s quest for some kind of“originating moment,” when he couldwrite without the influence of anyone orany preceding event.

In addition to the formal presentations,John Maxwell performed an abridgedversion of his acclaimed monologue “Oh,Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?” and SamApple read his winning entry in the Faux

Faulkner Contest, “The Administrationand the Fury: If William Faulkner WereWriting on the Bush White House.”Seth Berner, a book dealer fromPortland, Maine, conducted a session on“Collecting Faulkner,” and ColbyKullman moderated “Faulkner on theFringe” at the Southside Gallery.“Oxford Remembers,” coordinated byElizabeth Shiver, brought together sixOxonians for reminiscence of theFaulkner family and Oxford as it waswhen Faulkner lived here. A highlight ofthe conference continued to be the“Teaching Faulkner” sessions conductedthis year by James B. Carothers, TerrellL. Tebbetts, Theresa Towner, andCharles A. Peek.

Other events included two artexhibitions: Faulkner Prints by BoydSaunders at the University Museumand Whispering Pines, a collection ofphotographs by Birney Imes, at BarnardObservatory. There were also guidedtours of North Mississippi, an openingdinner at historic Memory House, anda closing party at Square Books.

As is always the case with majorartists, the “inheritance” continues toexpand, part of the past that, asFaulkner put it, is “not even past.”

DONALD M. KARTIGANER

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2005: “Faulkner’s Inheritance”

Conference participants looking at SethBerner’s Faulkner book display

“Faulkner in Oxford” moderator Elizabeth Shiver (from left) with panelists HarterWilliams Crutcher, Mildred Murray Douglas Hopkins, Dr. Ray J. Nichols, Carl S.Downing, and William Lewis

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SOUTHERN FOODWAYS REGISTERT h e N e w s l e t t e r o f t h e S o u t h e r n F o o d w a y s A l l i a n c e

Hurricane Katrina –SFA RespondsSFA has partnered with CIRA (theCouncil of Independent Restaurants)and the James Beard Foundation to builda job bank for displaced restaurantworkers. Approximately 60 SFAmembers volunteered to phone BeardFoundation member restaurants. Theyasked that the restaurant offer a minimumof one job to displaced workers. Theyexplained that each offer should comewith a promise of temporary housing andthat the employee will likely need helpwith relocation funds, too. Job offers areposted at www.cirajobs.com. Anyonemay view jobs online. To post a job offerto the site, retrieve the password fromwww.southernfoodways.com.

Full-time SFA OralHistorian HiredUniversity of Mississippi ChancellorRobert Khayat awarded SFA a one-timedevelopment grant of $30,000. Thosefunds, combined with an ongoing$15,000 annual grant from Birmingham-based Jim ’N Nick’s Bar-B-Que, fueledthe hire of SFA’s first full-time oralhistorian. Amy Evans, who built theprogram, first as a Southern Studiesgraduate student and later as a freelancer,began work in late July.

Tim O’Brien’s NewAlbumsThis fall, look for two full albums ofAmerican folk by singer and songwriterand SFA member Tim O’Brien,Cornbread Nation and Fiddler’s Green.The title track for Cornbread Nationwas written especially for SFA anddraws a parallel between traditionalfood and music—subjects dear toO’Brien’s heart. Other songs on thealbum, like “Long Black Veil,” “Houseof the Rising Sun,” and “Busted,”showcase his knack for interpretingcontemporary songs and making themhis own.

New Oral HistoriesOnlineA survey of the bartenders of NewOrleans, underwritten by SouthernComfort and collected by SFA oralhistorian Amy Evans, is now online.Viewed in the light of the recenttragedy, they are especially poignant.

Lyndhurst Foundation GrantThe Lyndhurst Foundation of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which had its beginnings inthe philanthropic activities of Thomas Cartter Lupton, a pioneer in the Coca-Colabottling business, has awarded SFA a grant of $5,000 for general support. SFAdeeply appreciates the gift. Visit their Web site at www.lyndhurstfoundation.org.

From the PresidentDear SFA Members, First, my profound thanks andcongratulations to all in New Orleanswho put together an amazing event. TheField Trip was imagined and executed byan all-volunteer crew including LolisEric Elie, Sara Roahen, Brett Anderson,Sarah O’Kelley, Brooks Hamaker, ScottSimmons, Poppy Tooker, Liz Williams,Elizabeth Pearce, Matt Konigsmark,Pableaux Johnson, Susan Tucker, andthe Eversmeyer family. MarcelleBienvenue provided wonderful insightinto the sugar cane industry and thepeople behind it. Our sponsors—Tabasco and Southern Comfort—enabled us to do it with panache and atan affordable price.

Many of our members who wanted tojoin us in New Orleans but could notwill be happy to know your board isworking hard to address this challenge.One of the ideas we’ve begunimplementing is a series of regionaldinners, kind of mini Field Trips. We’recalling them Day Camps, and the firstone, lovingly named Camp Bacon, tookplace on September 16 in Louisville. Tolearn more, point your browser towww.southernfoodways.com. Goingforward, Angie Mosier is helpingmembers organize their own events. Ifyou’d like to initiate a dinner, contactAngie at [email protected].

Our oral history work is progressing.In the coming months Amy Evanswill be working with, among othergroups, tamale makers in Mississippiand beekeepers in Florida. Lookingtoward to our May 18–21, 2006, FieldTrip to Apalachicola, Florida, she willbe collecting histories from oystermenand fisherwomen.

And please keep SouthernFoodways in mind when you thinkabout charitable giving. We have somuch work to do and so few resources!The organization needs andappreciates your support.

Yours around the table,Elizabeth Sims

In Kentucky, curing bacon and hamshas been a necessity of life forgenerations. In more recent years, thistradition has been in retreat. Someblame onerous government regulations.Others see urbanization as the culprit.Others still ponder our region’sevolving food habits. There remain,however, a select few artisans who clingfaithfully to family traditions. By way ofgenerations-old recipes, hands-onexpertise, and time sweet time, a smallnumber of folks are still doing thingsthe old fashioned way. As a means ofsurvival, these purveyors of bacon,whose families once cured by necessity,are now catering to gourmands andchefs who appreciate both the effortinvested and the end result. They arecarrying forth the tradition.

Amy Evans, oral historian for theSouthern Foodways Alliance, inter-viewed eight of these artisans as part of aproject sponsored by grants fromBirmingham-based Jim ’N Nick’s Bar-B-Que and the University of Mississippi.Sketches and photographs of threebacon producers and the names andbusinesses of five others interviewed arepresented below. The entire project,with audio clips from each interview, canfound at www.southernfoodways.com.

Colonel Bill Newsom’s Aged CountryHamNancy Newsom MahaffeyNancy Newsom Mahaffey, known far andwide as The Ham Lady, is one of the fewwomen who dry-cures pork. Her familyhas been curing ham in the town ofPrinceton, Kentucky, for generations.H. C. Newsom, Nancy’s grandfather,worked from a cure, handed down in an18th-century family will. Before long, hewas selling hams and bacon in the family-owned general store. Eventually, his son,Colonel Bill Newsom, started working onhis own and developed a traditional sugarcure, which caught the attention offamous eaters like James Beard. Nancygrew up learning the value of traditionand the secret to her father’s success.Today, she carries on her father’s legacy inthe same store, curing the same way, in

the same ham house, catering to some ofthe same customers who have frequentedNewsom’s Old Mill Store for decades.

Father’s Country HamsCharles Gatton Jr.Charles Gatton Jr. is known to some asthe mad scientist of bacon. Growing upon Gatton Farms, in Bremen, Kentucky,Charles learned the business of curinghams and bacon from his father, CharlesGatton Sr., who founded Father’sCountry Hams in 1950. When his fatherpassed away in 2000, Charles Jr. decidedto take bacon-making to another level.His epiphany occurred at a food show,when chocolate purveyors asked if hecould create a chocolate-flavored bacon.Charles Jr. returned home and begantoying with different products, eventuallygetting his hands on some flavorings thathe could use in his dry-cure process.Today, Gatton Farms makes 10 flavors ofbacon, including apple cinnamon and

vanilla bourbon, but no chocolate—yet.And, yes, they still offer the traditionalhickory and pepper bacons.

Meacham HamsWilliam MeachamNinety-two-year-old William Meachamstarted Meacham Hams 50 fifty yearsago. His grandfather used to providehogs to tenant farmers, and each yearthe Meacham family hosted acommunity hog killing to process themeat. When William was a young boy,his grandmother handed him the familycookbook with the cure recipe in it, andWilliam became responsible for curingthe hams and bacon on the farm. Afterhe was married, he began giving hiscured hams to relatives as Christmasgifts. In the late 1950s, the business ofMeacham Hams was born. For decades,William has produced a traditionalhickory-smoked country bacon but witha little less salt and a lot more flavor tosweeten the family cure. Today,William’s son, Rodman Meacham, keepswatch over the ham house and thetreasures within.

Bacon Producers of KentuckyText and Photographs by Amy Evans

Nancy Newsom Mahaffey

Charles Gatton Jr.

Broadbent’s Hams. . . . . . Ronny and Beth Drennan

Father’s Country Hams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lorene Gatton

Meacham Hams. . . . . . . . . . . Rodman Meacham

Scott Hams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leslie Scott William Meacham

Dining at Monticello: In GoodTaste and Abundance. Edited and with Recipes Developed byDamon Lee Fowler. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press,2004. 208 pages, 120 colorillustrations, 75 recipes. $35.00 cloth.

Dining at Monticello contains twosections: essays and recipes. To explainhow Thomas Jefferson’s delight inFrench cuisine only complemented hislove of American ingredients, editorDamon Lee Fowler says, “Clearly, herelished the best from both sides of theAtlantic.” Women ran the household,and Jefferson hired Europeans to trainhis slaves in gardening. Slave JamesHeming trained with chefs in Paris,and Heming in turn trained cooks atMonticello. As president, Jefferson setthe standard for entertaining inWashington.

Throughout his life, Jefferson paidcareful attention to the acquisition of ahuge variety of interesting foods,including over 300 types of vegetables.He toured the vineyards of France andalso made tasting notes on Italian wines,Madeira, and Sherry. Historicalexplanations accompany all the recipes,which are attributed to relatives or toJefferson himself. Beef Soup Monticellodraws from “Observations on Soup,”Jefferson’s recording of classic Frenchtechniques. More French-inspired dishesinclude Braised Artichokes with FineHerbs, Asparagus with Herb Vinaigrette,Beef à la Mode, and Blancmange. Otherdishes, such as Catfish Soup, Okra Soup,

Baked Virginia Ham, Broiled Shad,Apple Fritters, and Pepper Vinegar madewith Texas Bird Peppers, revealAmerican influences.

Dining at Monticello is a beautifullydesigned and fascinating way to learnhistory—a “feast of reason,” asJefferson’s granddaughter Ellen WaylesRandolph would say.

KAREN CATHEY

The Encyclopedia of Cajun andCreole Cuisine. By Chef John D. Folse.Gonzales, Louisiana: Chef John D.Folse and Company Publishing, 2004.849 pages, 735 recipes, approximately700 photographs. $49.95 cloth.

The Encyclopedia of Cajun and CreoleCuisine is a hefty book, both in weight(about ten pounds) and thoroughnessin treating its subject. It is the self-described “birthright and obligation” ofChef John Folse, the man designatedby the state legislature as “Louisiana’sCulinary Ambassador to the World.”

The 850-page cookbook, historytext, photo album, and reference sourceis divided into three sections. The firstdevotes a chapter to each of the sevencultures that Folse identifies as havingsignificantly contributed to thecreation of the Cajun and Creolecuisines (Native America, France,Spain, Germany, England, Africa, andItaly). This section can be textbookishin spots, but the relevance of thehistorical information does ultimatelycome through.

The second section is the sweet spot:the recipes (more than 700 of them).Folse’s classic recipes are well written,often anecdotal, and cover everythingfrom basic sauces to pig roasts to classiccocktails (often considered basic saucesin Louisiana). The recipes are dividedinto standard categories, but Folse istrue to his mission, as when he devotesseveral pages to the creation andevolution of brunch.

The final chapters reveal Folsefulfilling his duties as CulinaryAmbassador with tributes to thefestivals, plantations, personalities, andlocal brands that exemplify, celebrate,and preserve the essence of Cajun andCreole cuisine.

It is impossible to describe this bookwithout remarking on the strikingphotography. The best shot of all is thecover, in which Folse’s take on a 1933photo entitled “The Oysterman,” hasFolse perched, barefoot, atop a mound ofspent oyster shells, looking like he mayhave eaten more than he’s added to theoyster can. Snapshots and portraits ofhistorical figures add personality to thehistorical material in the first section,and vibrant close-up shots ofPonchatoula strawberries and plumpeggplants interspersed with the recipeswill inspire even the most timid cooks.

ANGIE WHITE

Louisiana Cookery. By Mary Land. Illustrated by MorrisHenry Hobbs. Preface by OwenBrennan. Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 2005. 376 pages. $20 paper.

“The five requisite elements inLouisiana cookery, Mary Land contendsin her classic 1954 book, are “the ironpot, the roux, stock, herbs, andalcoholic liquids.” It is the directnessand simplicity of such observations thatgive Mary Land’s writing its authority

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and her recipes their usefulness. MaryLand was a poet, a novelist, a journalist,and an outdoorsman. She realizes thatany area’s cooking exists at theintersection of culture—she recognizesthe contribution of French, Spanish,Anglo-Saxon, Native American, andAfrican American cultures to thecooking—and necessity—what theNative peoples and early settlers foundand could raise in the northern hillsand southern bayous.

The result is a book that isinformative about the foodways of 50years ago—few of us these days havesufficient access to game to makesrecipes for muskrat casserole or ragoutof bear or squirrel-head pot pie morethan a curiosity. But other recipes feelvery modern. Our age was not the firstto discover that spoonbill catfish hadroe that could be served as caviar.Louisiana Cookery is still a useful bookfor the contemporary Southern kitchen.

Cornbread, biscuits, hushpuppies, friedcatfish or bream, chicken anddumplings, fried green tomatoes. Thechapter on beverages is particularlyinteresting, not just a useful collectionof cocktail recipes but a compendium of

recipes for domestically producedratafias and cordials.

Mary Land begins Louisiana Cookerywith a quotation from Harnett Kane,who points out in Louisiana Hayride,that “modern Louisiana is divided, aswas the mother country, into threepasts: the South, the North, and TheCity—New Orleans.” Each has its ownlanguage, its own culture, and its ownstyle of cooking. Mary Land was bornin northwest Louisiana, and one of thedelights of this book for me, who grewup that part of the world, is to see thecooking of North Louisiana treatedwith equal respect to that of its flashiercousins to the south.

The University Press of Mississippiis to be congratulated for bringing thisclassic book back to print and forincluding the original edition’scharming illustrations by Morris HenryHobbs.

THOMAS HEAD

SFA Contributors

KAREN CATHEY, proprietor of Bon Vivant inArlington, Virginia, is a founding member ofthe Southern Foodways Alliance.

AMY EVANS is oral historian for theSouthern Foodways Alliance. She is also anexhibiting artist, freelance photographer,and cofounder of PieceWorks, a nonprofitarts and outreach organization.

ELIZABETH SIMS, current SFA president,has been the communications director forthe Biltmore Company in Asheville, NorthCarolina, since 1990. She holds a BA inEnglish from Rhodes College and an MA inliterature from the University of Arkansas.

THOMAS HEAD is the Washingtonianmagazine’s executive wine and food editor,one of its restaurant reviewers, and writes

regularly for the Washingtonian and otherpublications on food, drink, and travel.

ANGIE WHITE was born in Shreveport,Louisiana, and has lived the last 11 yearsin Washington, D.C., where she gets paidto do Latin American finance but reallyspends most of her time thinking abouther next meal.

The Mississippi River in1953: A PhotographicJourney from theHeadwaters to the Gulf ofMexico.Photographs and journal entries byCharles Dee Sharp. Essays by JohnO. Anfinson. 222 pages, 118black-and-white photographs, 63color photographs. Santa Fe:Center for American Places, 2005.$49.95 cloth.

Industrial Perspective:Photographs of the GulfCoast.Photographs and text by AndrewBorowiec. 128 pages, 51 tritoneblack-and-white plates. Santa Fe:Center for American Places, 2005.$50.00 cloth.

These two recent offerings from theCenter for American Places shouldboth be of interest to students of theSouth. Charles Dee Sharp’s TheMississippi River in 1953 looks at theentire length of America’s greatriver, following its course fromMinnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.Implicit in the author’s photographsand journal entries are comparisonsof life and culture along variousstretches of the river in the middleof the 20th century. AndrewBorowiec’s Industrial Perspectivelooks at heavy industry—oilrefineries, chemical plants, portfacilities—along the Gulf Coastfrom Alabama to Texas. It tooencourages readers to makecomparisons, this time between ourown stereotypically idyllic images ofa lazy coastline drowsing in the sunand a collection of real-lifeindustrial landscapes sometimes so

busy, complicated, and bizarre as toseem from another planet. Bothbooks make extensive use ofphotographs. There, however, thesimilarities end.

The Mississippi River in 1953 is theproduct of two trips Charles DeeSharp made down the Mississippi—the first on a towboat, the second bycar—in 1953, when he was 25 andjust out of the military. Heundertook these trips as research fora film he hoped to make about a pairof newlyweds who spend theirhoneymoon rafting down the river.Sharp never got around to makinghis movie, but even half a centuryafter his river travels, his bookbubbles over with the same youthfulenthusiasm that saw a honeymoon-on-the-Mississippi film as a can’t-miss idea. He pointed his camera atjust about everything—people,places, buildings, the river, and theland it flowed through. Hisphotographs of people along theMississippi include teenage girls inskirted bathing suits and rubbershower caps cavorting on a

Wisconsin beach; boys in Missouriplaying baseball; old men deep intoa checkers game in an Iowa riversidepark; cotton brokers grading cottonon Front Street in Memphis; womenin long dresses, aprons, and strawhats fishing near Vicksburg, apaddlewheel steamboat in thebackground. One enigmatic imagefrom the Mississippi Delta shows anAfrican American woman in a pinkdress clutching a brown paper bagand staring at what looks like adinosaur skull perched atop ageneral store’s potbelly stove.Among Sharp’s best pictures are aseries of portraits he made of thecrew on the towboat on which hetraveled downriver. He alsophotographed bridges, rail yards,river traffic, historic sites, statues,downtown business districts, andmore, all up and down the river. Itwas voracious, often indiscriminate,vision that made up for a lack ofsophistication and technicalexpertise with energy andenthusiasm.

Happily, The Mississippi River in1953 is more than just a photo album.Selected entries from Sharp’s 1953journal, excerpts from literary worksby the likes of Mark Twain, WaltWhitman, and Pare Lorentz, andpresent-day commentary on thepictures combine with essays byhistorian John O. Anfinson to form amultifaceted treatment of life on andalong the Mississippi. Put togetherin this manner five decades afterSharp’s river travels, The MississippiRiver in 1953 is as much about ahopeful, prosperous, and potentiallytranquil postwar America as it isabout a classically American place.As with any work that treats the past

Reading the South

Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff,Students, and Friends of the Center for theStudy of Southern Culture

For these and other books call 800-648-4001 or fax 601-234-9630.160 Courthouse Square • Oxford, Mississippi 38655



Reading the South continued

gently, it may be open to charges ofnostalgia or sentimentality, but criticsshould bear in mind that 1953 wasn’tthe past when Sharp made his tripsdown the river.

In contrast, Andrew Borowiec’sIndustrial Perspective: Photographs ofthe Gulf Coast is very much about thepresent—a heavily industrializedpresent not often associated with lifein the South and unlikely to ever bean object of nostalgia. Borowiec isone of America’s leading landscapephotographers, especially of thehuman-made “cultural landscape.”His previous book, Along the Ohio(2000), explored towns on the OhioRiver, many with histories ofmanufacturing that have left themwith present-day cityscapes whereresidential neighborhoods andindustrial sites exist side by side or, insome cases, interspersed among eachother. It is a very fine book thatspeaks with great eloquence aboutthe relationship between making aliving and living a life.

Industrial Perspective, however, is in adifferent vein. Photographed between1999 and 2003, Borowiec’s views ofindustry on the Gulf Coast (and as farup the Mississippi as St. Francisville,Louisiana) are more distanced and ona less human scale than his Ohio Riverimages. In part this is by necessity:industrial facilities in the Gulf regiontend to be larger, more isolated, and,by design, separate from where theiremployees live. As such, they don’tmake for landscapes that people seema part of. Borowiec tries to mitigatethis somewhat: we occasionally see

tiny human figures offto one side of the frame;or unimposing, low-tech objects—bicyclesin a few images, atelephone booth inanother—lost andincongruous amongbewildering jumbles ofindustrial hardware.He even shows us a

couple of backyards with the requisiteplayhouse or swing set, the loomingindustrial presence barely kept at bayin the very near distance. But thesekinds of pictures are the exceptionrather than the rule. All in all, most ofthe photographs in IndustrialPerspective are visual appreciations ofthe industrial sites themselves ratherthan about their relationship to theworld around them. In this sense,they are not as complex or as thought-provoking as the images fromBorowiec’s earlier book.

Borowiec’s approach, of course, ismarkedly different from Sharp’s.Unlike The Mississippi River in 1953,Industrial Perspective is a purelyphotographic vision. With theexception of the author’s briefintroduction and the pictures’ titles,Borowiec’s images are unmediatedby words. The photographs arereproduced (beautifully) one pertwo-page spread, allowing viewers tofocus on the individual pictures, oneat a time. And they’re very muchworth focusing on. All areimpeccably seen, with multiplepoints of interest spread throughoutthe frame. Made with a mediumformat panoramic camera (befittingthe Gulf Coast’s overwhelminglyhorizontal landscape) and notenlarged to any great degree, theyare rich with detail and delicacy oftone. They are lovely to look at.They are works of art. And this iswhere Industrial Perspective—withits purity of vision and photographicsophistication—is more rewardingthan The Mississippi River in 1953.

Borowiec has managed to revealsome hard truths about a particularpart of the contemporary Southernlandscape while simultaneouslyendowing it with a certain measureof beauty. This is a balance that’sdifficult to achieve and surely one ofthe hallmarks of fine documentaryart. In this case, one hopes thatBorowiec’s pictures are not sobeautiful that they obscure the harshset of realities—economic,environmental, political—theirsubject matter derives from.

DAVID WHARTON

Lost Delta Found:Rediscovering the FiskUniversity–Library ofCongress Coahoma CountyStudy, 1941–1942. By John W. Work, Lewis WadeJones, and Samuel C. Adams Jr.Edited by Robert Gordon and BruceNemerov. Nashville: VanderbiltUniversity Press, 2005. 344 pages.$34.95 cloth.To call Lost Delta Found acompanion piece to Alan Lomax’saward-winning The Land Where theBlues Began (1993) is like callingAlice Randall’s scathing parody TheWind Done Gone (2002) the sequelto Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with theWind. Although editors RobertGordon and Bruce Nemerovstruggle to be fair to the GreatWhite Folklorist, they’re on afrankly revisionist mission here,determined to decenter Lomax,critique his misnarration of a keyperiod in the history of bluesethnography, and put “the otherguy,” as they call John W. Work, onthe map. Three other guys, in fact:African American academics,Southern-born, and based at Fisk,all three of them members—alongwith the ever-calculating andvoracious Lomax—of what the



Library of Congress has called “thefirst racially mixed field study in theDeep South.”

Southern-born white men in theJim Crow South were not notablyskillful at sharing power with AfricanAmerican colleagues at a time and ina context where the word “colleagues”itself was scandalous. Lomax, moreskillful than most, nevertheless findshis missteps large and smallinventoried by Gordon and Nemerovin this volume’s introduction: hecame late to a field project in theMississippi Delta that musicologistWork and sociologist Lewis WadeJones had already dreamed up; usedthe power of his own affiliation withthe Library of Congress to wrestcontrol from his Fisk associates;stepped on Work’s metaphorical toesduring a famous 1941 interview withbluesman McKinley “Muddy Water”Morganfield at Stovall Plantation;misidentified Morganfield as “MuddyWaters” when he later issued thesefield recordings; allowed Work, Jones,and graduate assistant Samuel Adamsto transcribe his recordings and reporttheir findings in extensiveunpublished manuscripts thatsomehow disappeared into the Lomaxarchives; and then—most damningby far—incorporated much of thisjoint-stock material decades later intoThe Land Where the Blues Beganwithout crediting his three blackcolleagues.

The heart of Lost Delta Found issimply these unpublished manu-scripts, discovered by Gordon whenhe was researching his recentbiography of Waters and presentedhere for the first time, six decadesafter they went missing. They arestirring, enlightening, oftenbrilliantly interpreted presentationsof black cultural life in the mid-century Mississippi Delta. Jones, forexample, uses the personalnarratives he helped gather todiscern attitudinal differences thatdistinguished three successive

African American generations: thepioneers in their 70s and 80s whocleared and settled the Delta, usedthe Mississippi River as trans-portation, and dwelled comfortablywith frontier violence; an inter-mediate sharecropping generation intheir 50s and 60s that built churches,traveled on trains, and frowned onfrontier misrule; and a thirdgeneration between 30 and 50 that“[rattles] about in the second-handcars their cotton money bought,”listens to the latest pop hits onSeeburg (or “Sea Bird”) jukeboxes,and dwells in the modern disorderthat prevails between the wars.

Work’s manuscript, which includesmore than a hundred transcriptionsof spirituals, blues, ballads, worksongs, game songs, and long-linedhymns, explores the inner workingsof both sacred and secular spaceswithin the Delta—the black churchand its sermonizing preachers, blackjuke joints and the guitarists andharmonica players who struggle tonegotiate the shifting musical tastesof their restless public. Adams’scontribution, a master’s thesis at Fisktitled “Changing Negro Life in theDelta,” polls a hundred sharecropperson the King and Anderson plantationnear Clarksdale and discovers, among

other things, that the “favorite radiomusicians” in 1941 are the GoldenGate Quartet, Cab Calloway, ArtieShaw, Benny Goodman, DukeEllington, Glenn Miller, Gene Autry,Memphis Minnie, and Roy Acuff andhis Smoky Mountain Boys.

Not quite the brutalized,embittered, suffocatingly Jim CrowedSouthland that Lomax depicts in TheLand Where the Blues Began, in otherwords, but a rich, vibrant, fully-encultured world of black striversand seekers who created a world oftheir own and lived large livesregardless. It’s all here, in this superband needed book: much too late, butright on time.

ADAM GUSSOW

Divine Agitators: The DeltaMinistry and Civil Rights inMississippi. By Mark Newman. Athens:University of Georgia Press, 2004.376 pages. $54.95 cloth, $22.95paper.

In his second book, historian MarkNewman inspects the DeltaMinistry, which the NationalCouncil of Churches established in1964 as a servant ministry inMississippi. The Delta Ministry(DM) has probably been overlookedby many historians because itappeared at the end of the firstFreedom Summer, and the sordidevents of that tumultuous seasonhave dominated many accounts ofthe Mississippi civil rightsmovement. Newman reexaminesthe DM and pays special attentionto its guiding philosophy of meetingthe needs of the poor and acting as ahome mission service to Mississippi’sAfrican American community. Thebook provides a thoroughlyresearched and descriptive accountof the organization’s evolution andattempts to incorporate the larger


story of civil rights activity in thestate as well.

Newman begins the book with abrief introduction to the NationalCouncil of Churches and the DM’sgoal of serving Mississippi’s blacks. Atits inception, the DM theoreticallyoperated “as a religious equivalent ofSNCC [Student Non-ViolentCoordinating Committee],” but theorganization soon took on a variety ofnonsectarian chores. Between 1964and 1965 the Delta Ministry involveditself in voter registration, communityorganizing, and citizenship educationclasses. The DM also dispensed foodand clothing to the needy and createdthe Child Development Group ofMississippi. The Delta Ministry raisedfunds to supply black hospitals withmodern medical equipment andestablished the Delta Foundation thatallocated grant funds for smallbusiness growth.

Newman includes three casestudies on the cities of Hattiesburg,McComb, and Greenville, whichhelps in understanding how the DMworked at the local level. Newman’sexamination of the DM’s activitywithin the towns reveals how easilythe civil rights movement could losecohesion. In Hattiesburg, forexample, blacks became dividedalong class lines when white leadersgranted concessions to upper- andmiddle-class African Americans butignored the needs of the poor. By1967 the Delta Ministry had alsofailed to create an adequateinfrastructure to guarantee schooldesegregation in the city and pulledout before several objectives hadbeen secured.

Perhaps the best aspect of DivineAgitators is Newman’s honesty inrelating both the victories and thedisappointments of the DeltaMinistry. The DM seems to havebeen successful at distributing food,forcing state and federal authorities toallot food, and at implementing HeadStart programs. In 1966 the DM drew

national attention to the plight ofDelta blacks when it supported thefamous occupation of the GreenvilleAir Force Base. Newman counters allthe Delta Ministry successes with theorganization’s failures. The DMsupported the Mississippi FreedomLabor Union when it decided tostrike, which proved unrealistic,organized a nearly disastrouscommunal farming project called“Freedom City,” and routinely failedto attract necessary funding fromboth the Office of EconomicOpportunity and the denominationsof the National Council of Churches.

Newman’s study provides a fulleraccount of the Delta Ministry, whichhistorian James F. Findlay Jr. touchedon in his Church People in the Struggle(1993). Newman revives historicalinterest in the DM, but readers maystill wish to refer to Findlay’s book fora better explanation of the NationalCouncil of Churches’ role in theblack freedom struggle. Although thetitle of Newman’s work–“divineagitators”–suggests a focus on religionin the civil rights movement, headmits that religious worship andpersonal religious beliefs wereuncommon in the DM, and theimportance of religious beliefs amongDM organizers and workers escapesthe book.

Divine Agitators manages toprovide, however, a much neededaccount of the South’s largest civilrights group by 1967. Newman’s studyis also the best account of theNational Council of Churches’operations on the local level. Eventhough the DM suffered from quarrelsamong its leaders and from a host ofother problems, it showed an abilityto adapt to changing circumstancesin the state. Newman’s attention tothe shifting nature of the organizationand its many economic initiatives torelieve the impoverished blackMississippian community shows howMississippi has been slow to realizefull racial equality. Newman’s work

should please anyone interested inMississippi civil rights activity as wellas scholars searching for moreaccounts of the organizations thathelped in the freedom struggle.

WILLIAM HUSTWIT

The Bristol Sessions:Writings about the Big Bangof Country Music. Edited by Charles K. Wolfe and TedOlson. Jefferson, North Carolina:McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005.296 pages. $30.00 paper.

By compiling 19 essays, both oldand new, Charles K. Wolfe and TedOlson have attempted to clarify thesignificance and to trace thesubsequent influences of RalphPeer’s 1927 field recording sessions,which Johnny Cash hailed as “thesingle most important event in thehistory of country music.” Thathistoric venue established a musicaldynasty that reverberates to this dayand launched the careers of twosuperstar acts of early country music:Jimmie Rodgers and the CarterFamily. The book details every artistrecorded by the Victor TalkingMachine Company in Bristol,Tennessee, but the names Rodgersand Carter, probably because oftheir huge commercial successes, arerepeated like a litany. Peer’s twodiscoveries probably had suchwidespread appeal because theyrepresented popular but conflictingaspects of Southern rural culture.The Singing Brakeman yodeledabout “living the wild life,” but theCarters harmonized, often in the“old ballad tradition,” about subjects“morally and spiritually instructive.”Wolfe asserts that the sessions “maynot have ushered in a new type ofmusic, but they did usher in a newmusical era as well as a new way ofperceiving and merchandising ruralSouthern white music.”




The five sections of the bookproffer a balance of biographical,anecdotal, and technical writingsfrom both primary and secondarysources. Part 1 elucidates the stateof recording technology at that timeand traces the evolution of theVictor Talking Machine Company.Part 2 offers not only details ofRalph Peer’s organization of thesessions, but also biographicalsketches of the individuals andgroups recorded. Anchoring part 3are reminiscences provided byRalph Peer and some of the artists’relatives, including Rodgers’s wife,Carrie, and A. P. Carter’s daughterGladys. Part 4, the only sectionwith music and lyrics, contains tworather technical musicologicalstudies. One explains how ErnestStoneman creatively adaptedcommercially published material tohis individual style. The secondanalyzes how Jimmie Rodgers andAlfred Karnes “were more vocallyinventive and expressive, as well asmore stylistically progressive, thanthe others” at the sessions. Part 5follows up with extensive tableslisting the performances Peerrecorded in Bristol in 1928, as wellas those garnered in 1928-29 byColumbia in Johnson City,

Tennessee. The book closes withOlson and Kalra arguing that themusical traditions springing out ofthe Bristol sessions are still alive inthe region, particularly at EastTennessee State University, whosemusic department has instituted aBluegrass Program and whoseSherrod Library houses theextensive Burton-Manningcollection of regionally collectedmaterial.

The Bristol Sessions containsphotographs, an excellent index,and copious bibliographicalcitations—all of which provide awealth of information useful tostudents as well as scholars. Withcountry music’s becoming agalactic industry, and Peer’s 1927recordings apparently being theseminal point from which theindustry expanded, it seemsappropriate that the editorsemploy Nolan Porterfield’s oft-quoted stellar image to describethe Bristol Sessions as the “BigBang of Country Music.”

MICHAEL DAVENPORT

Bridging SouthernCultures: AnInterdisciplinary Approach. Edited by John Lowe. BatonRouge: Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 2005. 317 pages.$49.95 cloth.

This intriguing collection editedby John Lowe, professor of Englishat LSU, is notable for showing theacademic concerns of seniorscholars who have been studyingthe South for the past 25 years.Most of the authors of the 14 essaysin Bridging Southern Cultures arefull professors, and many of theiressays not only analyze topics inSouthern literature, art, music,history, and sociology but alsoaddress the state of the scholarly

Matzoh Ball GumboCulinary Tales of the Jewish South

marcie cohen ferris“A fascinating journey to dinner tables

throughout the Mississippi Delta,Charleston, and beyond. Over four

centuries, southern and Jewish cultures have mingled, resulting in

Pecan Kugel and Pesach Fried Green Tomatoes. A delicious and sometimes

poignant world emerges, complete with the history, stories, and recipes

from this unique cultural cross-section of southern Jews.”—Joan Nathan, author of Jewish Cooking in America

“The perfect introduction to the distinctive faith, culture, and foodways of southern Jews.”

—Jonathan D. Sarna,author of American Judaism

“Marcie Cohen Ferris does for the ethnography of food in the Jewish South what Jessica Harris has done

for African Diaspora cooking.”—Dale Rosengarten, coeditor of

A Portion of the People*344 pp., 79 illus. $29.95 cloth

“Delectablefrom start to finish.”*

the university of north carolina press

at bookstores or 800-848-6224www.uncpress.unc.edu



profession and how it has changedand should change.

What unifies these essays andgives the volume its title is theinterest in bridging gaps in thetopics and approaches in studyingthe South. This generation ofscholars was the group who brokedown scholarly conventions thathad long viewed studying the Southas a process of studying the concernsof white men. The concept ofSouthern identity, most obviously,had long seemed the possession ofthe white men in charge of theregion. The scholars in this volumetook part in revolutions in AfricanAmerican studies, women’s studiesand then gender studies, and theever-changing languages of culturalstudies; they established new fieldsof study by expanding the range ofboth topics to study and ways tostudy those topics. It is importantthat the book’s title refers not toSouthern culture but to Southerncultures, taking note of the region’sdiversity. Here they are concernedwith bridges not just between groupsand not just between academicdisciplines but also between olderand newer scholarly questions.

Many of the more intriguing,challenging essays take onconventional notions of how tostudy the South, but twist them orexpand them in new directions.William Andrews asks the samequestions of four Mississippiautobiographers—two AfricanAmerican and two white—and findsthem converging and diverging insurprising ways. Addressing the oldnotion of a Southern fascinationwith home, Thadious Davis analyzesrecent attempts by AfricanAmerican authors to claim theSouth as home as a creative practicerather than an act of nostalgia.Editor Lowe returns to the old ideaof the plantation myth in order toshow how a range of critics adoptedthe myth in order to critique it. In

an essay entitled “The Burden ofSouthern Culture,” Charles ReaganWilson expands C. VannWoodward’s argument to addressesissues of biracial concern. DanielLittlefield returns to old battles overthe continuity of African intoAfrican American culture to thinkhow contemporary scholars canmake use of those issues. AnneGoodwyn Jones discusses howscholars in cultural theory andregional studies have not engagedeach other very well, and offerssome hope that scholars of theSouth can learn more from newapproaches.

Other essays offer good examplesof recent scholarship on topics inSouthern culture. Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers a sophisticated readingof the depression, drinking, andcreativity of William Faulkner. SueBridwell Beckham’s detailed analysisof the gender issues in the creationof the Southern images in WPAmurals, Joyce Marie Jackson’sdiscussion of quartet singing bySouthern African Americans, andRichard Megraw’s study of artistEllsworth Woodward all apply theinsights of a generation ofscholarship to their topics.

Bridging Southern Cultures doesnot offer a method for what scholarsshould do next. Its authors are notsearching for some key ingredient todefine the South; surely it issignificant that no one offers whatregional scholars used to see as theirmission—a key to Southerndistinctiveness. Encouraging thestudy of all groups from manyperspectives, it has an open,welcoming approach to studying theSouth, and it is an intriguing volumeboth for what it says about specifictopics and for what it shows aboutthe changing state of Southernscholarship.

TED OWNBY

Southern Seen: Meditationson Past and Present. By Larry T. McGehee. Foreword byJohn Egerton. Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press,2005. 368 pages. $15.95 paper.

Among the least studied and yet mostintriguing contributions to Southernculture are the works of newspapercolumnists. These writers take on thedemanding responsibility of com-menting on local community life.Often writing daily, the columnistrelays stories, raises civic issues,provides a chronicle of events,comments on social mores, and, ingeneral, becomes the voice of thecommunity where the paper appears.

Larry T. McGehee writes out of thistradition, but he takes the column to ahigh art. For years I’ve been readinghis columns written for a hundredsmall-town Southern newspapers, ashe would send collections of recentwritings for circulation at the Center.I thus always knew him as a sagecommentator on the South, but untilI read his new book I did not realizehis achievement. He has been anintelligent and sensitive observer ofSouthern life as the region has livedthrough fundamental transformations.The subtitle of this book uses theword “meditations,” and these essaysare indeed thoughtful musings thatgive a philosophical reading ofSouthern culture by one who lamentsthe gentle ways of the South thathave vanished, says good riddance tothe bad, and points us toward savoringthose abiding experiences that still areavailable.

McGehee positions his bookintentionally as a contribution toSouthern Studies, and it is. He tacklesissues like the Confederate flag debate,conservative and liberal positions inpolitics, and, bless him, ways in whichElvis and football are religions in the



South. He interprets Southernrituals, places, and icons from aself-consciously Southernperspective. His range is wide—senior proms to snake handling,barbershops to frontier hymnals,cookbooks to BB guns. Hisportraits of Southern icons wouldbe a great source for journalistswriting stories, studentsresearching papers, or academicslooking for information on suchinteresting but often un-documented cultural topics aswaving (as in people in carswaving their hands in a friendlygesture to other motorists) andVick’s Salve (an unacknowledgedbut effective North Carolinacontribution to the Americanhealth care system).

My favorite pieces areMcGehee’s writings on theenvironment and landscape. Heprovides the eloquent testamentof a mature Southerner to therhythms of the land and of life onthe land he has long known. Hismemories of growing up andraising his children mix with hiscontemporary reflections onrural life, the countryside, andcity life. McGehee, trained inreligious studies and long ateacher and administrator atWofford College in Spartanburg,South Carolina, has produced abook that reflects his lifetime oflearning and experience.


Best of the South: TheBest of the SecondDecade, 1996–2005. Edited by Shannon Ravenel.Selected and introduced byAnne Tyler. Chapel Hill:Algonquin Books of ChapelHill, 2005. 368 pages. $15.95paper.



For 20 years, the wise editors ofAlgonquin Books of Chapel Hillhave bestowed upon the masses anannual New Stories from the Southanthology. This year, ShannonRavenel (who started the NewStories series in 1986) and guesteditor Anne Tyler (who haspublished 16 novels, most recentlyThe Amateur Marriage) haveselected 20 of the 186 stories fromthe last decade for inclusion in theBest of the South: The Best of theSecond Decade. This book reads theway a greatest-hits record from yourall-time favorite band sounds.Included here are Lee Smith,William Gay, Jill McCorkle,Michael Knight (who is this year’sGrisham Writer at the University ofMississippi), Scott Ely, PamDurban, and many talented others.People magazine once said of theNew Stories series that the “talesepitomize the qualities readerstreasure in the best Southernliterature: a rich appreciation oflanguage and humor, as well as adead-on sense of place andcharacter.” In other words, everyoffering is Southern short-storymagic. Every one is a masterpiece.Every one is a slam dunk.

That said, perhaps the most well-written characters in these Southerntales are young people poignantlydescribing events from their earlyyears that transformed them. InHeather Seller’s “Fla. Boys” the 14-year-old protagonist—who learned todrive at 12 and who must fend forherself while her father is in thehospital—wrecks Dad’s Oldsmobileon a Florida freeway and dreamilywanders into a service station whereshe meets a trucker who winds upsleeping with her. In the morning thegirl, walking toward home in stolenblue jeans, leaves us with a whollop:“It scared me, all of it. As much as thethought of the next thing.” ClydeEdgerton’s funny, chubby eighth-grader, Debra, describes her first date

in “Debra’s Flap and Snap.” Debrameets L. Ray in shop class. “Theydidn’t have special ed back then.They just called it shop.” After theschool dance, L. Ray masturbates infront of her, leaving her scarred forlife. “The experience at the time leftme feeling filthy. And he never askedme out again after that night, which Iregretted only after I got married.”Another 14-year-old, Roberta, fromJudy Troy’s “Ramone,” wonders aboutthe power of feeling “too much,” anddescribes it like “loving a boy morethan he loved you; you couldn’t helpit, and you couldn’t stop it, and youmade him love you in your dreams.”It’s only after making this connectionthat Roberta is able to understand hermother’s fear of emotional overloadand forgive her. Other standouts inthis collection include MarkRichard’s “Memorial Day,” in which asmall boy mistakes the personificationof Death for the landlady’s son; MaxSteele’s “The Unripe Heart,” aboutthe agony an eight-year-oldexperiences after he locks hismother out on the roof of the family’shome; and Jim Grimsley’s tale of asermon-giving woman on an Atlantacommuter train, “Jesus Is SendingYou This Message.”

Best of the South authors are currentlytouring Southern bookshops withmusicians from Sugar Hill Records’ (ofDurham, North Carolina) CDcompilation Best of the South. It isrumored they are serving Maker’sMark after the readings and singings.Great fiction, great music, andMaker’s—What more could you askfor? All I can think of is anothervolume of “Best of” in 2015.

SALLY CASSADY LYON

Joy in the Morning: Poems. By Claude Wilkinson. SouthernMessenger Poets Series. BatonRouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 2004. 62 pages. $26.95 cloth,$16.95 paper.

Claude Wilkinson returned to Oxfordrecently to read from Joy in theMorning, his latest poetry collection.A book of joys and sorrows, this slimvolume yields kudzu and Renoir, freeverse and sonnets, Greek heroes andGospel tunes, subtle puns and anoccasional mock epic attitude. Thesoft-spoken author told his SquareBooks audience that several poemshad their start in 2000-2001, when heserved as the University ofMississippi’s John and Renée GrishamVisiting Southern Writer inResidence. That same year, theWhiting Foundation recognizedWilkinson’s literary promise with alarge cash prize and a collector’sedition of Henry David Thoreau.

The Foundation saw a deeplikeness between the poet fromNesbit, Mississippi, and the 19th-century author from Concord,Massachusetts. In Walden: or, Life inthe Woods, his most famous text,Thoreau compares Walden Pond(“God’s drop”) to the holy GangesRiver; for him, bathing in thosewaters at dawn is a sacredimmersion. For Wilkinson, too,nature glimmers with transcen-



dence. The title Joy in the Morningcomes from the psalm he cites as hisepigraph; and Wilkinson reads God’smessage of joy in the flash of“radiant schools of fish,” “aconeflower’s purple alms,” and“undulations of butterflies.”

As lovers of music, Thoreau andWilkinson are alert to sounds ofharmony and dissonance: flutenotes, loons, and locomotives atWalden; blues and jazz, redbirds,and 18-wheelers in the South. Theauthors’ eyesight is as sharp as theirhearing. The act of vision becomesso crucial that both Walden and Joyin the Morning achieve an air ofprophecy, especially in Wilkinson’smany references to dreams andrevelations. The poem “Grail”recalls his early longing “to bechanged / from child to a giver / ofomens and dreams.” During a coldChristmas season, a time of waiting,the boy walks under a “temple” ofMississippi trees—sycamore, locust,cedar—hoping to spot “oneremarkable fire” in the dark sky. Thepoem’s title evokes the religiousquest of King Arthur’s purestknights, and Wilkinson might haveeven more in common with thegreat metaphysical poets of 17th-century England than he does withThoreau’s optimistic transcen-dentalism. Like Donne and Herbert,Wilkinson speaks of spiritualstruggle, the dark night thatprecedes the joyful morning. At hislocal book signing, he pointed outthat joy can come even in the“mourning.”

Thus, his poem “Mourning Song”describes a dove’s call “from thebrink.” Beginning “like a tear, / asmuch glory as despair / on thebroken note,” the bird’s mysterioussong of grief and gladness “fallsimperceptibly over / chambers ofdream,” just before the sleeper is“released” from the night. Inanother poem, “The Grace ofDreams,” the narrator wonders if a

field of “tall bleached grass / and itssingle leafless scrub” in his recurringnightmare might conceal “the favorof the Lord,” as the artist Rousseauhides kittenish lions and an earthynude in jungles of “passionflowerand fern.” Rousseau’s bold landscapeis the lushest of several allusions toart in Joy in the Morning. Himself anartist, Wilkinson reproduces a lovelydetail from his painting “CypressGrove” on the cover of his book. Afew years ago, he contributed severallandscape sketches and commentaryto The Yalobusha Review, theUniversity of Mississippi’s literaryjournal. In that article, Wilkinsonobserved: “While I typically paintscenes that offer an alluring serenity,there is always present, at least tomy mind, the undercurrent thatthese spots may soon be lost to someform of encroachment.”

Loss is a serious threat in hispoetry as well. Joy in the Morningbegins on a melancholy note with apoem named after Michael Crespo’s“The Enduring Night,” a painting of“moon, rabbit, dark.” A morefamiliar title to most readers is“Cape Cod Evening, 1939,”Wilkinson’s homage to EdwardHopper, a modern artist known for

his edgy scenes: “the soliloquy / ofanguish seems beyond / whatanything could take.” In otherpoems, Wilkinson describes the lossof a beloved dog, the hauling offamily cows to slaughter, the“shocked bodies” of chickens killedfor the evening meal, and a wolf ’sattack on a gardenia-white crane.“Golden Years” is the ironic title ofa poem about a nursing home; anoctogenarian “sits in the rec room /before candlelit cake / as if watchinga house burn.” Saddest of all,Wilkinson remembers his mother’sfinal weeks in a Memphis hospitaland his father’s last days. The dyingman lingers “between ether andearth” while asking his guilt-burdened son, “Things okay, /between you and me?”

Yet, the son is able to reassure hisfather and then to comfort himself.Wilkinson also fortifies his readersfor hard times to come by remindingus of the consolations of memory,art, religious faith, language, andeven humor. While Joy in theMorning begins with the terrors of“The Enduring Night,” the bookcloses with claps of praise in“Doxology and Benediction.”Halfway between these extremes ofdespair and hope, the poet playfullydescribes a haircut. In “TheBarbershop,” a “heroic chorus”—made up of farmers, a gardener,young “Romeos,” and the poet too—arrives with their “jawbones ofasses.” Each is “summoned” to be“cropped, / shaven, anointed withpomade”; the ceremony over, each“tramples out / over the dingy fleeceof our strength”—wry references tothe biblical Samson and thelegendary Jason. With good grace,Claude Wilkinson redeems frailhuman enterprises in his strongpoems.

JOAN WYLIE HALL



Martha Washington: AnAmerican Life. By Patricia Brady. New York: TheViking Press, 2005. 276 pages.$24.95 cloth.

Eighteenth-century Americanwomen are at long last being rescuedfrom oblivion. In recent years,biographers have begun tappinginto—and helping to create—agrowing public interest in the“founding fathers,” creating thephenomenon that Newsweek hasdubbed “founders chic.” Now,increasingly, historians have begunto capture the less public experiencesof the new nation’s “foundingmothers.” We now know much moreabout the lives of Abigail Adams,Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, MercyOtis Warren, Deborah Franklin,Deborah Sampson Gannett, andJudith Sargent Murray than anyonewould have thought possible a fewdecades ago. And yet one woman—Martha Washington—is strangelymissing from the pantheon.America’s first “First Lady” (theycalled her Madam Presidentress atthe time) remains a vague presence,as hidden from view as ever.

Patricia Brady’s Martha Washington:An American Life is an admirableeffort to bring Washington out of theshadows, even as it might explain justwhy most biographers may haveavoided her as a subject. As Bradypoints out in her introduction,Washington destroyed virtually all ofher personal correspondence beforeshe died. Thus it is difficult, if notimpossible, to bring her alive, tocapture her essence, or to developmany insights about her hopes andfears, much less her understanding ofher place—as a woman or as apatriot—in the founding of theAmerican nation.

Scholars who are interested infeminist theory, or who wantinsights on the gender and statusconstructs that informed the lives ofmen and women in the 18thcentury, will no doubt bedisappointed in Brady’s book.Chronologically rather thananalytically organized, this is astraightforward biography, writtenin a chatty, familiar, and accessiblefashion. Perhaps understandably,George Washington’s careerdominates. Martha is seen all toooften as an appendage to herhusband, as a loving helpmeet whoacquiesces to her fate and makes lifeas comfortable as possible for theplanter, general, and president. Therhythms of Martha’s life are weddedto her husband’s experiences. Sheevidently shares his political viewswithout question. His trajectorybecomes hers, as she follows himfrom camp to camp as long as theRevolution lasts, and then to NewYork when he assumes thepresidency. Martha becomes moreinteresting, and more or her ownperson, on those rare occasionswhen she refuses to follow her

husband, or expresses herdissatisfaction with the turn his lifehas taken. When he left forPhiladelphia and the ConstitutionalConvention, for instance, sheremained firmly ensconced atMount Vernon. Nor was sheespecially happy in New York, whereher duties as the president’s wifevirtually took over her own life.

Brady clearly likes both Georgeand Martha Washington. This is nota “warts and all” biography. Whenshe describes the Revolutionaryarmy’s experience at Valley Forge,she appears not to notice thedifference between the suffering ofthe common soldiers and therelatively comfortable existence ofthe officers and their wives. Shetalks of a few house slaves inpassing—including a couple whoran away—but does not evenmention the slaves whose labor inthe fields made Mount Vernon agrowing concern.

The book is marred by theoccasional anachronism. Referencesto the “burning intensity of [Martha’s]love for her husband” seem out ofplace in a world that had yet toembrace the notion of romantic love(105). The assertion that Mercy OtisWarren underestimated Martha’sintelligence “because of her softsouthern manner” is doubtful (108).The stereotypical “Southern belle”was a product of the 19th, not the18th, century.

Still, this is a lively, eminentlyreadable book. It does something tohumanize Martha Washington and,perhaps more importantly, to remindreaders that women were present atthe founding.

SHEILA L. SKEMP


Music of the SouthConferenceSeptember 2–3, 2005The Center, in conjunction withUniversity Outreach, hosted theinaugural Music of the SouthConference, September 2–3, 2005. Itbegan with presentations on gender andSouthern music and included otherpanels that dealt with such topics asreligion, race relations, generationaldifferences in Southern music, Mississippimusicians, and music in different parts ofthe South. Stephen Shearon offered awide-ranging multimedia look at theSouth through music.

Bill Malone, author of Country MusicU.S.A. and other books on music inthe South, delivered the keynoteaddress on Mike Seeger and issues ofmusical authenticity in the folk musicrevival. Malone and his wife, Bobbie,also performed traditional music.

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coastthe week before the conference, andmany participants reflected upon NewOrleans’s central role in Southernmusic. Mississippi’s Jones Sisters closedout the conference with gospel singing,putting an appropriate benediction onthis year’s gathering.


2006 Natchez Literary and CinemaCelebration to Explore Southern Food,Drink in History, Literature, FilmTaste buds in the Deep South favor biscuits, gumbo, sweet tea, bourbon balls, friedchicken, tomato aspic, pecan pie, mint juleps, and other foods and beverages sopopular they have become icons, actually representing the region. Food and drinkshow up everywhere in Southern history, literature, and film. What do these foodsand beverages tell about the South? What do their history and regional variationsreveal?

Find out at the 17th annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, to beheld February 23-26, 2006, in Natchez, Mississippi. Using the theme “Biscuits,Gumbo, Sweet Tea, and Bourbon Balls: Southern Food and Drink in History,Literature, and Film,” the conference will explore all manner of Southern foods andbeverages.

John T. Edge, a widely published author and director of the Southern FoodwaysAlliance at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, advised organizers of theconference program. He will speak about the legacy of the South’s fried chickencooks of African descent and will introduce one of the films to be shown at thefestival, Smokestack Lightning: A Day in the Life of Barbecue, by Lolis Eric Elie, ofNew Orleans.

Other authors who will speak about various aspects of Southern foodways areJessica Harris, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking;John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History; Robert St. John,Deep South Staples or How to Survive in a Southern Kitchen without a Can of Cream ofMushroom Soup; and Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, Being Dead Is NoExcuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.

Martha Foose, executive chef of Viking Cooking School in Greenwood,Mississippi, will present “Cooking to the Blues,” a cooking demonstration withmusic by Delta musician Duff Dorough. Judy Hood, from the University of Miami,will talk about food imagery in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, and literaryscholar Kenneth Holditch will discuss food and beverage imagery in TennesseeWilliams’s plays. Amy Evans, oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance,will look at Mississippi’s hot tamale tradition.

There will be a panel discussion on Southern drinks, including moonshine, mintjuleps, Coca-Cola, beer, wine, and tea. The conference will also include booksignings, tastings, special meals, writing workshops, food shows, receptions, andparties.

Receiving special writing awards are William Ferris, former director of the Centerfor the Study of Southern Culture and now at the University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill; literary scholar Noel Polk, Mississippi State University; andplaywright Beth Henley. Prior to the awards ceremony, the Centerfor the Study of Southern Culture will host a reception atwhich Center director Charles Reagan Wilson willmake remarks.

Most of the NLCC is free of charge, in partbecause of annual funding by the MississippiHumanities Council and a grant from theNational Endowment for theHumanities.

For information, call toll-free 866-296-NLCC (6522) or 601-446-1289;e - m a i [email protected]; orvisit the Web site:www.colin.edu/nlcc.

Bobbie Malone and keynote speaker BillMalone

Sylvester Oliver, music professor at RustCollege in Holly Springs, Mississippi

Joe

York

Joe

York


Literature, fine art, and delicious foodcombine to make Oxford one of thepremier cultural epicenters of theSouth, and the Yoknapatawpha ArtsCouncil has captured that uniqueSouthern combination in a newcookbook, Square Table: A Collection ofRecipes from Oxford, Mississippi,published at the end of October.

Almost 350 recipes for traditionalSouthern dishes, local favorites, plusthe best from celebrated New Southchefs share space in this beautifulbook, along with the words and imagesof many of Oxford’s authors and artists.

John T. Edge, cookbook author,director of the Southern FoodwaysAlliance at the University of Mississippi,and well-published food writer withworks appearing in the New York Times,Gourmet, and Saveur magazines, has highpraise for the work in his introduction tothe cookbook:

“The art alone is worth the fare. Butdon’t judge this book by a thumb-through, even if you’re swooning bypage thirty-seven. Find a space forSquare Table on your kitchen shelf.Dog-ear the pages; edit the recipesto suit your palate. Make the bookyour own. “A year may pass before you cometo truly appreciate the effort. Bythen your repertoire will includesmothered doves and marmaladesweet potatoes, not to mentioncream cheese jalapeño venisonrolls and cornbread salad.”The eclectic mix of literature, art,

and food in Square Table reflects theunique feel and flavor of Oxford itself.Essays from writers with ties to Oxford,such as Curtis Wilkie, John Grisham,Lisa Howorth, and Julia Reed, are byturns funny and poignant, most notablyin the case of the late author LarryBrown, whose essay was completedonly days before he died. Selectionsfrom Oxford’s most famous pastresident, Nobel Prize–winning author

William Faulkner, as well as reveredjournalist and Mississippi author WillieMorris are also sprinkled throughoutthe book.

Square Table is a visual treat as well.Celebrated artists from the communitysupplied beautiful renderings of Oxford.The book includes work from more thana dozen artists, among them Jere Allen,whom Art and Antique magazine hascalled a “modern-day master” and whosework has received international acclaim;Jason Bouldin, a Harvard-educated artistand winner of the grand prize in thePortrait Society of America’s 2002International Portrait Competition, whocontributed the art for the cover of thecookbook; and Marty Vinograd, anationally recognized collage artistwhose portraits and other work arefeatured in the University of MississippiMuseum, Washington, D.C.’s DecaturHouse, and the Israeli HeritageInternational Bank.

Square Table also features 17 colorfulphotographs by internationally recognizedphotographer Langdon Clay, whose workhas been featured in numerous books andmagazines, including Southern Living,capture favorite local activities such astailgating in the Grove, a Halloweenpumpkin patch, and the bounty of thelocal farmer’s market. Historical photos ofOxford, many of which have never beenpublished until now, highlight the town’s

roots, while reminiscences about thetown and its food culture from Oxfordresidents, such as William Lewis, JulieWalton, and Nan Davis, contribute to theessentially Southern sense of place thatpermeates the book.

The cookbook reflects a substantialcommunity effort. A committee of 67people guided the project, and 260Oxford residents contributed hundredsof favorite recipes, which were thentriple-tested by almost 100 volunteercooks. The award-winning chefs ofCity Grocery, L & M’s Kitchen andSalumeria, 208, and Yocona RiverInn—among several other arearestaurants—also contributed recipesfor their patrons’ favorite dishes.

With 11 recipe categories plus severalcomplete menus provided, Square Tableincludes the best cuisine ideas fromOxford residents and restaurants, notto mention practical tips on preparingand serving food.

Proceeds from the book will help thecity continue to celebrate and foster itsunique artistic culture by funding theactivities of the Yoknapatawpha ArtsCouncil. YAC enriches the communityby providing community arts grants,sponsoring the annual Oxford FilmFestival and the Double DeckerFestival, organizing local art sales anddemonstrations, as well as operatingwriting contests, drama workshops, andart shows for children.

Square Table is available for $32.00 acopy. To order, contact the Yokna-patawpha Arts Council at 662-236-6429or e-mail [email protected]. One bookcan be shipped with two-day deliveryfor $5.95 shipping and handling. Add$2.00 for each additional book ordered.A half case of six books can be deliveredto a single address for a shipping cost of$9.00 and $16.00 for a full case of 12books. Mississippi residents should add7 percent sales tax.

ELLEN MEACHAM

New Cookbook Celebrates Oxford’sEclectic Cultural Mix

Cover art by Jason Bouldin

A collection of recipes, originalartwork, and personal accounts ofSouthern cooking by Oxford’s mostdistinguished literary figures, SquareTable is the perfect gift—for yourselfand everyone on your holiday list. Abeautiful book—a perfect gift.

All proceeds benefit theYoknapatawpha Arts Council.

Many thanks to our primarysponsors, Baptist Memorial Hospitaland First National Bank.

Name __________________________________________________________

Address ________________________________________________________

City______________________________ State ______ Zip _______________

E-mail __________________________________________________________

Daytime Telephone _______________________________________________

Shipping and handling costs: Add $5.95 for one book and $2.00 foreach additional book sent to a single address. A half case of six bookscan be delivered to a single address for a shipping cost of $9.00 and$16.00 for a full case of 12 books.

Send check or money order to Square Table Cookbooks, P.O. Box 544,Oxford, MS 38655.

Orders may also be made by e-mailing [email protected] or calling662-236-6429.

Quantity ____ @ $32.00 each

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Mississippi residents

add 7% sales tax ________

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Oxford’s finest newcookbook is here!


NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

MARION BARNWELL taught English at Delta StateUniversity for many years. She is editor of the anthologyA Place Called Mississippi (1997) and coauthor of TouringLiterary Mississippi (2002).

MARY BATTLE is a second-year graduate SouthernStudies student at the University of Mississippi. She isserving as an intern for the soon-to-be-opened CottonExchange Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

WILLIAM BEARDEN is the president of the WilliamBearden Company of Memphis, Tennessee, whichproduces documentary films, live events, and corporatevideos. He is in charge of productions for the CottonMuseum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange and is alsothe author of Cotton: From Southern Fields to MemphisMarket, a collection of photographs and descriptions ofthe cotton industry in the Delta region.

MARK CAMARIGG practiced law in California for severalyears before moving to Mississippi in 2002 to studySouthern history, work for Living Blues magazine as agraduate assistant, visit jook joints, and soak up Southernculture. In the spring of 2004, he became publicationsmanager of Living Blues.

MICHAEL DAVENPORT, a retired teacher who lives nearGreeneville, Tennessee, taught Advanced PlacementEnglish and Great Books courses for 30 years. He was aSaks Fellow at the 2001 Faulkner and YoknapatawphaConference and is currently writing fiction and workingon some editing projects.

ADAM GUSSOW, assistant professor of English andSouthern Studies at the University of Mississippi, is theauthor of Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir andSeems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the BluesTradition, winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award for thebest book of literary scholarship or criticism in Southernliterature published in 2002.

JOAN WYLIE HALL teaches in the English Department atthe University of Mississippi. She is the author of ShirleyJackson: A Study of the Short Fiction and articles onTennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Grace King,Frances Newman, and others.

WILL HUSTWIT is a doctoral student in the HistoryDepartment at the University of Mississippi. He is

currently working on a dissertation on James JacksonKilpatrick and Southern whites’ response to the civilrights movement.

DONALD M. KARTIGANER holds the William HowryChair in Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippiand is director of the Faulkner Conference. He is theauthor of The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form inFaulkner’s Novels and has completed a book-lengthstudy, “Repetition Forward: A Theory of ModernistReading.”

SALLY CASSADY LYON is a Sewanee grad from Gulfportwho now calls Oxford home. She works at the Center, asDirector Charles Reagan Wilson’s assistant.

ELLEN B. MEACHAM is a graduate of the SouthernStudies master’s degree program, a freelance journalist,and an instructor in the University of Mississippi’sDepartment of Journalism.

SHEILA L. SKEMP is professor of history at the Universityof Mississippi. Among her publications are WilliamFranklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King; Benjamin andWilliam Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist, andJudith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents.

JENNIFER SOUTHALL is advancement associate forannual giving at the University of Mississippi, where shereceived a BA in English in 1992. She taught highschool English and worked as a copyeditor beforereturning to Ole Miss in 2003.

DAVID WHARTON is assistant professor and director ofdocumentary projects at the Center, where he teachescourses in Southern Studies, fieldwork, and photography.He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town:Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade.

CURTIS WILKIE, author of Dixie: A Personal Odysseythrough Events that Shaped the Modern South, lives in NewOrleans and Oxford, Mississippi, where he holds theCook chair in journalism at the University of Mississippi.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON is director of the Center andprofessor of history and Southern Studies. Among hispublications are Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the LostCause and Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faithsfrom Faulkner to Elvis.

31, 2006. Authors whose papers are selectedwill receive a waiver of the conferenceregistration fee, and lodging at the Inn at OleMiss from Saturday, July 22, through Thursday,July 27. For short papers, three copies of two-

page abstracts must be submitted by January31, 2006. Authors whose papers are selectedwill receive a reduction of the registration feeto $100. In addition to commercial lodging,inexpensive dormitory rooms are available.All manuscripts and inquiries should beaddressed to Donald Kartiganer, Department

of English, The University of Mississippi,University, MS 38677-1848. Telephone: 662-915-5793, e-mail: [email protected] abstracts may be sent by e-mailattachment; plenary manuscripts should onlybe sent by regular mail. Decisions for all paperswill be made by March 1, 2006.

(continued from page 8)

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Gift IdeasJ. B. Murry: Writing in an UnknownTongue; Reading through the WaterJ. B. Murry, a self-educated AfricanAmerican visionaryfrom Georgia,celebrates ritual“writing in the Spirit”and water divination.These traditional expressions, derived fromAfrican influences, occur throughout theCaribbean, South America, and the AmericanSouth. This DVD shows Murray performing therituals and includes shots of some of thepaintings for which he has gained nationalrecognition. This short documentary raisesissues about the relationship between thespiritual and the aesthetic in the art of religiousvisionaries. By Judith McWillie/University ofGeorgia. 1986.Color, 15 minutes.DVD1145 . . . . . . $15.00Friends . . . . . . . . $13.50

James “Son” ThomasA renowned Deltablues singer, “Son”Thomas was also agifted clay sculptor.Filmed at his home inLeland, Mississippi,this treatment juxtaposes Thomas’s artworkwith several musical performances. It alsoincludes a sequence showing how he workedclay to create his famous sculptures of thehuman skull. By Judith McWillie/University ofGeorgia. 1986.Color, 17 minutes.DVD1104 . . . . . . $15.00Friends . . . . . . . . $13.50

William Faulkner and Eudora WeltyThis filmfeatures EudoraWelty at theopening sessionof the 1987Faulkner andYoknapatawphaConference.Welty reads fromher story “Why ILive at the P.O.”and answersquestions abouther work andFaulkner’s.Color, 34 minutes.DVD1104 . . . . . . $25.00Friends . . . . . . . . $22.50

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