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THE NEWSLETTER OF THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE • WINTER 2006 THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI

Notable authors, editors, publishers, and others in thetrade 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 Thursday with exhibitions and

lunch at the John Davis Williams Library, followed by twosessions and a special conference edition of Thacker MountainRadio, the program will continue through Saturday afternoonwith addresses, panels, and readings. A fiction and poetryjam, an Elderhostel program, a marathon book signing atSquare Books, and an optional literary tour of the MississippiDelta (March 27–30) are also part of the festivities.

The 2006 conference is dedicated to novelist and historianShelby Foote (1916–2005), a native of Greenville, Mississippi,and a longtime resident of Memphis, Tennessee. A respected butnot widely known author of six novels published between 1949and 1977, Foote gained national prominence for his role ascommentator in the 11-hour television documentary on theCivil War, produced and directed by Ken Burns and first shownon the Public Broadcasting Service in 1990. The productionmade Foote a cultural icon and helped him attract many readers.

Ellen Douglas, novelist and friend of Foote’s since theirdays in Greenville, will open the conference with a talk aboutFoote as a fiction writer. Gary W. Gallagher, professor ofhistory at the University of Virginia, will discuss Foote’sthree-volume history of the Civil War. A filmed tribute byKen Burns will be shown. There will also be a panel withmembers of the Memphis book club in which the authorparticipated for more than a quarter of a century.

The slate of speakers includes impressive lists of fictionwriters—Brian Keith Jackson, Tyembia Jess, Michael Knight,Starling Lawrence, James Meek, Lewis Nordan, JackPendarvis, George Saunders, Olympia Vernon—and poetsBeth Ann Fennelly, John Kinsella, Aimee Nezhukumatathil,Aleda Shirley, and Natasha Trethewey.

(continued on page 6)

The 13th Oxford Conference for the BookThe University of Mississippi Oxford, MississippiMarch 30–April 1, 2006

Illustrating 2006 Oxford Conference for the Book materials isBaxter Knowlton’s portrait of Shelby Foote. The portrait isreproduced on posters and T-shirts will be available from theCenter by calling 800-390-3527.

See page 4 of this issue of the Register for theDelta Literary Tour itinerary and page 7 forthe Oxford Conference for the Book schedule.

SouthernRegisterWinter06 2/5/06 4:13 PM

Winter 2006 The Southern Register

I N T H I S I S S U EWinter 2006

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

Encyclopedia making is a slow, deliberate process. Observers havepointed out that it took twice as long to complete the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture as ittook to fight the Civil War. When that volume came out in 1989 it was indeed theculmination of a long effort to bring together hundreds of contributors and produce a volumethat would help define the emerging field of Southern Studies—the interdisciplinary study ofthe American South. It was also one of the defining projects in the Center’s early history,establishing its leadership role in regional studies.

The South has changed enormously in the years since that volume appeared, andSouthern Studies is a thriving academic enterprise. Thus, the time is ripe for a new edition ofthe encyclopedia, which will begin appearing in separate volumes later this spring. We’vebeen planning The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture for years, working with consultants,renewing our productive relationship with the University of North Carolina Press, andputting in place our resources to once again assess the current state of the South and itsacademic study.

A key decision was to produce the New Encyclopedia as a series of separate volumes insteadof one big hardback, as in the previous edition. We believe that this format will providereaders interested in one topic, such as music or politics, the opportunity to buy theencyclopedia’s authoritative compilation in that area. Teachers will be able to assign arelevant book on such subjects for classroom adoption. Together, the 20-plus volumes willmake up the New Encyclopedia, which one day will make a hefty shelf full of knowledge andinsight.

Producing the reference book as a series of volumes enables us significantly to expand thecoverage of relevant topics. Of course, we are editing entries through updating statisticalinformation, adding new bibliographies, and reassigning some articles to new authors whohave worked recently with their topics. With more space, we are adding more entries andmore visual documentation. This is appropriate, given the expansion of scholarly workrelated to the South. Historians have continued their engagement with the region and itsrole in national history, and today historians are increasingly interested in the internationalrole of the South, going back to its founding as part of the expansion of the Atlantic world ofthe early modern period and continuing into this age of globalization. Literature has alwaysbeen a major area of scholarship on the South, and that remains true. Postmodern theory hasled to interest in post-Southern writing, including comparison of the American South withother “global Souths.” Other disciplines have shown new interest in the region, includinganthropologists who increasingly consider Native Americans of the South as integral parts ofearly Southern history and who place many of their contemporary participant-observerprojects not overseas but in the South. Gender, African American, and Southern Studiesoften overlap, and topics such as foodways, folk art, collective memory, and space and placehave seen significant new work that will be a part of our new survey of Southern culture.

The first two volumes to appear will be Religion and Geography. Religion continues to bea central social force in making the South an identifiable place, and the new volume willchart the changes in religion’s role in the recent South, including new attention to groupssuch as Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, New Age devotees, and Latinos, as well as attention toreligion’s dramatic role in politics and public culture. Geography is a foundational topic forthe study of any region, and it is appropriate that we publish that volume before proceedingto other topics. Our consultants in those areas, Samuel Hill and Richard Pillsbury, were withus in the first edition, and they have sensitively overseen the updating of their volumes.

We are building on the work of the first edition, which Bill Ferris and I coedited, alongwith the crucial contributions of Ann Abadie and Mary “Sue” Hart. Bill and Sue’s work willalways be a part of any new edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and we look backfondly on our “team.” Bill has gone on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,and Sue has retired. Ann remains an integral part of the production team for the newedition, and we have been blessed with the energetic and intelligent work of Jimmy Thomas,our managing editor. Jimmy was an experienced editor when he came to the Center a fewyears ago, and it has been a pleasure to work with him in producing these first two volumes.The production of the complete New Encyclopedia will take four more years, and we lookforward to a productive collaboration with our many generous contributors who write for us.

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 2006 Oxford Conference for the Book2 Director’s Column3 Bob Stone Exhibition3 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule4 Mississippi Delta Literary Tour7 Book Conference Schedule8 Brown Bag Schedule—Spring 20069 Living Blues Going Strong at 35

10 2006 F&Y: “Global Faulkner”12 Eudora Welty Awards12 Call for Music Papers 12 Square Table: Oxford’s New Cookbook13 Mississippi Encyclopedia Report13 Mississippi Institute of Arts and

Letters14 Studies Graduate Students Abroad 15 2005 Tennessee Williams Festival

Report15 2006 Tennessee Williams Festival

Dates16 Katrina Conference Report17 Reading the South: Reviews & Notes20 Joe York’s Film Whole Hog21 Southern Foodways Alliance News26 Notes on Contributors26 Regional Roundup26 2006 Events Calendar27 Southern Culture Catalog Items 28 Address Section/Mailing List Form/

Friends Information and Form

the

SouthernRegisterWinter06 2/5/06 4:13 PM Page 2

The Southern Register Winter 2006

Currently on exhibit in the GammillGallery is Sacred Steel, a collection of23 black-and-white photographs byFlorida folklorist Robert Stone. Theimages are of musicians and worshipersin the House of God and the Church ofthe Living God, two related Holiness-Pentecostal churches in which steelguitar music is a fundamental part ofthe worship service. In his position asoutreach coordinator for the FloridaFolklife Program, Stone documents andpresents the folk arts and folklife of oneof the nation’s most culturally diversestates. He first became aware of thesechurches’ steel guitar tradition in 1992through a friend who owned a musicstore in Hollywood, Florida, wheresome of the musicians did business.Soon thereafter, he secured a grantfrom the National Endowment for theArts’ Folk and Traditional ArtsProgram to support a survey of thetradition in the state and to produce acassette tape and accompanyingbooklet entitled Sacred Steel:Traditional Sacred African-AmericanSteel Guitar Music in Florida (1995).

The compelling, passionate music washeralded by folklorists, musicjournalists, and lovers of Americanmusic as a significant vernacular musicdiscovery. Stone has since producedeight CD albums of the music forArhoolie Records, directed thedocumentary video Sacred Steel: TheSteel Guitar Tradition of the House of

God Churches for the ArhoolieFoundation, and worked for the Houseof God to help them document theirmusical tradition. He is presentlyfinishing the manuscript for a book tobe published by the University ofIllinois Press.

“The tradition is rooted in theHawaiian music fad of the 1930s,”Stone writes, “but the sound isdistinctly African American, oftenclosely approximating the moans, cries,shouts and ornaments of gospelsinging.” Between the twodenominations, there are currentlyabout 250 congregations, totalingabout 10,000 members, in 26 states,most of them in the eastern UnitedStates. Ten of the churches are locatedin northeast Mississippi. Stone’sphotographs present the musicians,clergy, congregations, and families ofthe two churches in a variety ofsettings. As they meditate, grieve,make joyful noises, dance withabandon, testify, become filled with theHoly Ghost, speak in tongues, andeven “fall out,” the passionate voice ofthe steel guitar is ever-present.

Stone was in Oxford for the 2006Living Blues Symposium as a panelist onthe Blues Photography Panel. Areception honoring him took place inthe Gammill Gallery.

Sacred Steel

Eddie Harmon, steel guitar, Jay Caver, rhythm guitar, and master of ceremonies KeithRobinson at the House of God Musicfest, Pompano Beach, Florida, 2003

Robert Stone

Exhibition Schedule

The Gammill Gallery, located in Barnard Observatory, is open Mondaythrough Friday, 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., except for University holidays.

Telephone: 662-915-5993.

January 15–March 22,2006

Sacred Steel: The Musicand Culture of the Houseof God and Church of the

Living GodRobert Stone

March 23–May 31, 2006

Bruce NewmanAuthors at the YellowWall, and Then Some



The Mississippi Delta is the site of a spring tour organized bythe Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Focusing onthe area’s legendary blues, writers, and food—along with itstumultuous history—the program is based in Greenwood,home of playwright Endesha Ida Mae Holland and memoiristMildred Topp, and will include day trips to three other towns.

Scheduled for Monday, March 27, is a bus trip to the historictown of Carrollton, ancestral and early home of novelist, storywriter, and memoirist Elizabeth Spencer, whose best seller Light inthe Piazza was made into a movie by MGM and is now a TonyAward–winning musical in New York. On Tuesday, March 28,the group will travel to Greenville, home of William AlexanderPercy, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote, Bern Keating, Walker Percy,Julia Reed, Ben Wasson, and many other writers—so many thatGreenville is known for having “more writers per square foot thanany other city of its size.” On Wednesday, March 29, the groupwill go to Sumner, the setting for Lewis Nordan’s novel WolfWhistle, based on the Emmett Till case, and where the Till murdertrial took place. Sumner is the home of Langdon Clay and MaudeSchuyler Clay, and has been the subject of many photographs byWilliam Eggleston, who often stayed with his grandparents there.

Also scheduled are meals at Lusco’s, Giardina’s, and othernotable Delta restaurants as well as live blues and gospelperformances. On March 30, after breakfast at the Alluvian—Viking Range Corporation’s boutique hotel—participantswill be free to travel on their own to Oxford, arriving in timeto visit Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, tour the town, havelunch on the courthouse square, and attend the OxfordConference for the Book, which will begin that afternoon.

The Delta tour is $475 per person for all program activities,eight meals, and local transportation. The fee does notinclude lodging. To register, visit the Center’s Web sitewww.olemiss.edu/depts/south/. Remember to sign up early.Only 35 spots are available, and they will go fast.

Group accommodations have been arranged at theAlluvian, in downtown Greenwood, www.thealluvian.com.Rooms at the Alluvian require a separate registration andare priced at a discounted rate of $145. Rooms may bereserved by calling 866-600-5201 and asking for the special“Literary Tour” rate. In the event that the Alluvian sells outbefore you get a chance to book a room, call the GreenwoodBest Western, 662-455-5777.

MISSISSIPPI DELTA LITERARY TOURExperience the place, the people, the food, and the music that inspired Mississippi writers

March 27–30, 2006

MONDAY, MARCH 27 CARROLLTONNoon Registration—Alluvian Lobby1:00 p.m. Depart for Carrollton—Marion Barnwell, tour guide2:30 p.m. “Creativity in the Mississippi Delta,” talk by

Charles Reagan Wilson3:30 p.m. “Landscapes of the Soul: Elizabeth Spencer and

Endesha Ida Mae Holland,” talk by Marion Barnwell5:00 p.m. Cocktails and Dinner at historic Tuttle House 7:00 p.m. Depart Carrollton, arrive back in Greenwood by

7:15 p.m.8:00 p.m. Reception, Readings, and Music at Jamie

Kornegay’s Turnrow Book Company

TUESDAY, MARCH 28 GREENVILLE8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast9:00 a.m. Depart for Greenville—Jimmy Thomas, tour guide

(Drive by Nordan home in Itta Bena on the way)10:30 a.m. Greetings, Franke Keating

“Shelby Foote’s Novels,” talk by W. Kenneth Holditch,program at the William Alexander Percy Library

Noon Lunch at Doe’s Eat Place“The History of Greenville,” talk by Hugh McCormick

1:30 p.m. Greenville Tour led by Mary Dayle McCormick 2:00 p.m. Greenville Cemetery Tour led by

Princella Wilkerson Nowell3:00 p.m. Reception at McCormick Book Inn

Readings by Lewis Nordan and Cynthia Shearer5:00 p.m. Depart for Greenwood6:30 p.m. Free Time7:30 p.m. Dinner at Lusco’s in Greenwood

“The Cefalu Connection,” talk by Amy Evans

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29 SUMNER8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast9:00 a.m. Depart for Sumner—talks by Luther Brown and

Henry OutlawVisit Little Zion Church and Robert Johnson’sMoney Road Grave Site

10:00 a.m. Talk and Reading by Patti Carr Black11:00 a.m. Slide Presentation by Maude Schuyler ClayNoon Lunch at the Sumner Country Club

Gospel Music/Blues Music2:00 p.m. “Civil Rights in the Delta,” Curtis Wilkie in

conversation with Patti Carr Black, Frank Mitchner,Wheeler Parker, Betty Pearson, Bill Pearson,William F. Winter

3:30 p.m. Readings from The Celestial Jukebox by CynthiaShearer, A Killing in This Town by Olympia Vernon,and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan

4:30 p.m. Depart for Greenwood7:00 p.m. Tour of Delta art at the Alluvian, led by

William Dunlap7:30 p.m. Dinner at Giardina’s in Greenwood

THURSDAY, MARCH 30 CONFERENCE FOR THE BOOK8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast9:00 a.m. Depart for Oxford (1.5 hours)

Oxford Conference for the Book, dedicated toShelby Foote, on the University of Mississippicampus, March 30–April 1

*All events subject to change.

LITERARY TOUR SCHEDULE



The Alluvian is a luxury boutiquehotel in Greenwood, Mississippi, setwithin walking distance of VikingRange Corporation, the Yazoo River,and historic Cotton Row. Original artby Delta artists and a lively lobby scenemake the Alluvian the epicenter ofcontemporary Delta culture.

Marion Barnwell taught English atDelta State University for many years.She is editor of the anthology A PlaceCalled Mississippi and coauthor ofTouring Literary Mississippi.

Patti Carr Black has written and editedmany books, including Art inMississippi, 1720–1980 and AgnesGrinstead Anderson’s Approaching theMagic Hour: Memories of WalterAnderson. Her most recent publicationsare Eudora Welty’s World and EudoraWelty: Early Escapades.

Luther Brown is founding director ofthe Delta Center for Culture andLearning at Delta State University inCleveland, Mississippi.

Carrollton, built around a courthousesquare, is one of two seats in CarrollCounty. Many of Carrollton’s downtownbuildings and houses were built in the19th century, including a house used inthe 1969 film The Reivers, adapted fromthe William Faulkner novel. Carrolltonis the home of a writer with aninternational reputation, ElizabethSpencer. She is the author of nine novels,seven collections of short fiction, and amemoir, Landscapes of the Heart.

Maude Schuyler Clay is a fifth-generation native of the Delta town ofSumner, Mississippi. Her book ofphotographs, Delta Land, is a beautifulhomage to her home.

William Dunlap is an artist, artscommentator, and educator. His workcan be found at museums across thenation and at United States embassiesthroughout the world.

Amy Evans is a special projectsconsultant for Viking Range and leadsthe Southern Foodways Alliance’s OralHistory Initiative. She is also aphotographer and painter.

Giardina’s, opened by the Giardina

family in 1936, is a local favorite forItalian-inflected Delta dishes like GulfPompano. The restaurant’s new homeas part of the Alluvian hotel is a uniqueblend of old family charm and modernelegance.

Greenville is known as the home ofmany Delta bluesmen and as Mississippi’sliterary center. It has been said thatGreenville has produced more authorsper capita than any other city its size inthe country. Among the more than 100writers who made this city on theMississippi River their home during the20th century are poet and biographerWilliams Alexander Percy; novelist,historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winningauthor Shelby Foote; Delta DemocratTimes publisher Hodding Carter Jr. andhis son, Hodding Carter III; historian andauthor Bern Keating; memoirist CliftonTaulbert; and novelists Ellen Douglas,Beverly Lowery, and Walker Percy.

W. Kenneth Holditch, a prominentliterary scholar who is professoremeritus at the University of NewOrleans, is the author of numerousshort stories, poems, and essays onmajor Southern writers. He is theauthor of Tennessee Williams and theSouth and, with New York Times dramacritic Mel Gussow, edited the Library ofAmerica’s two-volume edition of theworks of Tennessee Williams.

Franke Keating and her late husband,Bern, traveled the world takingphotographs and writing about theplaces they visited. Featured in theNew Yorker, the New York Times, andcountless other prominent newspapersand magazines, their work broughtattention to their hometown ofGreenville and helped put the Delta onthe map throughout the world.

Lusco’s has been in business since 1933and is owned and operated by a fourth-generation Lusco, Andy Pinkston, andhis wife, Karen. This legendaryrestaurant has long been the haunt ofDelta folks who revel in the restaurant’sdown-at-the-heels gentility.

Hugh and Mary Dayle McCormickare natives of Greenville, Mississippi,and founts of local Greenville history.

Together they own and operateMcCormick Book Inn, the premierDelta bookseller.

Frank Mitchner is a lifelong resident ofSumner, Mississippi. He vividlyremembers the Emmett Till trial, whichtook place in his hometown during hisyouth.

Lewis Nordan is the author of fournovels and Sugar among the Freaks,selected stories from his collectionsWelcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair andThe All-Girl Football Team. The settingfor his fiction is Arrow Catcher, a placesimilar to his hometown of Itta Bena inthe Mississippi Delta. He has also writtena memoir, Boy with Loaded Gun.

Princella Wilkerson Nowell , ajournalist and local history buff, is theauthor of A Closer Look: A History andGuide to the Greenville Cemetery.

Henry Outlaw is professor of chemistryand program manager of the DeltaCenter for Culture and Learning atDelta State University in Cleveland,Mississippi.

Wheeler Parker, a cousin of EmmettTill, accompanied him to Mississippifrom Chicago to visit relatives and waswith him at the Bryant Grocery andMeat Market the night that Till allegedlywhistled at Carolyn Bryant. Parker wasin the home of Moses and ElizabethWright the night that his cousin wasabducted. Born in Mississippi in 1939,Parker moved with his parents and twosiblings to Argo, Illinois, in 1947. As anadult, he worked as a barber and becamea minister in 1977. In 1993 be becamepastor of the Argo Temple Church ofGod in Christ, the church AlmaSpearman, Emmett Till’s grandmother,helped to found.

Betty Pearson, a lifelong resident of theMississippi Delta except for a stint inCalifornia serving in the Marine Corpsduring World War II, attended theEmmett Till trial in Sumner with a presspass from the town’s Sun Sentinel. Thetrial kicked off the civil rightsmovement, she said, and led to herbecoming a member of advisory

PEOPLE AND PLACES TO KNOW




Novelist, journalist, and playwrightLarry L. King will be here to unveil hismemoir of Willie Morris, to be publishedin March 2006. Also joining King to talkabout “Writing Literary Lives” will beSuzanne Marrs, author of a newbiography of Eudora Welty, and DarleneHarbour Unrue, whose latest book is onthe life and works of Katherine AnnePorter. Artist and arts commentatorWilliam Dunlap will bring together arthistorians Patti Carr Black, Mary LynnKotz, and Annalyn Swan for a discussionof “Writing about Art and Artists.”

Once again, the Junior Auxiliary ofOxford, the Lafayette County LiteracyCouncil, Square Books Jr., and othercollaborators will bring local fifthgraders to the campus to meet an authorof books for young readers. The 2006author is T. A. Barron, author of TheLost Years of Merlin series, The GreatTree of Avalon trilogy, and numerousother celebrated publications for youngand not-so-young readers. This programis part of the Young Authors Fair, inwhich all fifth graders in LafayetteCounty will read one of Barron’s booksand write, illustrate, and bind a book oftheir own before attending the session.The students’ books will be on displayduring the week of the conference.

The program is being expanded thisyear to include a session for ninth graderswith Sharon M. Draper, a professionaleducator as well as an accomplishedauthor. She has been honored as aNational Teacher of the Year, is a three-time winner of the Coretta Scott KingLiterary Award, and is a New York Timesbestselling author. Her new novel, CopperSun, due out in March 2006, portrays thehorrible reality of the slave trade. As withthe fifth-grade program at the conference,

all students will receive their very owncopy of one her books and read and writeabout it before the conference.

Following the young readers sessionson Friday morning Elaine H. Scott willmoderate “The Endangered Species:Readers Today and Tomorrow,” a panelwith Claiborne Barksdale, director ofthe Barksdale Reading Institute at theUniversity of Mississippi; Sarah Combs,teen specialist in the collectiondepartment of BWI Books inLexington, Kentucky; Cindy Dach,marketing director of Changing HandsBookstore in Tempe, Arizona; andPamela Pridgen, director of the public

library in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, anda board member of the MississippiLibrary Commission. Following thesession, the Lafayette County LiteracyCouncil will offer box lunches forparticipants. Proceeds will benefit localliteracy projects.

Author Barry Hannah, director of theMFA program at the University ofMississippi, will return as moderator ofhis regular “Finding a Voice/Reaching anAudience” session. Talking with himwill be author T. A. Barron, agent AlexGlass, author and editor StarlingLawrence, and two representatives ofSarabande Books, editor in chief SarahGorham and marketing director NickoleBrown. Sarabande Books, a nonprofitliterary press founded in March 1994, inLouisville, Kentucky, focuses on poetryand short fiction, genres that in therecent past have received less thangenerous attention from the mainstreampublishing industry.

Ole Miss journalism professor CurtisWilkie will moderate a session on“Writing about Politics” with panelistsJames Gill, a columnist for the New

An easy way to attend the Oxford Conference for the Book isthrough Elderhostel, an international program of educational travel for adults55 and older. For $444 per person, everything is provided: the conference,three nights’ lodging at the newly renovated Downtown Oxford Inn andSuites, all meals from dinner March 30 through breakfast April 2, and localtransportation to and from conference activities. To register, call toll-free, 877-426-8056, or visit www.elderhostel.org and refer to “So You Love Books? Getbetween the Pages at the Oxford Conference for the Book,” program number12317-033006. For information, call Center Advisory Committee member andlongtime Elderhostel provider Carolyn Vance Smith in Natchez, 601-446-1208, or e-mail her at [email protected].

(continued from page 1 Book Conference

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Orleans Times-Picayune; Trent Lott,U.S. Senator from Mississippi whosememoir, Herding Cats: A Life in Politics,was recently published; and ThomasOliphant, longtime Washingtoncorrespondent for the Boston Globe anda nationally syndicated columnist.

During the conference, theDepartment of Archives and SpecialCollections at the John Davis WilliamsLibrary will feature an exhibitiondevoted to the life and work of ShelbyFoote. The department will also feature anew exhibition entitled MississippiMatinée: An Exhibition of the State and theSilver Screen. Conference participants areinvited to visit the exhibitions onThursday and enjoy a lunch hosted byJulia Rholes, dean of libraries.

The conference is open to the public

without charge. To assure seating space,those interested in attending shouldpreregister by contacting the Center forthe Study of Southern Culture.Reservations and advance payment arerequired for three optional events: acocktail buffet at Isom Place ($50), a boxlunch offered by the Lafayette CountyLiterary Council ($10), and a countrydinner at Taylor Grocery ($25).

Conference sponsors include theCenter for the Study of SouthernCulture, Department of English,Department of History, Department ofJournalism, John Davis WilliamsLibrary, Sally McDonnell BarksdaleHonors College, John and RenéeGrisham Visiting Writers Fund,Barksdale Reading Institute, SarahIsom Center for Women, School of

Education, Junior Auxiliary of Oxford,Lafayette County-Oxford PublicLibrary, Lafayette County LiteracyCouncil, Oxford Middle School PTA,Mississippi Library Commission,Mississippi Hills Heritage AreaAlliance, and Square Books.

The 2006 conference is partiallyfunded by the University of Mississippi,a contribution from the R&B FederFoundation for the Beaux Arts, andgrants from the Mississippi HumanitiesCouncil, the National Endowment forthe Arts, and the Yoknapatawpha ArtsCouncil.

Detailed information about theprogram, speakers, and registration isavailable on the Center’s Web site,www.olemiss.edu/depts/south.

THURSDAY, MARCH 3010:00 a.m. Registration Begins 11:30 a.m. Exhibitions

Shelby Foote: His Life andWork Mississippi Matinée: AnExhibition of the State and theSilver ScreenJohn Davis Williams Library

Light Lunch Mississippi Hall of WritersHosted by Julia RholesDean of University Libraries

1:30 p.m. WelcomeRichard Howorth, MayorShelby Foote: His Work andLegacy Charles Reagan Wilson,moderatorEllen Douglas, Gary W.GallagherFilm Clip with a Ken Burnstribute and Footecommentaries

3:00 p.m. Remembering Shelby Foote Richard Howorth, moderator Michael McDonnell, WilliamPearson, William Reed

5:30 p.m. Thacker Mountain RadioJim Dees, hostThe Yalobushwhackers, house bandVisiting Authors, VisitingMusicians

7:00 p.m. DinnerMeet the SpeakersIsom Place (reservations required)

9:00 p.m. Open MikePoetry & Fiction JamDavid Galef, moderator Bouré

FRIDAY, MARCH 319:00 a.m. Welcome

Carolyn Ellis Staton, ProvostLiterature for Young Readers 1Rosemary Oliphant-Ingham,moderatorReadings/RemarksT. A. Barron

10:30 a.m. Literature for Young Readers 2Barbara Lowe, moderatorReadings/RemarksSharon M. Draper

11:30 a.m. The Endangered Species:Readers Today and TomorrowElaine H. Scott, moderatorClaiborne Barksdale, Sarah Combs, Cindy Dach,Pamela Pridgen

1:30 p.m. Readings and RemarksJamie Kornegay, moderatorTad Floridis, StarlingLawrence, James Meek

2:30 p.m. Readings and RemarksEthel Young-Minor,moderatorBrian Keith Jackson,Tyehimba Jess, Olympia Vernon

3:30 p.m. Readings and RemarksDavid Galef, moderator Jack Pendarvis, George Saunders

4:30 p.m. Poetry: Readings and RemarksCelebration of National

Poetry MonthBeth Ann Fennelly,moderatorJohn Kinsella, AimeeNezhukumatathil, Aleda Shirley

7:00 p.m. Country DinnerTaylor GroceryTaylor Grocery BandTaylor, Mississippi(reservations required)

SATURDAY, APRIL 19:00 a.m. Writing about Politics

Curtis Wilkie, moderatorJames Gill, Trent Lott,Thomas Oliphant

10:30 a.m. Finding a Voice/Reaching an AudienceBarry Hannah, moderatorT. A. Barron, Nickole Brown,Alex Glass, Sarah Gorham,Starling Lawrence

1:30 p.m. Writing about Art and ArtistsWilliam Dunlap, moderatorPatti Carr Black, Mary LynnKotz, Annalyn Swan

2:30 p.m. Readings/RemarksTom Franklin, moderatorMichael Knight, LewisNordan, Natasha Trethewey

3:30 p.m. Writing Literary LivesTed Ownby, moderatorLarry L. King, Suzanne Marrs,Darlene Harbour Unrue

5:00 p.m. Book Signing Off Square Books

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM13th Oxford Conference for the Book

The University of Mississippi • Oxford, Mississippi • March 30–April 1, 2006Program sessions will be at the Gertrude Castellow Ford Center for the Performing Arts.

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January18 “Winter in the Garden:

Preparing for What’s to Grow”Barry WhitehouseLafayette County MasterGardeners

25 “Alex Haley’s Roots and the1970s”Ted Ownby, Professor ofHistory and Southern Studies

February1 “The University of Mississippi’s

School of Law and theChildren’s Advocacy Clinic”Debbie Bell, Professor of Law

8 “A Rose by Any Other Name:The Origins, Rise, and CurrentState of Soul-Blues Music”Mark Camarigg, PublicationsManager, Living Blues Magazineand History Graduate Student

15 “Just Beneath the Surface: AStory of Race Relations in aSmall Southern Town”Mary Battle, Southern StudiesGraduate Student

22 “A Badge of a Man: Genderand Fraternity in a NorthCarolina Secret Society”Angela Hornsby, AssistantProfessor of History

March1 “Irish in the American Rural

South”Rankin Sherling, HistoryGraduate Student

8 “Lady Preacher: Women andOrdination in the South”Katherine CookeAssistant PastorFirst Presbyterian Church Oxford, Mississippi

22 “They Dance and Shout It intoObscurity: The Early History ofthe Church of God in Christ”Calvin White, HistoryGraduate Student

29 “Portraits of Writers, Oxford,Mississippi: A Gammill GalleryTalk”Bruce Newman, Photographer“A Reading”Michael Knight, GrishamWriter in Residence

April5 “Making America Safe for Civil

Rights: Lynching and theChanging Meaning of Community in the World WarII Era”Chris WaldrepProfessor of HistorySan Francisco State University

12 “‘Daddy, Tell Me AnotherStory’: The Drive-By Truckersand the Search for SouthernIdentity”Elllie Campbell, SouthernStudies Graduate Student

19 “The Nashville ChristianInstitute: Pioneers in thePursuit of Christian Educationamong African AmericanMembers of the Church ofChrist, 1905–1967”J. R. DukeHistory Graduate Student

26 “Packaging History for PublicConsumption”Willie Bearden, Writer andFilmmakerMemphis, Tennessee

May3 “May Flowers: An Irish

Musical Celebration of Spring”Greg JohnsonCurator, Blues Archives

Center for the S tudy o f Sou thern Cu l tu re

T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f M i s s i s s i p p i

Brown BagLunch and

LectureSeries

2006 Spring SemesterThe Brown Bag Luncheon Series takesplace each Wednesday at noon in theBarnard Observatory Lecture Hallduring the regular academic year.

The Provincials

—Pat Conroy

The University of North Carolina Press



Living Blues magazine—the country’s longest-running bluespublication—is celebrating its 35th year. And with six four-color, 100-plus-page issues a year and an annual Blues TodaySymposium each February, it’s come a long way from the one-room apartment where it began.

Now housed at the University of Mississippi, the magazinewas born in uptown Chicago, the result of a couple ofNorthwestern University students and a young businessmanwondering why no blues magazines were published in theUnited States. Although there was plenty about the bluesbeing written in Great Britain and on the Continent, fewpeople were paying attention to it in this country. StudentsJim O’Neal and Amy van Singel,along with future AlligatorRecords founder, Bruce Iglauer,and several friends, aimed toremedy the situation.

The name Living Blues was theobvious choice: Unlike theEuropean publications, this newmagazine would focus only onthe music and backgrounds ofliving artists. The strength of themagazine, which has a circulationof nearly 20,000, comes from “verycareful and focused in-depthwriting,” according to editor BrettBonner. “Since the beginning, thathasn’t changed.”

One thing that has changed is themagazine’s location. In 1982,O’Neal and van Singel decidedLiving Blues had outgrown theirability to oversee it. They alsobelieved that University ofMississippi’s Center for the Study ofSouthern Culture would make thebest home for their publication. Just 75 miles from Memphisand 60 miles from the Mississippi Delta, the university isarguably the ideal home for a publication dedicated to theblues culture.

“The University of Mississippi is a natural home for LivingBlues,” said Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center.“Mississippi is the source and heart of the blues, and thisuniversity has a mission of examining and preserving humanitiesand the arts. Living Blues is part of an interconnected series ofresources at the Center from the Blues Archive to Highway 61,the radio show that’s produced here. It’s right in the middle ofboth, with a high caliber of writers and photographersdocumenting the blues for generations to come.”

“To give the blues its own voice from its own home sourcewas one of the main points of starting the magazine, and also tocounter the notion that the blues was dead or dying,” said JimO’Neal in a September 2000 Living Blues interview. “It always

surprises me that there are younger generations playing theblues because in some ways it would seem logical that it woulddie out, but it’s so strong at the roots and the community that itkeeps going.”

The magazine, like the music it reports on, seems to be justas strong at the roots. With its continued mission to celebrateliving African American blues artists, Living Blues has grownfrom a sort of homemade black-and-white fanzine circulatedaround Chicago to one of the world’s most respected bluespublications.

“I’m really happy that Ole Miss has kept the magazinegoing and has stayed close to theeditorial policy we started with,”O’Neal said recently from his KansasCity home. “Living Blues still providesa service to the blues world that noother magazine does. An artist doesn’thave to have a hit record or anyrecord at all to be in Living Blues. It’smore about the culture that the musiccomes from.”

Besides documenting the blues,Living Blues has set out to celebrate thegenre in a manner true to form for themagazine. Rather than doing what’sbeen done in the past, focusing oneither academic discourse or bringingin entertainers, the annual BluesToday Symposium on the Ole Misscampus each February combines thebest of both worlds.

“I wish that the symposium hadhappened a long time ago,” saidO’Neal, who still reads themagazine’s copy before it goes topress. “It’s not like any other blues

gathering. It’s a gathering of people who love the music, fromacademics, to people in the business, to entertainers. It’s a greatevent, and I’ve never quite had the feeling at any other event.”

The blues symposium exemplifies the same effort that haswon the magazine praise not only from critics and peoplewho hand out awards, such as the W. C. Handy Keeping theBlues Alive award, but also from true fans of the music.

“We have an extremely devoted subscriber base,” Bonnersaid. “In fact many of them have been subscribing since thefirst issue.” No wonder then that B. B. King himself callsLiving Blues his “Number one source for blues news, reviews,and in-depth stories.” Or that he returned to Ole Miss in2004 to be a part of Blues Today.

Living Blues is available on newsstands and by subscription.To subscribe for $23.95 a year in the United States, $29.95 inCanada, and $35.95 overseas, call 1-800-390-3527 or visitwww.livingblues.com.

TOBIE BAKER

Living Blues Magazine Still Going Strong after 35 Years



When Sherwood Anderson advisedFaulkner to write about “that little patchup there in Mississippi where you startedfrom,” he justified it by adding: “Butthat’s all right too. It’s America too.” By“America” Anderson meant the UnitedStates, but in the 80 years or so since heassured Faulkner of the potentialsignificance of what would becomeYoknapatawpha, the resulting Saga hasacquired resonances and ramificationsneither Anderson nor Faulkner everdreamed of. The “postage stamp of nativesoil”—Faulkner’s imaginary South andthat larger South that is both source andproduct of his apocrypha—has become akind of mirror in which countries andcultures around the world have seenthemselves reflected.

Throughout its history the South hasbeen regarded, and has regarded itself,as exceptional, and yet, as a plantationeconomy, as the victim and practitionerof forms of imperialism, as a culturecharacterized by racial suspicion andracial intimacy, the South sharessignificant common ground with theUnited States as a whole and with therest of the hemisphere. Moreover, theperennial fascination with the UnitedStates South demonstrated outsideNorth and South America suggests alarger global dimension, therecognition of a representativenesseven wider than we have imagined.

The 33rd annual Faulkner andYoknapatawpha Conference—“GlobalFaulkner”—will explore during fivedays of lectures, panel discussions,tours, and social gatherings theconnections between Faulkner’s Southand the cultures that it illuminates andis illuminated by. Appearing at theconference for the first time will beManuel Broncano, associate professorof American Literature at theUniversity of Leon, Spain; KeithCartwright, assistant professor ofEnglish at the University of NorthFlorida; George Handley, associateprofessor of Humanities at BrighamYoung University; Alfred Lopez,

assistant professor of English at theUniversity of Mississippi; MarioMaterassi, professor of AmericanLiterature at the University ofFlorence, Italy; and Takako Tanaka,professor of English at Nagoya CityUniversity, Japan.

Manuel Broncano has publishedseveral books in Spanish on Americanliterature, including Brief Worlds,Infinite Worlds: Flannery O’Connor andthe American Short Story, The Frontier:Myth and Reality of the New World, anda forthcoming volume, MulticulturalSocieties: Artistic Discourse and Identity,as well as translations of Willa Cather,Washington Irving, Edgar Alan Poe,and Flannery O’Connor. KeithCartwright has published on Africanand Caribbean literature, highlightedby his volume Reading Africa intoAmerican Literature: Epics, Fables,Gothic Tales, selected as a Choice BestAmerican Book of the year, 2003.George Handley has writtenextensively of the Caribbean and LatinAmerica and their relationship to theSouth, including his Postslavery

Literatures in the Americas: FamilyPortraits in Black and White and acoedited volume, Caribbean Literatureand the Environment: Between Cultureand Nature. Alfred J. Lopez is the authorof Posts and Pasts: A Theory ofPostcolonialism and a forthcomingvolume, José Martí, the United States,and the Future of Cuban Nationalism,and is the editor of PostcolonialWhiteness: A Critical Reader on Race andEmpire. Mario Materassi has publishedextensively on Faulkner, including twobooks in Italian, Faulkner’s Novels andFaulkner, Again, as well as translationsof Soldiers’ Pay, As I Lay Dying, Privacy:The American Dream: What Happenedto It?, and a forthcoming volume,Sanctuary. Takako Tanaka has written20 essays on Faulkner and a volume inJapanese, A Study of Faulkner’s Fiction1919–1931: Body and Language.

Returning to the Faulknerconference are Leigh Anne Duck,assistant professor of English at theUniversity of Memphis, author of essayson Faulkner, Zora Neal Hurston, and V.S. Naipaul and a forthcoming book,The Nation’s Region: SouthernModernism, Segregation, and U.S.Nationalism; and John T. Matthews,author of The Play of Faulkner’sLanguage and The Sound and the Fury:Faulkner and the Lost Cause, as well asnumerous essays on Faulkner, literarytheory, and cultural studies. Additionalspeakers and panelists will be selectedfrom the Call for Papers competition.Among the topics that will be taken upat the conference will be Broncano’sexploration of significant parallels inthe U.S. South and Spain, includingthe issues of race, an inherited socialstructure in the process of radical andirreversible transformation, and aboveall the Spanish Civil War, that ledSpaniards, “at least those on thedefeated side, to rediscover the U.S.South and its literature”; Cartwright’sstudy of Faulkner and the West Africanwriter Wole Soyinka, and thetreatment of the endangered

Global FaulknerFaulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference • July 23–27, 2006

George Handley



wilderness, the hunt, ritual, traditionand authority; and Handley’scomparison of Caribbean conceptionsof history and Faulkner’s: a sharedpoetics of memory that may uncoverfresh implications in Faulkner’sgenerally tragic vision. Lopez willexamine the way in which certain“Third World” writers have translatedFaulknerian understanding of racialhierarchy into their own social andcultural contexts, such as India’s castesystem and Latin America’s racialdistinction between whites andindigenous populations.

Materassi will focus on Faulkner’streatment of the Pygmalion image in hisearly novel Mosquitoes and how thatimage participates in an extraordinarynumber of European traditions and texts,suggesting an exchange, an interactionthat links Faulkner with a larger culturalcontext; Tanaka will discuss theglobal/local nexus in Faulkner’s fiction inrelation to his treatment of patriarchalpower, with particular attention to thattreatment by Japanese writers in Japanesesociety. Duck, addressing Requiem for aNun and Absalom, Absalom!, will discussFaulkner’s prescient understanding of ashift in the political economies ofimperialism/colonization in the South ofthe early part of the 20th century to aform of globalization scholars have onlyrecently come to recognize. Matthewswill investigate late Faulkner fiction,particularly The Mansion, in terms of itsconcern with aspects of globalmodernity, such as migration, electronicmass culture, and the conceptualizationof region in a global context.

Evident in all these topics is aFaulkner whose multilayered depictionof the South (however geographicallylimited its imagery) has become trulyglobal, not only in its influence, whichhas often been studied, but in itsdynamic interaction with the rest ofthe world: illuminating cultures tothemselves, being illuminated bycultures, whose parallels with Faulknerare only now being recognized.

Other program events will include apanel of Faulkner friends and family,moderated by Elizabeth Shiver, sessionson “Teaching Faulkner,” a discussion of“Collecting Faulkner” by Seth Berner,and an exhibition of Faulkner books,

manuscripts, photographs, andmemorabilia at the John DavisWilliams Library.

The conference will begin onSunday, July 23, with a reception at theUniversity Museum, and a specialexhibition of Jackson, Mississippi,artist Gwendolyn Magee’s Journey of theSpirit, a fiber-quilt show inspired by thespiritual “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”After the Museum reception, theopening papers of the conference willtake place at the Johnson CommonsAuditorium and will be followed by abuffet supper at the home of Dr. BeckettHoworth Jr. and the late Mary HartwellBishop Howorth. A Sunday eveningprogram will feature the announcementof the winner of the 17th Faux FaulknerContext, coordinated by the author’sniece, Dean Faulkner Wells, a showingof a short film, Faulkner in Japan (1955),and a presentation of dramatic readingsfrom Faulkner’s work.

Other events will include “Faulkneron the Fringe”—an “open mike”

evening at the Southside Gallery;guided daylong tours of NortheastMississippi, including, for the first time,a tour of Memphis; a picnic served atFaulkner’s home, Rowan Oak; and aclosing party at Off Square Books.Films relating to Faulkner’s life andwork will be available during the week.

For more information on theconference contact the Office ofOutreach and Continuing Education,P.O. Box 879, The University ofMississippi, University, MS 38677-0879;telephone: 662-915-7283; e-mail:[email protected]. For information onthe conference program, course, credit,and all other inquiries, contact theDepartment of English, P.O. Box 1848,Bondurant Hall, The University ofMississippi, University, MS 38677-1848;telephone: 662-915-7439; e-mail:[email protected]. For on-lineregistration, visit us on the Web atwww.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/.

DONALD M. KARTIGANER

Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate Student ConferenceThe 12th annual Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate StudentConference will be held at the University of Mississippi on Thursday, July 20,through Saturday, July 22, 2006. Creative and critical readings will addressvarious topics onor about theSouth. Criticaltopics are notrestricted toliterature; wewelcomesubmissions fromother disciplinesare welcomed andparticularly thosewithinterdisciplinaryperspectives. Theconference willinclude an MFA reading night on the Square, a luncheon on Saturday duringwhich two best paper awards will be presented. Several travel awards, new thisyear, are being offered. Students whose papers are accepted may register for the33rd annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference for a reduced registrationfee. For more information, visit either the graduate conference Web site atwww.olemiss.edu/conf/swsw or www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/.



Eudora Welty Awards forCreative WritingDo you have a nephew who just may be the next WendellBerry? A granddaughter who can channel her inner O’Connorwith a flick of a pen? Or does the neighborhood paperboy aimfor Richard Wright-like greatness? If so, encourage these youngpeople to enter stories and poems for consideration in theCenter for the Study of Southern Culture’s annual EudoraWelty Awards. Schools may submit one entry per category.Students should be Mississippi resident ninth-through-twelfth-graders and must submit writing through their high schools.Maximum length of short stories is 3,000 words and of poetry,100 lines. Winners and nominating schools will be notified inthe spring. First place carries a $500 prize and second place,$250, plus recognition by Center director Charles ReaganWilson at the opening of the 2006 Faulkner andYoknapatawpha Conference on campus in August. Entries aredue by April 15, 2006, and are judged by University ofMississippi English professors. Applications and submissionrequirements have been sent to all Mississippi public andprivate high schools, but if you know a Mississippi studentcurrently enrolled in high school outside the state, [email protected] or call 662-915-5993 for a copy.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture and theOffice of Outreach at the University of Mississippi aresponsoring the second annual Music of the SouthConference on the Oxford campus June 2–3, 2006. Theconference focuses on a wide range of music that isrooted in the American South, either having origins inthe region or making use of regional themes andcontext. Country, bluegrass, blues, gospel, jazz, rock ’n’roll, rap/hip-hop, and art music that came out of theSouth will all be covered in lectures, workshops, andmusical performances. We hope to explore theconnections among particular genres and understandthe refined context that has produced such musicalcreativity. Papers should draw from academic research,but be presented for a general audience interested inthe American South and its culture. For one specialpanel discussion, the conference welcomes papers thataddress Louisiana music. Submissions should be e-mailed to [email protected] by March 1.Acceptance notifications will be e-mailed before April1. Call 662-915-5993 with questions.

Call for Music Papers

Cover art by Jason BouldinA collection of recipes, original artwork, and personal accounts of Southern cookingby Oxford’s most distinguished literary figures, Square Table is the perfect gift—foryourself and everyone on your holiday list. A beautiful book—a perfect gift.

All proceeds benefit the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council. Many thanks to ourprimary sponsors, Baptist Memorial Hospital and First National Bank.

Name __________________________________________________________

Address ________________________________________________________

City______________________________ State ______ Zip _______________

E-mail __________________________________________________________

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Shipping and handling costs: Add $5.95 for one book and $2.00 for each additional booksent to a single address. A half case of six books can be delivered to a single address for ashipping 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 calling 662-236-6429.

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Mississippi residents

add 7% sales tax ________

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Oxford’s finest new cookbook sold out in twomonths and is available again!



Work on the Mississippi Encyclopedia has moved into a newphase that should help it continue toward completion.Planning began on the project in 2001, and numerous scholarshave been writing entries since 2003. New entries from avariety of authors arrive at the Center almost every day. Forexample, in a three-day period in December, we received entrieson the Education Reform Act of 1982, antebellum lumbermanAndrew Brown, Reverend C. L. Franklin, Prohibition, and theLisa Herdahl court case. Charles Reagan Wilson, editor inchief; Andrea Odom, managing editor; and Ted Ownby andAnn Abadie, consulting editors, are working with 30 sectioneditors from across the country on the content of individual

topics ranging from Agriculture to Politics to the Press to Mythsand Representations.

The first 10 sections will be complete by March 1, 2006, andsix others by May 1. That will leave 14 sections for the summerand fall, along with the numerous other jobs associated withcompleting a large book project. Anyone still wanting tovolunteer to write entries should consult the project’s Web siteat www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/ms_encyclopedia/.

The Mississippi Encyclopedia will be published by the UniversityPress of Mississippi. Other partners on the project include theMississippi Department of Archives and History, the MississippiHumanities Council, and the Mississippi Arts Commission.

The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) willpresent awards to outstanding artists in the categories ofFiction, Music Composition (Concert and Popular),Nonfiction, Photography, Poetry, and Visual Arts during anannual gala scheduled for June 10, 2006, in Oxford.

The awards honor the achievements of livingMississippians (current residents or former ones withcontinuing, significant ties to the state). Artists arenominated on the basis of work shown, published, orperformed in 2005.

MIAL, now in its 27th year, was established in to support,nurture, and recognize one of Mississippi’s most importantresources, her artists. Recipients are awarded cash prizes andMississippi-made gifts. The competition is a juried one, withjudges, prominent in their fields, chosen from out of state.MIAL is privately funded, self-perpetuating, and nonprofit.

Anyone may join; membership dues start at $35 for anindividual ($15 for students). Visit MIAL’s Web site at

www.ms-arts-letters.org for complete instructions aboutjoining and about nominating an artist for an award.

A day of tours and other events will precede the annualawards gala at the Oxford Conference Center. A tour ofRowan Oak and an exhibition at the University Museum byGwen Magee, a former MIAL award winner and currentmember of the MIAL Board of Governors, are two of thespecial highlights being planned. Magee’s exhibition is calledJourney of the Spirit and draws its inspiration from the hymn“Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Ann Abadie, of Oxford, is chairof the program committee planning the gala. Other programcommittee members are Bonnie Davidson, Tupelo; SandraShellnut, Pass Christian; Patty Lewis, Oxford; Jan Taylor andMark Wiggs, Jackson.

For additional information, contact Margaret Anne Mitchellat 601-366-0761 or write to MIAL, P.O. Box 2346, Jackson, MS39225-2346. You may also visit www.ms-arts-letters.org.

MIAL MEMBERSHIP FORMName _____________________________________________________________________________________________

Address ___________________________________________________________________________________________

City ____________________________________________ State _____________ Zip _________________

E-mail _________________________________ Daytime Telephone ____________________________

Check membership dues category:

❏ Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $15 ❏ Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . $35

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

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

Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters2006 Annual Awards Events to Be in Oxford

Mississippi Encyclopedia Report



During the Christmas holidays, threeSouthern Studies graduate studentscompleted a three-week photojournalismprogram in South Africa exploring theparallels and contrasts of the country’sracial environment to that of theAmerican South.

Georgeanna Milam, Kate Medley, andMary Margaret Miller studied in SouthAfrica with 15 other University ofMississippi graduate and undergraduatestudents as part of a pilot program hostedby the Ole Miss Office of Study Abroadand Nelson Mandela MetropolitanUniversity in Port Elizabeth. Thestudents spent two weeks in PortElizabeth and one week in Cape Town,with day trips to Jeffriesbai, RobbenIsland, and the South African Karoo.

In addition to attending lectures bySouth African journalist and freedomfighter Simphiwe Sesanti, the studentstook part in excursions to several ofPort Elizabeth’s townships includingUitenhage and the Red Location.Throughout such excursions, Sesantidescribed the violence and rioting thattook place in each area during thecountry’s severe social unrest from theearly 1980s to end of apartheid in 1994.Students also enjoyed an afternoon at alocal shebeen, much like a juke joint,talking with and photographing locals.

While in Port Elizabeth, Milam,Medley, and Miller also took the

opportunity to break away from the groupand explore their specific areas of interest.

Milam, who holds an assistantshipwith the Southern Foodways Alliance,spent an afternoon in the home ofAndiswa Sesanti, wife of SimphiweSesanti, where she observed thepreparation of traditional SouthAfrican dishes. Milam said that theprimary ingredients were maize andframp, which is similar to cornmeal.The African salad was composed ofmaize, water, butter, and sour milk andresembles grits. Umpqusho, a recipe ofsugar peas and samp, was reputed asNelson Mandela’s favorite food.

Medley spent a day working as aphotojournalist for the Herald, PortElizabeth’s oldest newspaper. Medleyshadowed a full-time photographer forthe newspaper, taking photos anddiscussing the role of photojournalismin South Africa after apartheid. Medleysays that she was able to explore diverseareas of the city with the photographerand experienced aspects of city life thatshe would have not been able to as astudent or tourist.

Miller spent time reporting on andinvestigating the culture of fear withinthe urban areas of South Africa. Sheinterviewed individuals from variousbackgrounds specifically about thenoticeable number of security fences,electric and razor wire, and alarm systemsinstalled on homes and aroundneighborhoods. This fixation on securityis often referred to as “gate syndrome”and is increasingly commonplace withinresidential areas of South Africa.

The trip helped the students to bettercomprehend the globalized issue ofracism and reconciliation. By exploringrace issues in South Africa of similarcontext to those of the AmericanSouth, they have gained newperspectives on the progress and futureof race relations at home.

MARY MARGARET MILLER

SST Graduate Students in South Africa

Southern Studiesgraduate studentsGeorgeanna Milam(left) and KateMedley travel alongSouth Africa’s scenicGarden Route fromPort Elizabeth toCape Town.

Southern Studies graduate student MaryMargaret Miller shows pictures from herdigital camera to local kids while visiting ashebeen near Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

Kate M

edleyM

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Mar

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iller



Stories, food, and music have longbeen significant traditions in theSouth. This fall’s October 14th and15th Mississippi Delta TennesseeWilliams Festival is living proof that allthree work successfully together tocreate a uniquely memorable Southernliterary festival.

The stories come from the plays ofTennessee Williams, from Delta folksand invited guests who knew TennesseeWilliams, and from scholars and fanswho talk about his literary achievement.Once again, the highlight of the programwas the high school acting competitionwith a “Stella!” screaming contest as thegrand finale. With 65 students fromseven Mississippi high schools and oneMissouri high school participating, thisdynamic part of the program ischaracterized by high energy, unlimitedenthusiasm, and quality acting anddirection. Over $3,000 in prize money isawarded annually in monologues andscene competition. Although The GlassMenagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, andCat on a Hot Tin Roof are favorites, thestudents often delve into the less familiarone-act plays by Tennessee Williams.

The stories taken from the world ofTennessee Williams continued into theafternoon of the second day in the form ofporch plays. Johnny McPhail and AliceWalker brought Big Daddy and Maggiethe Cat to life in a skillfully editedselection of monologues, Clarksdale HighSchool students performed a 25-minuteversion of The Glass Menagerie byhighlighting approximately a dozenscenes from the play, and JannaMontgomery focused attention on St.Louis and New Orleans with a dramaticreading of selected statements by Williamsand his characters about the nature ofboth places.

Joe Bonelli, actor and retiredproducer and announcer for MississippiPublic Broadcasting, impersonatedTennessee Williams in a one-man

dramatization of Confessions of aNightingale written by CharlotteChandler and Ray Stricklyn.Composed entirely of the words ofTennessee Williams, this event givesthe illusion of bringing Williams hometo Clarksdale to be a part of the festivalin his honor. Creative writer AnnFisher-Wirth continued the storytellingtradition of the Mississippi DeltaWilliams Festival by reading from her2003 volume of poetry, The TrinketPoems. Each poem in his volume cameto life while Ann was playing thecharacter of Trinket in TennesseeWilliams’s play The Mutilated.

Always a cornerstone of the festival,Kenneth Holditch introduced the filmversion of Williams’s The Eccentricities of aNightingale by giving a history of the play.Following Holditch and the showing ofthe movie version, scholars DorothyShawhan Vera Griffin, William Spenser,and Ralph Voss provided a commentaryand discussion of Eccentricities of aNightingale for an enthusiastic audience.Travis Montgomery presented a paper on“Shaping Her Old Course in CountryNews: Habitus, Nostalgia, Victimization,and Alienation in Williams’s A StreetcarNamed Desire”; and Meron Langsnerspoke on “The Evolutions of Adaptations:Tennessee Williams’s The Notebook ofTrigorin and Chekhov’s The Seagull.” Thelatter fit in well with comments made byThomas Keith, editor and production

manager for New Directions Publishing,who played a key role from 2000 to 2005in the publication of 14 new and old playsby Tennessee Williams.

The stories were seasoned by gourmetmeals and a premiere Delta blues band.Panny Mayfield’s opening buffet at herhome, 415 Clark Street, broughteveryone together in a historicneighborhood of Clarksdale. The nextstreet over is St. George’s EpiscopalChurch and Rectory, where TennesseeWilliams lived for some time as hisgrandfather, the Reverend WalterDakin, was parish priest there for manyyears. (A prayer service was held at St.George’s the first evening of thefestival.) The concluding event was aclassically Southern barbecue, withmusic by the Wesley Jefferson Bandand performances by winners of thedrama competition.

Clarksdale is to be applauded for therestoration of the Cutrer Mansion in thehistoric district. For the first time, this1916 Italian Renaissance villa, which issignificant in Williams’s life and work andis now the Coahoma Higher EducationCenter, was used for many festival events.Its presence is a testimony to the life,energy, and leadership of the Mississippidelta. What a perfect setting for acelebration of Clarksdale’s “native son”Tennessee Williams.

COLBY H. KULLMAN

13th Annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival

October 2005 Event a Great Success

14th Annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams FestivalThe 14th annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival is scheduled totake place in Clarksdale on October 13-14, 2006. Williams’s 1959 play Sweet Birdof Youth will be a focus of the festival. As in the past, the program will includepresentations by Williams authorities and friends, several performances, a sessionwith papers by scholars, and tours of the house and neighborhood where theplaywright lived as a child. Also scheduled in conjunction with the festival areworkshops for teachers and for student actors and a drama competition, withprizes totaling $2,500 for the winners.

For information on the 2006 festival and drama competition, write TennesseeWilliams Festival, P.O. Box 1565, Clarksdale, MS 38614-1565; telephone 662-627-7337.



The Center, in conjunction with theDepartment of Political Science,hosted the “Katrina: Future of the GulfCost Conference,” December 2–3,2005, at Barnard Observatory. Theconference, which was a project of theCenter’s Future of the South initiative,funded by the Phil Hardin Foundationand matching contributions fromCenter friends, assessed the state ofrecovery on the coast and provided aforum for the exchange of ideas about anew Coast.

Marie Antoon, executive director ofMississippi Public Broadcasting (MPB),opened the conference with remarksabout public broadcasting’s role incovering the hurricane and, moregenerally, the importance of the mediain keeping the nation’s attention onthe need for resources for recovery.Antoon showed excerpts from an MPBproduction, Gulf Coast Expressions,which evocatively portrayed the Coastbefore and after the disaster.

Panelists participated in sessions on“Economic Capital”; “Social Capital”;“The Governor’s Commission onRecovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal”;and “Memories and Visions.” Participantsshared their personal experiences duringand after the hurricane and conveyed thework of their agencies and organizationsin relief and recovery.

One recurring theme was theimportance of Mississippi stateagencies, nonprofit organizations, andchurches in dealing with the aftermathof Katrina. These groups answeredquestions and helped channel outsideresources to those in need. Churches,for example, provided assistance to theelderly and single-parent householdsand helped in rebuilding homes. “Thereused to be barriers of denomination andrace,” said Jacqueline Johnson, directorof the Mississippi Faith-based Coalitionfor Community Renewal, “but thereare no barriers now.” She added that“everyone is in common need.”

Representing the Foundation for theMid-South, Necole Irvin recounted herorganization’s efforts to channel

resources not only to the Coast but alsoto the Mississippi Delta, where manyevacuees went to seek shelter. Hergroup, like others, offered many neededcounseling services, such as advice onhow to obtain insurance funds for losthousing. Attorney Richard Scruggs waspessimistic in his assessment of a keyissue for the renewal of the Coast andasked where the capital is to come fromto help in rebuilding. Beth Sewell, fromthe Mississippi Department ofEducation, relayed the good news thatas of early November last year, all of theMississippi school districts affected byKatrina were up and running, whichwas important, she said, in giving asense of continuity for those still shell-shocked by the storm.

Architect Tom Howorth and formergovernor William Winter talked aboutthe work of the Governor’sCommission and its plans for dealingwith Katrina’s effects. Howorth gavedetails of “a frenzied and elaboratedesign process” that came out of aGovernor’s Forum in October, wheremembers of the Congress of NewUrbanists, working with localcommunity members, devisedextensive community plans for eacharea of the coast. Governor Winter waspassionate in urging the federalgovernment to deliver on earlierpromises to provide extensive financial

resources for local communities. Heinsisted that we have to recognize the“high responsibility of the governmentto assist those who have losteverything.” Winter expressedconfidence that the Coast would createa new community structure in the nextfew years but expressed his concernabout people there surviving the nextsix months.

Much of the conference focused oncultural institutions. Malcolm White,executive director of the MississippiArts Commission, lamented theconflict for attention between theMississippi Gulf Coast and NewOrleans. He also recounted the effortsof the his organization to contactmembers of the arts community on thecoast, gathering information aboutwhat was damaged and what resourcesremained. He noted that art is “a majorcomponent of the Mississippi GulfCoast.” He added that he thought ofBeauvoir before Beau Rivage, referringto the historic home of Jefferson Davisand the popular Biloxi casino. Artistshave lost their paints, canvasses,studios, and audiences, but Whiteended on a hopeful note, “lookingforward to a wealth of creative geniuscoming out of this tragedy.”

The final session on “Memories andVisions” was a poignant one, includingMary Anderson Pickard’s story of theeffects of the storm in destroyinghistoric Shearwater Pottery and thefamily compound of members of artistWalter Anderson’s family. AlanHuffman told of the stunningdestruction to historic buildings, andseveral members noted the effects ofsuch destruction on the collectivememories of coastal people. PoetNatasha Trethewey, who grew up inGulfport, looked to a renewed Coast,given the chance to reimagine itself asthe home to a diversity of peoplelooking toward the future.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

Center Hosts Katrina Conference


Early Escapades.By Eudora Welty. Compiled andedited by Patti Carr Black. Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 2005. 150 pages. $30.00 cloth.

Eudora Welty: A Biography. By Suzanne Marrs. Orlando,Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 2005. 652 pages. $28.00 cloth.

“A strange kind of life he leads inOxford, two lives really,” EudoraWelty wrote in August 1949 after anenjoyable sail with William Faulkneron Sardis Lake—gliding past “thedead cypresses and stumps and all,”steering clear of “bookish” matters.Suzanne Marrs’s Eudora Welty: ABiography shows just how completelyWelty herself lived multiple lives a fewhours south of Faulkner in Jackson,Mississippi. And the drawings andwritings in Patti Carr Black’scompilation Early Escapades revealthat Welty’s imagination was racingfar from her quiet neighborhood bythe time she was 12. For “The GloriousApology: A Tragedy,” a precociousEudora clipped newspapers andmagazines to illustrate her story aboutthe resourceful Fitzhugh Green (son ofa “whispering saxophonist”) and hisbride, Lallie, whose head was “full offancies.” Packed with verbs like“snarled,” “quailed,” “suffocated,” and“accosted,” the hilarious narrative by“E. Welty” is prefaced with Eudora’sphony blurbs from H. L. Mencken,Andrew Volstead, and otherluminaries of 1921. Black’s collectionof Welty’s earliest works and Marrs’sdiscussion of her long life are verydifferent fruits of the two scholars’personal friendships with the PulitzerPrize–winning author.

Fans and students of EudoraWelty will eagerly reach for bothvolumes, but most will reach first forthe slender one with the humorouscover. Black chose an early 1930sphotograph of Welty in a bushymoustache and curly wig for thedust jacket of Early Escapades. “Thiscould be Welty as Groucho Marx,whom she admired,” the editor

explains, “or as a mountain manwith his moonshine.” In comiccounterpoint, the back coverreproduces a late example of Welty’s“juvenilia,” her sketch of Mae Westwith a huge hat, long eyelashes, redlips, and well-defined bosom. Othercaricatures in the 1933 series for herfriend Frank Lyell include a pointy-chinned Faulkner and a strikingHitler (a penciled rectangle with acouple of hair-strokes and a smudgedmoustache). These cartoons areamong the treasures of the EudoraWelty House Collection, MississippiDepartment of Archives and

History, which was also an essentialresource for Marrs’s biography.

Black’s long introductory essay,“Comic Energy: Eudora Welty’s YoungArt,” provides an excellent overviewof the drawings and writings, circa1920–1935, and almost all of them“done in fun.” Such works, says Black,allow us to “feel the comic energy thatswirled through her adult writing, andsee the beginnings of her satiric force.”At 10, Eudora drew a charming beachscene that was published in thelegendary St. Nicholas children’smagazine; at 15, she sketched awestern train trip for a Lamar LifeInsurance souvenir booklet. Herpoetry, prose, and graphics appeared invarious high school and collegepublications. Black even reproducestwo pages of doodles from notes for aColumbia University psychologylecture. Welty’s artwork reflects severalstyles, from classical and Victorian tomodernist modes, much as she assumesvaried poses and wears differentcostumes for the photographs includedin this volume. Early Escapades alsoreprints examples of her earlyjournalistic writing for outlets inJackson and Memphis; Black observesthat Welty’s amused attitude “wasbarely fettered” in reports onweddings, fraternity events, and othersocial gatherings.

In Suzanne Marrs’s authoritativeand indispensable biography, Weltyherself is often the life of the party,whether the occasion is a niece’sbirthday, a publisher’s reception inNew York, a visit with writer V. S.Pritchett in London, or festivities atMississippi Governor WilliamWinter’s mansion. Reviewing thisbook for the New York Times,Francine Prose admits that she,

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




“like many readers,” had “alwaysimagined Eudora Welty as a bit likeEmily Dickinson with excellentSouthern manners.” Instead, Marrspresents a much more robust,extroverted, and adventurouswoman—in essence, the Eudora ofEarly Escapades. Intent ondescribing Welty’s life “as fully aspossible,” Marrs says her researchwas guided by many voices: “thevoices in her fiction; the voices inher letters to friends, editors,colleagues; the voices of individuals[including Marrs] who knew her notas a marble statue, but as a living,breathing, changing, developing,witty, sensitive, and complicatedpersonality.” Because Weltyendorsed Marrs’s book proposal, shehad access to letters that will notbecome available to other scholarsuntil 2008; and her research in far-flung manuscript collections wasthorough. In fact, the resultingbiography is so rich in detail thatlong passages read almost like adaybook of Welty’s travels, honors,and meetings with friends—a floodof facts that occasionally obscuresthe larger importance of Marrs’sprodigious undertaking.

Two of the most significantfriendships Marrs describes are Welty’sromantic passion for her fellowMississippian John F. Robinson andfor Kenneth Millar, the popularauthor who published mysteries underthe pseudonym Ross Macdonald. Thedepth of the relationships is clear andmoving in Welty’s correspondence,but Millar’s marriage and Robinson’sambivalent sexuality were majorimpediments. Even more intriguingthan Marrs’s discussion of theseemotional dramas is their possibleimpact on Welty’s fiction. Herprotracted worry about Robinson’smilitary service in Italy during WorldWar II and Millar’s slipping memoryduring the 1970s could help to explainsome periods of writer’s block. Marrsrefers to “Henry,” a story that was

“clearly based on Ken’s battle withAlzheimer’s disease”; and she suggeststhat Welty’s love for Millar also“began to inform her development ofcharacters” for “The Shadow Club,”another work she never completed.The man who had the most obviousimpact on Welty’s published workswas her incredibly supportive agentDiarmuid Russell, a close friend untilhis death in 1973.

Marrs traces this collaboration andmany other literary friendships,including those with Faulkner,Pritchett, Elizabeth Bowen, WilliamJay Smith, Katherine Anne Porter,Reynolds Price, Mary Lou Aswell,Elizabeth Spencer, and Anne Tyler.Welty’s correspondence with theseand other friends gives insight intoher process of composition andrevision, her strong family ties, herliberal Democratic politics, herlectures and creative writing classes atuniversities, her antiracism, herenthusiasm for theater and travel,and her complicated attitude towardthe South. Marrs’s generousquotations from these letters putWelty’s own voice at the heart of thebiography. Readers who share mylonging for more extensive reflectionson Welty’s works might turn next toMarrs’s One Writer’s Imagination: TheFiction of Eudora Welty. As Weltywrote to Kenneth Millar in 1980, herstories “showed me my life—I guessthey are my life.”

JOAN WYLIE HALL

Handling Serpents: PastorJimmy Morrow’s NarrativeHistory of His AppalachianJesus’ Name Tradition. Jimmy Morrow with Ralph W.Hood Jr., editor. Macon, Georgia:Mercer University Press, 2005. 207 pages. $19.00 paper.

In most instances, the inclusion of

multiple perspectives is welcomed in acivil, academic discourse whereparticipants are trying to clarify asubject. This assumption, one wouldthink, would be especially true if thetopic is as controversial as handlingserpents or drinking “any deadly thing”by Christians who believe sincerelythey are “following the signs” set forthin scripture, specifically Mark 16:17–18. Unfortunately, in the case ofPastor Jimmy Morrow, his voice addslittle to elucidate the actual evolutionof these practices.

In his introduction, Ralph Hoodadmits the book is not a “historian’shistory,” and he readily acknowledges“obvious flaws in terms of the properidentification of sources.” The editor,however, is willing to grant JimmyMorrow his donnée, and Hood hasdone a commendable job oforganizing the “sheets and scrapsJimmy has written” into anintelligible form.

Throughout Morrow’s accountinconsistencies in the spellings ofgeographical places, confusion overdates, skipping back and forth overgaps of 30 and 40 years, and theoverall absence of reliabledocumentation supporting hisclaims are distracting, to say theleast. These issues render the bookproblematic for most objective,scholarly purposes. Hood even statesthat Morrow’s assertions are oftenderived from hearsay or newspaperclippings, with no publicationinformation provided. In addition,only two of the 31 photos provide acredit. All of these difficultiesmuddy the waters that researchers ofJesus’ Name, Holiness, andTrinitarian traditions have tried sopainstakingly to clarify, using courtrecords, census documents, andtrustworthy media accounts.

On the positive side, what thebook does reveal is a fascinatinginsight into one serpent handler’spsychology as he shares his version ofthe religious movement that many

Reading the South continued



experts claim is almost exclusivelya Southern phenomenon—despite Morrow’s allegation that“Our religion has already goneinto many nations across the sea.”

Pastor Morrow provides manyanecdotes, detailed descriptions ofservices, rules to be observed bypreachers and participants, andthe traditional histories of variouschurches that have practiced “fol-lowing the signs.” He relates, forexample, his conversion experi-ence in 1970 when he wasunharmed after two bites on thehand from a “large, yellow timberback rattlesnake.” On that occa-sion he heard a voice say, “Thistime I will overlook your igno-rance.” Of particular interesttoward the end of the book, andrecounted as a series of questionswith answers taken from scripture,is a vision of hell Morrow reportshaving had in 1975.

Jimmy Morrow’s “history” isreplete with biblical quotations,and his syntax reveals a mindthat passes frequently and com-fortably back and forth from nar-rating to preaching. In fact, thereis something reminiscent of theMiddle English Book of MargeryKempe in the autobiographical/devotional manner in whichMorrow shares the voices andvisions he has experienced duringhis on-going search for God. Thetale is homely, unabashed, and, ifanything, guilelessly sincere. Iwould be quick to say, however,that my critical discussion ofHandling Serpents is not a judg-ment of Jimmy Morrow, whosevoice has as much right to beheard and respected as anyoneelse’s in the attempt to discovermysteries that are ultimatelyunknowable.

MICHAEL DAVENPORT

Reading the South continued



Southern Foodways Alliancedocumentary filmmaker Joe Yorkwowed participants at the CulinaryInstitute of America’s 2005 World ofFlavors Conference with his mostrecent production, Whole Hog. This 23-minute short film features the life andwork of whole hog barbeque master andentrepreneur Ricky Parker of B. E.Scott’s Barbeque in Lexington,Tennessee. A crowd of 500 chefs andculinary enthusiasts were drawn in byParker’s bona fide character andcooking at the 10th annual conferenceheld in Napa Valley, California,November 3–5, 2005.

“His pit literally became the centerof attention,” said York. “In the sameway that his parking lot is slam packedevery day he is open, in the same waythat folks in Lexington are longing forauthentic, good food, I think thesepeople at the Culinary Institute of

America were hungry to meet someoneso honest and out in the open, nothidden in some far away kitchen.”

Parker and his cooking team—hiswife, Tina, and their three children—were featured cooks at the conference,setting up a barbeque pit on the groundsof the Culinary Institute of Americaand serving lunch to the conferencegoers. Parker prepared two hogs anddozens of baby back ribs, while Tinaserved her coleslaw and baked beans.

Students at the institute wereassigned to work with Parker in the

barbeque pit and were instructed in theundertaking of whole hog barbequing.

York and Southern FoodwaysAlliance director John T. Edge servedas keynote speakers at the conferencewith a talk entitled “Cross Currents ofHistory in a Barbeque Pit.” York andEdge each received master’s degrees inSouthern Studies from the Universityof Mississippi. The film documentingthe people and process of whole hogbarbeque is a result of three years ofexploring various barbeque traditionsin the American South.

“That is exactly what the SFA is allabout,” said York. “What Ricky Parkerdoes with a shovel and a pile of coalsand a hog is no less than what the bestchefs at five-star restaurants are doing.”The 23-minute version of Whole Hogscreened at the Worlds of FlavorConference was composed especiallyfor the event. York—who also is atwork on a series of documentaryportraits of the South’s premier pitmasters—will soon complete a full-length version of the Whole Hog film.The University’s Department of MediaProduction is assisting with the project.

MARY MARGARET MILLER

Whole HogUniversity of Mississippiresident filmmaker getshigh praise for barbequedocumentary

Scott’s sign in Lexington, Tennessee

Ricky Parker, entrepreneur and barbeque master at Scott’s Barbeque

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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

I highly recommend falling in love with a city. It’s more faithful and stimulating than aman. And if you pick the right one, you never have to cook again. — Sarah Dunant

Tabasco and SFATeam to RaiseNOLA AwarenessThe Southern Foodways Alliance isteaming with Tabasco, Louisiana’sculinary native son, to raise awareness ofthe resurgence of the New Orleans foodscene and encourage Americans tocome back and support one of America’smost distinctive culinary Meccas. In aseries of special events in select citiesacross 2006, this team of Southernculinary institutions will showcase someof the most interesting and unusualfoods born of Cajun and Creole culturesat open-to-the-public tastings andhands-on demonstrations. The calendarwill be announced in early spring 2006.Soon more information will be availableat www.southernfoodways.com andwww.tabasco.com.

Blackberry FarmUpdate Early in January, Blackberry Farm hostedthe second annual Taste of the Southbenefit dinner for SFA. The eventraised more than $25,000. MatGarretson of Garretson Wines (PasoRobles, California, by way of Georgia)was the guest winemaker. More than100 revelers joined proprietor SamBeall, host chef John Fleer, John Besh(Restaurant August, New Orleans,Louisiana), Sean Brock (Capitol Grill,Nashville, Tennessee), Linton Hopkins(Restaurant Eugene, Atlanta, Georgia),Edward Lee (610 Magnolia, Louisville,Kentucky), and Maggie Davidson(Blackberry Farm) for a weekend ofgreat modern eats, born of tradition.

Calendar UpdatesApril 8, 2006Camp Athens: An Edible Education Join SFA in Athens, Georgia, for aweekend of lively talk and greateats as we explore connectionsbetween meat-and-three cookingand haute Southern cuisine. Moredetails are forthcoming in Februaryat www.southernfoodways.com.Host chef is Hugh Acheson of Five& Ten; among the honorees isWilson’s Soul Food.

May 18–20, 2005Field Trip to Florida’s Forgotten CoastJoin the Southern FoodwaysAlliance as we travel south toApalachicola, Florida, a onetimecosmopolitan cotton port, now afishing village on the brink ofchange. In keeping with SFA’sprogramming for 2006, we focusupon the culinary life and legacyof the Gulf South. We will payhomage to the men and womenwho have long worked the water,tonging for oysters, casting netsfor shrimp and fish. John Gorrie,the local doctor who invented theice machine and was a pioneer inrefrigeration and air conditioning,will get his due. We’ll taste tupelohoney, smoked mullet, andcasseroles of oysters and spaghetti.Experiential learning and greateating, that’s what we promise.Look for your invitation to arrivein February.

This January, the Southern Foodways Alliance Board gathered for its annual retreat. Thetask at hand was a five-year plan. Host was John Fleer of Blackberry Farm in the foothillsof the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. First row, from left: Chris Cavanaugh,Asheville, North Carolina (consultant); Carol Puckett Daily, Jackson, Mississippi; AnnCashion, Washington, D.C.; Ann Abadie, Oxford, Mississippi; Charla Draper, Hoover,Alabama. Second row: Mary Beth Lasseter, Oxford, Mississippi; Elizabeth Sims,Asheville, North Carolina; John T. Edge, Oxford, Mississippi; Marcie Cohen Ferris,Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Sara Roahen, New Orleans, Louisiana; Scott Barton, NewYork City; John Fleer, Walland, Tennessee; Angie Mosier, Atlanta, Georgia.


Letter from thePresidentAt the fall symposium, I was remindedonce again why I love the SouthernFoodways Alliance. I have never seensuch extended hugging. Hugging inGreenwood, hugging at Taylor Grocery,hugging at City Grocery, hugging inthe Grove. We hug because we feel aprofound connection with one another.At the table, at this wonderfulgathering, we are all drawn, like somany Shoeless Joes.

We gathered in Oxford to ponder thehistory of sugar, but also to help oneanother recover from the devastationof our Gulf Coast, our communities,and cities. We listened to those whohad been there and mourned their

losses. We heard them talk of theoverwhelming challenge of rebuilding.Their words kindled a cautiousoptimism that re-creating home wasnot only possible but essential.

It was a time, as well, for your boardto more fully understand what we, as anorganization, need to do to build forour collective future. Oral histories,films, day camps, field trips, specialevents, Cornbread Nation (Ronni . . .CN3 is wonderful!), Web sites,symposia—we are vibrant, if we areanything.

Your dedicated board and staffmembers are excited about the organicevolution of SFA. And yet, the workwe do requires more staff, more funding.Our needs are many. We want to ensurethe future of SFA as a fiscally soundorganization, steadfast in our mission ofcelebrating and documenting the

diversity of our region through ourfoodways.

To achieve this, your board isworking hard to create a strategic planfor SFA. With that plan will comeobjectives and goals and timelines.Know that you will hear more aboutthis by the spring (if not before) andthat, as always, the backbone of ourorganization—its membership—iswhat makes our gatherings somemorable and meaningful.

See www.southernfoodways.com forupdates on SFA activities. And keep inmind that, pursuant to your requests,we are adding more SFA events inmore cities.

Yours around the table, Elizabeth Sims

Mama Dip’s Family Cookbook. By Mildred Council. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press,2005. 296 pages, 300+ recipes, 17 illustrations.$24.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.Don’t buy Mildred Council’s handsomeMama Dip’s Family Cookbook lookingfor precise, to-a-grain-of-saltinstruction on how to recreate herfamed Southern delicacies. The ownerof Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s MamaDips hasn’t use for such truck.

A lifelong proponent of “dumpcooking”—a method wherein no recipesor measurements are used, in favor ofcooking “by taste and hand”—Councilwill tell you, right up front: the real secretto good cooking is great ingredients,preferably bought nearby at a farmer’smarket, farm, or roadside stand. “Goodfood is fresh food,” she says.

Now 76, Council has risen as a starin culinary circles over the last 10years, with appearances on the FoodNetwork and Good Morning Americaunder her belt. New York Times foodwriter Craig Claiborne and basketballlegend Michael Jordan have famouslysung her praises. You’d think she mightretire, might hang up the old apron.You’d be wrong. She still helps stir apot, as do some 15 children andgrandchildren.

Council’s absorbing introduction isthe real reason to buy this book. Anaked reminiscence, it reminds you thatthere are stories behind our food, storiesthat are equally as nourishing as the stuffitself. A visit to Mama Dip’s (try thefried green tomatoes) is as instructive asit is tasty. This book allows you to take alittle bit of that experience home withyou, and the chance to cook up yourvery own version of her famous catfishgumbo, chicken and dumplings, and

smothered pork chops, to name but afew fan favorites.

Just remember to rely on those twomost important tools a cook can bring tothe food he or she prepares: taste andtouch. If that fails, just remember to buythe freshest ingredients you can find. Atleast you’ll help the local economy.

Timothy C. Davis

Matzoh Ball Gumbo: CulinaryTales of the Jewish South. By Marcie Cohen Ferris.Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2005. 344 pages, 79 illustrations. $29.95 cloth.

SFA members got a preview of MarcieFerris’s new book at the barbecuesymposium in 2003 when she gave adelightful lecture about the barbecuetraditions of Jewish Memphis. Thedilemma of “how to respect Jewishdietary laws in a region that consumednot just barbecue but bacon, ham, lard,head meat, chitterlings, pig feet, saltpork, fatback, side meat, white meat,potlikker, and pig ears” was a challengethat eventually led to the creation ofthe world’s largest kosher barbecuecontest, not as big as Memphis in May

Eating the South



Skip Glover can trace his family’s rootsby way of his farm, set on theAnneewakee Creek, near theChattahoochee River, about 40minutes southwest of Atlanta. Skip’sparents were not vocational farmers,yet they were serious about kitchengardening. His love of Southern foodwas born, not only on the family farm,but in the surrounding community:

“When I think of the Southern foodthat is stamped upon my memory, it wasnot only the food that we grew andcooked here, but my experiences atHouseworth’s Boarding House inDouglasville, Georgia. Mrs. Houseworthand her widowed daughter ran thisboarding house. And talk aboutSouthern cooks . . . they had a kitchengarden, used local meats. I, as a kid, soldthem blackberries at fifty cents a gallonto use in their blackberry cobblers. . . .

“A reasonable cross-section of, at leastat that time, the Caucasian population ofDouglasville would be gathered there forlunches. During court week the judgeswould be there, the visiting attorneyswould be there. Alongside them would bethe mill workers that would actually beliving inside the boarding house, andthere were always, once or twice a year,the Georgia Power linemen that wouldcome through. They were these big burlyguys who could eat an enormous amountof food, and they were all full of jokes . . .the local doctors would eat there, and togrow up eating there often was a many-faceted education for me.”

When Skip was still in college, hisfather read the Atlanta Constitution’sserialization of Rachel Carson’s SilentSpring. The family swore off pesticidesand herbicides. “Organic methods weresnickered at in the South in the 1950sand 1960s,” recalls Skip.

Eventually he discontinued the use offertilizers, too.

Skip went on to earn a master’sdegree in community development. Intime, along with his wife and children,he moved to Western Australia. Forseven years, he developed socialprograms for Aboriginal communities.While he helped the indigenous peoplelearn farming practices, the Gloversworked their kitchen garden, growingblack-eyed peas, corn, and okra.

Upon his return to the states, Skip andhis wife, Cookie, never really intendedto farm full time. But an interest inorganic farming methods led Skip to bean active member in the GeorgiaOrganic Growers Association. GloverFamily Farms has been involved in thestart-ups of many green markets aroundthe metro Atlanta area as well as outlyingareas and continues to be an example ofhow sustainability and organic practicescan become one of the most viable waysto run a small farm:

“When my in-house labor,meaning my children, left home tostart their own families, I realizedthat I needed to figure out howto do something to help keepthis land growing withoutCookie and me killingourselves. While Ihave always beenmore interested ingiving away food asopposed to sellingit, I begangetting

involved in some of the immigrantfarm programs that wereblossoming. We started with aSoutheast Asian immigrant farmproject, and now, through HeiferInternational and a grant from theKellogg Foundation, the farm isused for the National ImmigrantFarming Initiative. They havefunded six of these farm projectsthroughout the U.S., and our farm isone of them.” Glover Family Farms is satisfying

needs of sustenance and community.Skip and Cookie would like their farmto be here for generations. They believethat sustainable operation is the onlyway to accomplish that. By operating aworking farm that functions as aneducational tool, the Glovers aregrowing a community, populated bylike-minded folks from very differentbackgrounds. Skip would say thatdifferently. He would tell you that it’sall about eating great tomatoes andfarm eggs for a long, long time.

ANGIE MOSIER

Glover Family Farms Begets Global Family Farms


Southern Foodways Alliance

M E M B E R S H I P

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, VISIT US AT OUR WEB SITE: www.southrnfoodways.com or call John T. Edge, SFA Director, at 662.915.5993 or via e-mail at [email protected]

name

company

address

city state zip

telephone fax

email

Please make checks payable to the Southern Foodways Alliance

and mail them to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

University, MS 38677.

❏ $25 student ❏ $75 individual ❏ $100 families

❏ $200 nonprofit institutions ❏ $500 corporations

SFA Contributors

TIMOTHY C. DAVIS is a freelance writer,pursuing his trade in and around Charlotte,North Carolina.

HENRY MENCKEN, a native of the South,now lives and writes beyond.

ANGIE MOSIER, along with her husband,Johnny Mosier, is proprietor of Blue-EyedDaisy Bakeshop south of Atlanta, inSerene, Georgia.

ELIZABETH SIMS, current SFA president,has been the communications director forthe Biltmore Company in Asheville, North

Carolina, since 1990. She holds a BA inEnglish from Rhodes College and an MAin literature from the University ofArkansas.

THOMAS HEAD writes regularly for theWashingtonian and other publications onfood, drink, and travel.

but equally important to the characterof the city.

Food, Ferris observes, may beconsidered “a barometer, a measuringdevice that determined how southernJews acculturated while also retainingtheir own heritage.” Southern Jewsestablished their ethnic identity by eitheraccepting or rejecting traditionalSouthern foods and traditional Jewishfoods. She accords equal respect to thosewho chose to eat traditional Southernfoods and those who, with great difficulty,chose to keep the laws of kashrut.

As she explores Jewish life inCharleston, Savannah, New Orleans,Natchez, Memphis, and Atlanta, she isparticularly attentive to race relationsin the kitchen, which became what shecalls a “free zone,” where Jewish womenand their African American helpbonded as the exchanged recipes.African American women oftenlearned to prepare traditional Jewishdishes better than their employers.

Matzoh Ball Gumbo is a scholarly book

that approaches an ideal of what scholarlywriting should be—thorough, original,entertaining, engaging—and it hasrecipes, too, more than 30 of them,illustrating the convergence of traditionalrecipes and regional ingredients.

THOMAS HEAD

Square Table: A Collection ofRecipes from Oxford,Mississippi. Yoknapatawpha Arts Council.Memphis, Tennessee: WimmerCookbooks, 2005. 240 pages; 350+ recipes; 17 photographsby Langdon Clay; paintings of Oxfordscenes by Jere Allen, Jason Bouldin,Marty Vinograd, and many other artists;essays by Larry Brown, Beth AnnFennelly, Barry Hannah, Lisa Howorth,John Grisham, Julia Reed, DeanFaulkner Wells, Curtis Wilkie, andother Mississippi authors; excerpts fromthe works of William Faulkner andWillie Morris. $32.00 cloth.

Community cookbooks—those clunky,spiral-bound, gravy-spattered volumes—are much relied upon in Southernkitchens. They offer windows into theeveryday life and foods of a group ofchurchgoers, a clutch of quilters, or aleague of ladies inclined toward service.

The first community cookbooks werepublished during the Civil War as ameans of raising funds for the treatmentof wounded soldiers and the support offamilies who lost sons, fathers—andfarms—to the ravages of battle. Soon,seemingly every charitable organizationfrom the United Daughters of theConfederacy to Tuskeegee Institute wasselling cookbooks. By the close of the19th century, more than two thousandcommunity cookbooks were in print.

Late in 2005, the YoknapatawphaArts Council joined the fray by way ofSquare Table: A Collection of Recipesfrom Oxford, Mississippi. The first10,000 copies sold in a flash. By thetime you read this, the good folks atYAC will surely have restocked.

HENRY MENCKEN

continued from page 22 Eating



committee to the Mississippi Civil Rights Commission and aparticipant in the Human Relations Council and other civilrights activities in the 1960s.

William Pearson is a semi-retired cotton farmer in Sumner,Mississippi. He studied English at the University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill and since 1973 has been a memberof the Wolf River Book Club in Memphis, Tennessee.

Cynthia Shearer received the 1996 prize for fiction from theMississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for her first novel,The Wonder Book of the Air. Her widely acclaimed secondnovel, The Celestial Jukebox, weaves together the multiethnicculture found in the contemporary Mississippi Delta. Afterliving for a number of years in Oxford, Mississippi, where shewas curator of William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, shenow resides with her husband and daughter in Texas.

Sumner, a small farming community (population of 407), is oneof two seats in Tallahatchie County. Cassidy Bayou, which runsthrough the town and flows southward, is the longest stream inMississippi because it is so crooked. The birthplace of authorPatti Carr Black and the home of photographers Langdon Clayand Maude Schuyler Clay, Sumner has been the subject of manyphotographs by William Eggleston, who often stayed with hisgrandparents there. The town is best known as the place wherethe Emmett Till murder trial took place in 1955, bringingreporters from the Chicago Defender, the New York Times, theAtlanta Constitution, and many other major newspapers to thetown. In addition to being an important part of the history of thecivil rights movement, the case has inspired Lewis Nordan’snovel Wolf Whistle and numerous other literary works.

Jimmy Thomas is originally from the Delta town of Leland,Mississippi. He is the managing editor of the NewEncyclopedia of Southern Culture and lives in Oxford,Mississippi.

Olympia Vernon is the author of two critically acclaimednovels, Eden and Logic. Her new novel, A Killing in ThisTown, concerns the story of a young boy who must, upon hiscoming of age, lynch a black man in order to be initiated intothe KKK.

Curtis Wilkie was a reporter for the Clarksdale Press Registerin his home state of Mississippi during the 1960s and thenserved as a national and foreign correspondent for the BostonGlobe for 26 years. He has written for many nationalmagazines, including Newsweek and the New Republic, and isthe author of Dixie: A Personal Odyssey through Events thatShaped the Modern South. Wilkie holds the Kelly Gene CookChair of Journalism at the University of Mississippi.

William F. Winter is a former governor of Mississippi,president of the Mississippi Historical Society, and a LamarSociety member.

Charles Reagan Wilson is director of the Center for theStudy of Southern Culture and professor of history andSouthern Studies at the University of Mississippi.

(continued from page 5 People and PlacesHOWORTH EDUCATIONAL PLANNING

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

TOBIE BAKER is a communications specialist for the Office ofMedia and Public Relations at the University of Mississippi.Formerly a newspaper reporter in Grenada, he received his BSin journalism from the University of Mississippi in 1996.

MICHAEL DAVENPORT, a retired teacher who lives nearGreeneville, Tennessee, taught Advanced Placement Englishand Great Books courses for 30 years. He was a Saks Fellow atthe 2001 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference and iscurrently writing fiction and working on some editing projects.

JOAN WYLIE HALL teaches in the English Department at theUniversity of Mississippi. She is the author of Shirley Jackson:A Study of the Short Fiction and articles on TennesseeWilliams, William Faulkner, Grace King, Frances Newman,and other authors.

DONALD M. KARTIGANER holds the William Howry Chair inFaulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi and isdirector of the Faulkner Conference. He is the author of TheFragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels and isnear completion of a book-length study, “Repetition Forward:A Theory of Modernist Reading.”

COLBY KULLMAN is professor of English at the University ofMississippi. In addition to writing many articles on TennesseeWilliams and other modern dramatists, he has also served aseditor in chief of the two-volume reference work TheatreCompanies of the World and coeditor of Speaking on Stage andStudies in American Drama: 1945–Present.

MARY MARGARET MILLER is a first-year Southern Studiesgraduate student from the Mississippi Delta. She has anundergraduate degree in journalism from the University ofMississippi and works as a freelance journalist.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON is director of the Center and professorof history and Southern Studies. Among his publications areBaptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause and Judgment andGrace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis.

Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, will host aSummer Institute of Christian Spirituality comprised ofbiblical, historical, pastoral, and oral courses led byfaculty from its division of philosophy and theology aswell as visiting faculty. Session 1 will be held June 4-10,and session 2 will be June 11-17. Contact Pat Warren,coordinator of the Institute, at 251-380-4672,[email protected], or visit the Web site www.shc.sics.

�Tougaloo College’s 10th annual Tougaloo Art Colony willtake place July 16-22, 2006, with nationally known artiststeaching studio courses for artists, teachers, artenthusiasts, and college-level students. Guest artists willinclude pastel portrait artist Mario Robinson, memory-scape artist Mary Hardy, ceramicist Dong-Hun Chung,printmaker Ricky Calloway, woodcarver George Berry,and jewelry artist Betsy Liles. Other featured artists will beannounced at a later date. For registration informationand packets, please call Minnie Watson at 601-977-7839.

Tougaloo Art Colony 2006 is looking for sponsorswho will provide scholarships for 20 displacedMississippi and New Orleans artists. For information,call Art Colony director Johnnie M. Maberry-Gilbert at601-977-7743.

March 27–30, 2006Mississippi Delta Literary Tourwww.olemiss.edu/depts/south/

March 30–April 1, 2006Oxford Conference for the Bookwww.olemiss.edu/depts/south/

May 5–6, 2006Southern Gardens Symposiumwww.outreach.olemiss.edu/gardening/

May 18–21, 2006Southern Foodways Alliance Field TripEdible Apalachicola: A Field Tripto Florida’s Forgotten Coast

May 19–21, 2006UM Conference on the Civil WarCivil War and the African AmericanExperience

June 2–3, 2006Music of the South Symposium

June 10, 2006Mississippi Institute of Arts and LettersAwardsOxford, Mississippiwww.ms-arts-letters.org

June 16–18, 2006Yoknapatawpha Summer WritersWorkshop

July 23–27, 2006 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/

September 9, 2006Telling the South’s StoriesA Conference on Oral HistorySeptember 9, 2006

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J. 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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