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THESouthern NEWSLETTER OF THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE •WRegisterINTER 2005 g THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI The Twelfth Oxford Conference for the Book The University of Mississippi Oxford, Mississippi • April 7-9, 2005

ince 1993, the Oxford Conference for the Book, organized by the Center and Square Books, has brought the publishing world’s preeminent personalities to north Mississippi for a weekend of readings, discussions, and celebrations. The 12th OxforSd Conference for the Book, April 7-9, featuring yet another accomplished lineup is sure to entertain and enlighten. Dedicated to the genius of Flannery O’Connor, this year’s list of panelists includes not only O’Connor scholars but also leading journalists, poets, editors, and, of course, fiction writers. As usual, the conference also includes, for small registration fees, the opportunity for readers to mingle with writers and publishing insiders at two social gatherings: a cocktail buffet ($50) and a catfish dinner ($25). A young author’s fair, featuring Newbery Medalist Richard Peck; a fiction and poetry jam; an Elderhostel program; and an optional literary tour of the Mississippi Delta (April 4-7) are also part of this year’s festivities. All conference panels are free and open to the public, although those wishing to attend should register to ensure seating space. Illustrating 2005 Oxford Conference for the Book Special registration is required for the cocktail buffet, the catfish materials is Baxter Knowlton’s portrait of Flannery dinner, and the Delta Literary Tour. Call 662-925-5993, e-mail O’Connor. The portrait is reproduced on posters and T- marybeth@olemiss, or visit www.olemiss.edu/depts/south for shirts available from the Center by calling 800-390-3527. more information or to register for conference programs. For more information or to register for Elderhostel, call 877-426-8056 or visit www.elderhostel.com and refer to program 12317, or funded by a contribution from the R&B Feder Foundation for contact Carolyn Vance Smith at 601-446-1208 or the Beaux Arts and grants from the Mississippi Humanities [email protected]. Council and the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council. The Oxford Conference for the Book is sponsored by the University of Mississippi, Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, See page 4 of this issue of the Register for the Delta Literary Lafayette County Literacy Council, Mississippi Library Tour itinerary and page 5 for the Oxford Conference for the Commission, and Square Books. The conference is partially Book schedule. Southern Register D IRECTOR’ S C OLUMN THE AMERICAN SOUTH,THEN AND NOW SYMPOSIUM, which was Published Quarterly by held at the Center in November, was one of the most memorable events in our long The Center for the Study of Southern Culture history. It was an energetic gathering of leaders who shared their thoughts on the The University of Mississippi state of the South. When you gather journalists, politicians, business leaders, and Telephone: 662-915-5993 Fax: 662-915-5814 academics together you may find a few strong opinions, and we did indeed find E-mail: [email protected] that. It was just after the presidential election and political feelings ran high, but Internet: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south the level of discourse was thoughtful and engaged. We honored the work of the L. Q. C. Lamar Society, a progressive organization IN THIS ISSUE that held meetings similar to ours back in the early 1970s. We want to tap into the Winter 2005 energy, intelligence, and good will that the Lamar Society embodied in its time. 1 2005 Oxford Conference for the Book Meeting their leaders, including Tom Naylor, Brandt Ayers, Mike Cody, and so 2 Director’s Column many others, gave us the chance to benefit from their experience and insights about the region. At the same time, we had young Southern leaders who were, in some 3 In Memoriam: cases, more optimistic than former Lamar members about the potential for Larry Brown 1951-2004 achieving progressive change. 3 In Memoriam: Bud Bartley 1934-2004 Governor William Winter’s keynote address set the tone for the meeting. With 4 Delta Literary Tour his usual eloquence and insight, he warned us of the dangers facing the South if it 5 Book Conference Schedule refuses to address socioeconomic problems. He provided historical perspective on 6 Southern Gardens Symposium the achievements of the Lamar Society, finding hope in their example. He outlined 6 Center Celebrates Double Decker the special opportunities we have that can be used to confront and overcome social 6 Civil War Conference problems. He left us chastened but hopeful. I listened with fascination as the speakers moved through a range of emotions. 6 Oxford Film Festival We heard the deep commitments of historian Dan Carter to the future of the 7 Bruce West Exhibition children of the South, and Susan Pace Hamill found in the Scriptures an 7 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule inspiration for social justice. John Egerton has studied much Southern history and 8 Southern Studies Student Exhibition lived through the frustration of good causes. He is fearful of the future, and many at 10 Fall 2004 Donors to the Center the meeting expressed anxieties. Historian Don Doyle told me of his feeling of a 12 2005 F&Y: Faulkner’s Inheritance certain melancholy in the group, and I agreed with him. It is an old Southern mood. Still others cautioned against sadness and saw a glass that’s easily half full, 14 New Ventress Order Members especially if one gets back to local citizen activism in neighborhoods and 15 Reading the South: Reviews & Notes communities. We heard Leroy Clemons, an optimistic young African American 21 New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture leader of the Neshoba County, Mississippi, NAACP, speak with confidence of a 22 South Today Symposium Report future based on personal relationships that can embody a better South, but we 24 Lewis Portrait at Barnard Observatory heard other African American leaders caution of the need not to ignore the larger 25 Southern Foodways Alliance News system that contains political, economic, and social injustices. The symposium was a moment in Southern time, assessing a South that has 28 Eudora Welty Newsletter undergone extraordinary transformation since the Lamar Society’s work and now 28 Wiley and the Checkmates faces both new challenges and tenacious older problems such as rural poverty and 29 Nassour Donates Collection racial conflict. It was a launching pad for the work of the Center’s newest initiative, 30 Notes on Contributors the Endowment for the Future of the South. We are still raising funds to match a 31 Southern Culture Catalog Items grant from the Hardin Foundation, which will enable the Center to play a lead role 32 Address Section/Mailing List in showing the continuing importance of the Southern cultural context to Form/Friends Information and Form understanding and addressing issues that will shape the region’s future. The Future of the South project will focus in 2005 on racial reconciliation. REGISTER STAFF Working with the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation and other Editor: Ann J. Abadie centers on campus and throughout the region, we hope to illuminate the Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee complexities of that issue, which is an essential one for the South to engage. We Mailing List Manager: Mary Hartwell Howorth look forward to working with other organizations, with our ability to engage in Editorial Assistant: Sally Lyon collaborative work surely a key to the future of the South. Lithographer: RR Donnelley Magazine Group The University complies with all applicable laws CHARLES REAGAN WILSON regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in all its activities and programs and does not discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, color,disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status as a veteran or disabled veteran.

Page 2 Winter 2005 The Southern Register Oxford, Mississippi, Loses Writer, Friend

On Wednesday morning, November Larry Brown 1951-2004 24, 2004, Oxford lost not only one of the best out of a wealth of celebrated Inwriters to have ever put pen to Memoriampaper here, but also a good man and a friend to many. Larry Brown, writer of gritty Southern literature, died of a heart attack in his home in the neighboring community of Tula. He was 53. From 1973 to 1990 Brown worked as a firefighter in the Oxford Fire Department and aspired to become a published author. During the mid-1980s Brown began to find success placing short stories in magazines and journals,

eventually publishing in 1988 his first Br uce Newman/ Oxfor d Eagle book of short stories, Facing the Music, with Algonquin Books in North Carolina, and retiring to write full time. His work soon gained popular and critical success across the U.S. and beyond. Deft at his craft, Brown wrote straight-forward, lyrical prose that won him legions of fans who snatched up his Friends and admirers of Larry Brown are invited to contribute to an endowment fund that work as soon as it hit bookstores. will provide an annual award to a Lafayette High School student showing promise or Often brutal, yet always based on a achievement in the arts. Please send contributions to the following address and note on reality existing somewhere where books the donation that it is for the Larry Brown Creative Arts Award. like his were seldom cracked open, Brown’s characters lived on the Larry Brown Creative Arts Award periphery of society—hard-drinking, Greater Oxford Community Foundation c/o Claiborne Barksdale hard-loving, quick to fight, and 1003 Jefferson Avenue Oxford, Mississippi 38655 sometimes quick to run. However The Greater Oxford Community Foundation is a nonprofit organization and will provide unfamiliar his settings may have been to receipts for tax purposes. For details, go to the Web site some of his readers, his stories were www.createfoundation.com/page17813.cfm. steeped in emotion that transcended region and class. They spoke words of novels Dirty Work (1989), Joe (1991), (1990), which was adapted into a film of the heart, making even the most remote Father and Son (1996), Fay (2000), and the same name in 2001; and two works characters familiar and knowable. The Rabbit Factory (2003); another of nonfiction, On Fire (1994), a memoir Brown’s other works included the collection of short stories, Big Bad Love of his fire-fighting days, and Billy Ray’s Farm (2001), a book of essays on his life outdoors and as a writer. He served briefly as a creative-writing instructor at the University of Mississippi in 1998 and twice won the Southern Book Critics’ Circle Award. InNuman MemoriamV. Bartley 1934-2004 On Saturday, November 27, 2004, Numan V. “Bud” Bartley, E. Merton Coulter Professor of History Emeritus at the beneath brooding, mournful skies, University of Georgia, died in Athens, Georgia, on December 27, 2004. He taught Larry Brown was laid to rest next to his at Georgia Tech before joining the faculty at the University of Georgia in 1971. pond in Tula. Nearby stands a small The author or coauthor of half a dozen books, he was a leading scholar of Southern house he had just finished building. It politics and served as consulting editor for the Politics section of the Encyclopedia was where he’d intended to write. The of Southern Culture. He received the State of Georgia’s Governor’s Award in the potential it held was enormous. Humanities and was a past president of the Southern Historical Association. JIMMY THOMAS

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 3 MONDAY, APRIL 4 YAZOO CITY: Willie Morris MISSISSIPPI DELTA Noon Registration—Alluvian Lobby 1:00 p.m. Depart for Yazoo City—Richie Caldwell, tour guide LITERARY TOUR JoAnne Prichard Morris, special guest Tour homesite, library, cemetery, etc. Experience the place, the people, the 5:00 p.m. Depart Yazoo City, arrive back in Greenwood by 6:00 p.m. food, and the music that inspired 6:00 p.m. Cocktails on your own at Giardina’s bar or free time 7:30 p.m. Blues & BBQ Dinner—Viking Training Center Mississippi writers Spooney’s Bar-Be-Que Crystal Grill pies April 4-7, 2005 Live Delta Blues The place that novelist Richard Ford described as the South’s TUESDAY, APRIL 5 South–the Mississippi Delta–is the site of a spring tour GREENVILLE: Greenville Writers organized by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and 8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast the Alluvian Hotel. Focusing on the area’s legendary blues, 9:00 a.m. Depart for Greenville—Jimmy Thomas, tour guide writers, and food–along with its tumultuous history–the 11:00 a.m. Talk given by Kenneth Holditch at the program is based in Greenwood, home of playwright Endesha William Alexander Percy Library Ida May Holland and memoirist Mildred Spurier Topp, and will Noon Lunch—Place TBA include day trips to three other towns. “The History of Greenville,” talk given by Each day we will travel the back roads of the Mississippi Hugh McCormick Delta, discovering other historic sites along the way. 1:30 p.m. Greenville Tour led by Mary Dayle McCormick Scheduled for Monday, April 4, is a trip to Yazoo City, whose 3:00 p.m. Greenville Cemetery Tour led by Princella Wilkerson Nowell most famous and beloved son is author Willie Morris. On 3:30 p.m. Reception at McCormick Book Inn with Tuesday, April 5, the group will travel to Greenville, home of Hugh McCormick William Alexander Percy, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote, Bern Readings by Ellen Douglas and Julia Reed Keating, Walker Percy, Julia Reed, Ben Wasson, and many Comments by Patti Carr Black other writers–so many that Greenville is known for having Live Delta blues (local musician) “more writers per square foot than any other city of its size.” 5:00 p.m. Depart for Greenwood On Wednesday, April 6, the group will go to Clarksdale for a 6:30 p.m. Free time visit to the Delta Blues Museum and tour places connected to 7:30 p.m. Dinner at Lusco’s in Greenwood the life and work of playwright Tennessee Williams. “The Cefalu Connection,” talk given by Amy Evans Also scheduled are meals at Lusco’s, the new Giardina’s, Madidi, and other notable Delta restaurants as well as live WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6 blues and gospel performances. On April 7, after breakfast at CLARKSDALE: Tennessee Williams 8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast the Alluvian, participants will be free to travel on their own 9:00 a.m. Depart for Delta Tour led by Luther Brown to Oxford, arriving in time to visit William Faulkner’s home, Greenwood to Cleveland, with stop at Delta State Rowan Oak; tour the town; have lunch on the courthouse University Library square; and attend the Oxford Conference for the Book, Noon Lunch at Madidi—Clarksdale which will begin that afternoon. Gospel Music—Coahoma Community College Choir The Delta tour is $450 per person for all program activities, 1:30 p.m. Talk by Kenneth Holditch at Cutrer Mansion eight meals, and local transportation. The fee does not 2:30 p.m Tour Tennessee Williams sites, including include lodging. To register, go to the Events and Conferences St. George’s Episcopal Church, and visit various blues section of the Center’s Web site (www.olemiss.edu/ sites, including Delta Blues Museum and Cat Head depts/south/events/index.htm) and click on Registration. 4:30 p.m. Depart for Greenwood 7:00 p.m. Tour of Delta art at the Alluvian, led by Remember to sign up early. Only 35 spots are available, and William Dunlap they will go fast. Maude Schuyler Clay, special guest Group accommodations have been arranged at the 7:30 p.m. Dinner at Giardina’s in Greenwood Alluvian, in downtown Greenwood (www.thealluvian.com). Rooms at the Alluvian require a separate registration and are priced at a discounted rate of $135 and may be reserved THURSDAY, APRIL 7 by dialing 866-600-5201 and asking for the special “Literary OXFORD CONFERENCE FOR THE BOOK OR BUST! Tour” rate. In the event that the Alluvian sells out before you 8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast get a chance to book a room, we have also reserved a block at 9:00 a.m. Depart for Oxford (1.5 hours) the Greenwood Best Western, 662-455-5777. Oxford Conference for the Book, dedicated to Flannery O’Connor University of Mississippi campus, April 7-9 *All events subject to change.

Page 4 Winter 2005 The Southern Register Twelfth Oxford Conference for the Book The University of Mississippi • Oxford, Mississippi • April 7-9, 2005

Program sessions on Thursday, April 7, will be at the Oxford John Davis Williams Library Conference Center. Program sessions on Friday and Light Lunch Saturday, April 8-9, will be at the Gertrude Castellow Ford Mississippi Hall of Writers Center for the Performing Arts. Hosted by Julia Rholes Dean of University Libraries THURSDAY, APRIL 7 1:30 p.m. Welcome 2:00 p.m. Flannery O’Connor: Her Work and Legacy Tribute to Larry Brown Charles Reagan Wilson, moderator Richard Howorth, Mayor Paul Elie, Beverly D. Fatherree, Kelly Gerald, Readings/Comments William A. Sessions Joseph Urgo, moderator Ellen Douglas, Ashley Warlick, Brad Watson 3:30 p.m. Young Authors Fair Book Signing - Richard Peck 2:30 p.m. Readings/Comments Square Books Jr. Tom Franklin, moderator Karen Spears Zacharias, John Green, Julia Reed 4:30 p.m. Poetry: Readings and Remarks Celebration of National Poetry Month 4:00 p.m. The Perfect Crime Beth Ann Fennelly, moderator Jere Hoar, moderator John Kinsella, Davis McCombs, Katrina Vandenberg George Pelecanos, Randy Wayne White 7:00 p.m. Country Dinner 5:30 p.m. Thacker Mountain Radio Taylor Grocery Band Jim Dees, host Taylor, Mississippi George Pelecanos, Randy Wayne White (Reservations Required) The Yalobushwackers SATURDAY, APRIL 9 7:00 p.m. Dinner 9:00 a.m. Finding a Voice/Reaching an Audience Meet the Speakers Amy Stolls, moderator Isom Place Steve Almond, Paul Elie, Sheldon Fogelman, (Reservations Required) Elizabeth Gaffney, Jeff Kleinman

9:00 p.m. Open Mike - Poetry & Fiction Jam 10:30 a.m. Writing about Truth, Art, and Sex David Galef, moderator William Dunlap, moderator Two Stick Steve Almond, Ellen Douglas, Ronald Goldfarb, Julia Reed, Ashley Warlick FRIDAY, APRIL 8 9:00 a.m. Welcome Noon Lunch - On Your Own Robert C. Khayat, Chancellor Literature for Young Readers 1:30 p.m. Writing for Young People and Crossover Literature Ethel Young-Minor, moderator Phyllis Fogelman, moderator Comments John Green, Richard Peck, Amy Stolls Leigh Ann Morgan, Rosemary Oliphant-Ingham, Susan Nicholas, Katie Snodgrass 2:30 p.m. Readings/Remarks Introduction Jamie Kornegay, moderator Sheldon Fogelman Steve Almond, Tayari Jones, Amy Stolls Readings/Remarks Richard Peck 3:30 p.m. Sense of History Panel & Readings Ted Ownby, moderator 10:30 a.m. The Endangered Species: Readers Today and John Bailey, Elizabeth Gaffney, Ronne Hartfield Tomorrow Elaine H. Scott, moderator 4:30 p.m. Writing about Politics Claiborne Barksdale, John Y. Cole, Jon Parrish Curtis Wilkie, moderator Peede, Keith Stephens Hendrik Hertzberg, Nick Kotz, Thomas Oliphant

Noon Center for the Book and Its State Affiliates 6:00 p.m. Book Signing John Y. Cole Off Square Books Constance Lawson

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 5 Southern Gardens Center Celebrates Double Decker

Symposium Oxford’s annual Double Decker Arts Festival–a celebration of music, food, and the arts—is always a guaranteed good time, and this year the Center is getting in on the April 22-23, 2005 act. On Friday, April 29, the day before the festival, the Center will present a series of “Gardening,” says Center director short (30- to 45-minute) lectures on topics ranging from dirt-track auto racing to the Charles Reagan Wilson, “has always blues. Also on tap are the preview of a documentary film on the Freedom Riders, been part of Southerners’ regional produced by the University’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, and identity.” This is just one reason the a walk through Bailey’s Woods, which connect the University to William Faulkner’s Center and the University Office of Rowan Oak. The activities will take place at the Oxford Depot and are set to start at Outreach have teamed up to offer the 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., with an hour lunch break at noon. No registration is Southern Gardens Symposium, Friday required, and participants may come and go as they please. through Saturday, April 22-23. The Additionally, plans for a gospel concert in the Grove are being made for Sunday, symposium will feature famed Mississippi May 1, the day after Double Decker. Concert details will be available soon. Check gardener Felder Rushing, landscape the Center’s Web site (www.olemiss.edu/depts/south), e-mail Mary Beth Lasseter ([email protected]), or call the Center (662-915-5993) for more information on both the concert and the presentation series. Robert Jordan/University of Mississippi

architect and garden historian James Cothran, and Rowan Oak restoration experts Kevin Risk and Ed Blake. Registration includes guided tours of gardens in both Oxford and nearby Holly Springs, presentations on Southern gardens and historic garden renovation, a tea party, and a lunch lecture. The fee Double Decker Bus on the Oxford Square for the symposium is $85; no refunds will be given after April 10. To register for the symposium or for more information, including a schedule of events, visit www.outreach.olemiss.edu/gardening/. Dates of Civil War Conference Set The Civil War is the topic of a conference to be hosted by the University’s Yoknapatawpha Department of History and Office of Outreach from Friday, May 27, through Saturday, May 28, 2005. “Remembering America’s Civil War” is the theme of Arts Council the event planned to coincide with Memorial Day weekend. The conference Third Annual Oxford will include presentations by historians exploring the national remembrance and commemoration of the war. Presentations will include talks on the creation Film Festival of national military parks, the politics of monuments, the effect of the war on September 5-11, 2005 Southern widows, and postwar perceptions of Civil War prisons. Also slated are www.oxfordfilmfest.com a Civil War memorial tour of the Ole Miss campus and, for an additional fee, a Sunday tour of Shiloh and the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center. Visit 662.236.6429 www.outreach.olemiss.edu/culture, e-mail [email protected], or call 662- Film submission deadline is 816-2055 for more information as it becomes available. May 1, 2005.

Page 6 Winter 2005 The Southern Register Bruce West Exhibition at Gammill Gallery Currently on exhibit in the Gammill Bruce W Gallery is Take Time to Appreciate, a est selection of 23 color photographs by Bruce West. All of the images were made in Mississippi, between 1994 and 2004. Most are portraits of people West met while traveling in the Delta. Indeed, the title of the exhibition derives from one of the hand-painted signs done by Mrs. L. V. Hull, a folk artist and the subject of one of West’s vibrant color portraits. West adopted Mrs. Hull’s phrase, he says, because “it speaks of my primary objective as a photographer.” “These are beautiful images,” says David Wharton, director of Documentary Projects at the Center. “They’re big prints (14 x17 inches), made from medium- format negatives, so they’re highly detailed. And Bruce’s use of color is lovely—rich and deep but never garish. But I’m even more impressed by his approach to content. His pictures are Reverend Dennis with Candelabra, Mississippi, 2000 quiet, straightforward, and true. No one seems to be posing, neither the see her in her backyard wearing a floral- Bruce West is professor of art and photographer nor his subjects.” print housecoat. In the background are design at Southwest Missouri State When West comes to Mississippi, he flowers much like those on the University, where he has taught since often revisits people he has housecoat. In another photograph of 1985. He has exhibited his photographs photographed previously, so several of Mrs. Clinton, made the following year, widely. Recent exhibitions include the pictures in the exhibition are of the she stands in front of her front porch’s shows at the Sheldon Art Galleries, the same person, though made at different screen door, sporting large sunglasses, a St. Louis Art Museum, the Mississippi times. This lends the images greater baseball cap, and a Wal-Mart smock. Art Museum, the University of depth than one often sees in The two images together show different Northern Iowa, and Millsaps College. photographic portraits. In one picture sides of Mrs. Clinton and provide a He has received a number of awards for of Mrs. Elisa Clinton, made in 1999, we fuller understanding of her life. his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation for the Arts, and the Polaroid Corporation. His photographs are included in various public and corporate collections, including the St. Louis Art Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Mississippi Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum Ludwig, the Exhibition Schedule Munchner Stadtmuseum, the Museum de la Photographie a Charleroi, the January 15 - March 25, 2005 March 25 - May 31, 2005 Paine-Webber Corporation, and A. G. Mississippi: Community Photography Edwards and Sons Inc. Take Time to Appreciate Southern Studies Take Time to Appreciate will be on Bruce J. West Documentary Students display at Barnard Observatory’s Gammill Gallery through March 25. The Gammill Gallery, located in Barnard Observatory, is open Monday Bruce West will give a gallery talk at through Friday, 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., except for University holidays. noon on Wednesday, March 9. Telephone: 662-915-5993.

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 7 Southern Studies Student Exhibition in Gammill Gallery

During the 2004 fall semester, students in the Southern Studies documentary photography seminar, taught by David Wharton, made repeated visits to six towns in north Mississippi with the aim in mind of compiling photographic “community portraits.” There were 12 students in the class—Robert Caldwell, Ellie Campbell, Jordan Craven, Matt Donohue, Sean Hughes, Nathan Kosub, Andrew Leventhal, Mary Margaret

Robert Caldwell, Love: Mother and Child in Laundromat, Water Valley.

Miller, Angela Moore, Susie Penman, exhibition, Community Photography, will Renna Tuten, and Robin Yekaitis. The be on display from March 25 through communities they visited were Batesville, May 31. It will be the second in a series of Bruce, Holly Springs, New Albany, exhibitions planned as part of the Pontotoc, and Water Valley, with two Mississippi Hills Documentary Project, a students concentrating on each town. collaboration between the Center and At the end of the semester, each the Mississippi Hills Heritage Area student compiled a 25-print portfolio of Alliance. Some of the students’ pictures his/her best images. Working together, are printed in this newsletter. More will the class also selected 72 of the soon be available for viewing at the photographs to exhibit at Barnard “special projects” link at the Center’s Observatory’s Gammill Gallery. That Web site (www.olemiss.edu/depts/south). Jordan Craven, School Lunch, Holly Springs. more photos on page 30

Ellie Campbell, Power Swings, Batesville. Renna Tuten, Man at Flea Market, Pontotoc.

Page 8 Winter 2005 The Southern Register Nathan Kosub, Turnage’s Drug Store, Main Street, Water Valley.

Matt Donohue, Man with Ice Cream Cone, Holly Springs.

Andrew Leventhal, Willie Rogers, Age 95, with Portrait, New Albany. Sean Hughes, Honoring the Troops, Pontotoc.

Mary Margaret Miller, Young Man in Garage, Bruce. Angela Moore, National Anthem at Football Game, South Panola High School, Batesville.

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 9 Center for the Study of Southern John Gordon Corlew George Henry Booth Culture Advancement Fund Coterie Club of Oxford, Mississippi Ted Borodofsky Jr. James & Madeleine McMullan George H. Crawford III Stacy Dianne Boyd Philip K. Ensley Lonnie Braxton Endowment for the Future Mrs. Porter L. Fortune Monika Bruckner of the South Elisabeth G. Graham Kaye H. Bryant Ann Abadie Cristen C. Hemmins Centennial Press, Jackson, Mississippi Henry & Elizabeth Brevard Corey Donald Hinshaw Aneta Marie Chapman Michelle Hyver Oakes Joan S. Horton Katherine Holmes Cochran Clarke & Judy Reed Charles & Jane Jordan M. Graham Coleman Charles Reagan Wilson Ruth B. Kloha Rosemary M. Conlon John W. Kuykendall Edward P. Connell Ventress Order for Southern Studies Bennett L. Leventhal Bettie Minette Cooper (See page 14 of this issue of the Register.) (in honor of Andrew Leventhal) Julia Cannon Crichton The Lewis Trust Samuel L. Deleeuw Friends of the Center Charles R. Mandly Louann Dorrough Patron ($1,000+) Martha C. Morrison James C. Downey Vasser Bishop Nelken Realty Properties, William J. Duston Lynn & Stewart Gammill Greenville, Mississippi Thomas R. Ethridge Mary Lynn Kotz Dr. Charles Noyes Elizabeth M. Fellows Eugenia & Albert Lamar Fund Samuel B. Olden Andrew E. Fies W. P. McMullan Palisades Corporation, Carl Fleischhauer Thomas S. Rankin Brandon, Mississippi Anna C. Fowler Ms. Willard Pate Thomas D. Fowlkes Sustaining ($500-$999) Dannal Perry Suellen S. Friou Marshall B. Allen Harry K. Ransler Ann C. Gill David & Barbara Arnold Dr. James Robbins Ernestine Pickens Glass Sarah Dabney Gillespie Jan H. Robertson Margaret P. Grantham Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians Randall B. & Patricia S. Robertson Rt. Rev. Duncan M. Gray John P. Robertson Carolyn Scruggs Katherine D. Gray John Albert Ware Russell G. Sherrill III J. Timothy Griffin Ramsey T. Way Joyce Sidorfsky Michael James Hahn Linda B. Smith Betty Harrington Sponsor ($250-$499) Roslyn Snow Lisa Hetterick Argyll Foundation Harold W. Stanley R. Harold Hipps Joyce M. Arnold Louisa Stark David Hodnett William & Jennifer Calhoun Anne & Allan Strand Bonnie J. Holaday William R. Ferris Eric J. Sundquist Richard D. Holland Robert B. Fulton Joseph C. Todd Elmer Leroy Hunt Gertrude S. Gildea Deborah Walker Jolee C. Hussey James H. Johnston Curtis Wilkie M. Thomas Inge Lou Ann H. McCarty Karen Spears Zacharias Mary B. Jackson Kennard A. McKay John Zibrida Linda Lou Jenkins Carolyn Vance Smith Arthur F. Jones Jay Wiener Regular ($50-$99) Richard E. Jones Ann J. Abadie Associate ($100-$249) M. Christine Allen Stuart J. Abraham Sue Allison Julie G. Adkisson Jacqueline Bachman Frank A. Anderson John M. Bailey Mark D. Anderson D. Carl Black Ray L. Bellande J. Glenn Blackburn David R. Bowen Helen Kean Blanks Richard A. Boyd Mollie R. Brewer Jean B. Butler Maude G. Carr Jane F. Clark Center for the Study of Southern Culture ~ Fall 2004 Page 10 Winter 2005 DonorsThe Southern Register Donald M. Kartiganer Joe Curtis Rees Elizabeth F. Harris David B. Kesterson Julia M. Rholes Richard Hegel Judy Kidd Mary Stovall Richards Kenneth E. Highland Frances Byars King John William Richter Virginia Houk Tamara Sue King Kathleen Robbins Jeff L. Kenner Nancy R. Norris-Kniffin Robert A. Roth Meredith Veda Matthews Michael P. Kreyling Alice Russell E. M. Meek Thomas G. Kudzma Paul E. Russell Garry D. Mitchell Harriett D. Kuykendall Joel W. Sarrett Christi Moss P. Walker Lasiter Fred W. Sauceman Laquita Neill Betty Lawrence Todd L. Savitt Deanne Nuwer William M. Leach Robert D. Seawright Linda T. Parker Steven Lebert Carol A. Sewell Marilyn D. Parrish Legacy Research Associates, Mrs. Wilbourne C. Shands Terrie Price Durham, North Carolina Ann Sharp William R. Raulston Thomas M. Levis Maude Saunders Sharp John Allen Robertson T. Van Magers Peter Sharpe Audrey H. Sidney Alyne Massey Gardiner H. Shattuck David Smith Brenda D. McClain William S. Sheriff, Jr. John J. Stevens Rowena McClinton Peggy B. Shuford George G. Stewart Lydia H. McIntosh Terry K. Simmons Mary C. Swilling Kathleen Crum McKinney Cathryn Slater Stanislav Volens Margaret McMullan Todd M. Small Sean H. Wells Thomas Ronald Melton Virginia Marie Smith John R. Meyer Carol Hederman Tatum Memorial Gifts Randall M. Miller Claude Edward Teague Ann J. Abadie in memory of Lee G. Mitchell Margene M. Tichane Mary Hartwell Bishop Howorth Sally N. Molpus Leslie R. Tucker Mollie R. Brewer in memory of Louann Morehouse Calvin J. Turley Mary Hartwell Bishop Howorth Mattie J. Mosley Jack and Helen Tyson Bonnie Crawford in memory of Anne Marie Mueller Charles Edward Warren Mrs. Martha Cox Elane O’Rourke Elizabeth Webb Louise L. LeQuire in memory of Mr. & Mrs. Michael Overstreet Mary Alice White Mary Hartwell Bishop Howorth Randall G. Patterson Anne James Wilbourne Charles Reagan Wilson in memory of Anne D. Percy Robert C. Wilkerson Mary Hartwell Bishop Howorth Jess Pinkston Mary R. Williams Porchswing Productions, Burbank, Charles Reagan Wilson Callifornia Paul M. Wilson Janet Mohon Povall The Center thanks all those who Dr. Peggy W. Prenshaw Student ($1-$49) joined Friends of the Center during George H. Pruette Stephen S. Arnold our Fall 2004 membership drive. Robert D. Pugh Martha A. Baty Annual donations through this Elizabeth Queener Carl D. Bennett program help us develop and expand Janice L. Quick Teresa M. Burk public programming; fund graduate Bob Razer W. Cook student assistantships in our Bettie Fikes Copeland Southern Studies Program; support Karen U. Crawford faculty research; and much, much Charlotte Darling more. If you have not done so Ronald E. Deabenderfer already, please consider joining the T. Erick Dittus Friends of the Center. Your tax- Shawna Rebecca Dooley deductible gift will ensure that our Jane Edwards work will continue to grow. Gail A. Evans-Blue Other Center donors are also listed on this page. If you are interested in contributing to a special project, please contact Angelina Altobellis at 662- 915- thern Culture ~ Fall 2004 1546 or [email protected]. onorsThe Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 11 Faulkner’s Inheritance Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference : July 24-28, 2005

William Faulkner’s “inheritance” was of lectures, panel discussions, tours, and as expansive as the man himself. He social gatherings some of the things he once said that the writer “collects his saw: what his inheritance was, and what material all his life from everything he happens to it in his writing. Appearing reads, from everything he listens to, for the first time at the conference will be everything he sees, and he stores that Jay Parini, Axinn Professor of English at away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my Middlebury College, author of the newest case it’s not anything near as neat as a biography of Faulkner, One Matchless filing case, it’s more like a junk box.” Time: A Life of William Faulkner, as well as He tended to be quite casual about four volumes of poetry, six novels, and “influences,” referring, for example, to biographies of John Steinbeck and Robert the South, the setting of the great Frost; Adam Gussow, assistant professor majority of his fiction, as “not very of English and Southern Studies at the important to me. I just happen to know University of Mississippi, author of Mister it, and don’t have time in one life to Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir and learn another one and write at the Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence same time”; or to his Christian and the Blues Tradition, winner of the C. background as simply another tool he Hugh Holman Award for the best book might pick up on one of his visits to of literary scholarship or criticism in Oliver Parini “the lumber room” that would help him Southern literature published in 2002; tell a story. Jay Parini Jon Smith, assistant professor of English Sometimes he could just be poking at the University of Montevallo, coeditor fun, claiming he never read Joyce’s of Look Away! The U.S. South in New Ulysses or had never heard of Thomas World Studies and author of Southern Mann—writers he would elsewhere Culture on the Skids: Narcissism, Branding, declare as “the two great men in my and the Burden of Southern History, time.” And, of course, sometimes he forthcoming from the University Press of would just express annoyance at readers Mississippi; and Priscilla Wald, associate who found esoteric theory in his fiction, professor of English at Duke University, when all he wanted them to find was author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Faulkner: “I have never read [Freud]. Anxiety and Narrative Form and associate Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if editor of the journal American Literature. Melville did either, and I’m sure Moby- Returning to the conference are Susan Dick didn’t.” V. Donaldson, professor of English at the Nevertheless, as he acknowledged, the College of William and Mary, author of writer collects his material from Competing Voices: The American Novel, everywhere, and Faulkner’s life was not 1865-1914 and coeditor of Haunted only rich in what he did and saw and read, Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts; but he seems to have remembered all of it: Martin Kreiswirth, professor of English from the history of his own family, from and dean of graduate studies at the the Old Colonel, to the poetry he read at University of Western Ontario, author of the urging of Phil Stone, who began his William Faulkner: The Making of a Priscilla Wald great “tutorial” of the 17-year-old high- Novelist and coeditor of three volumes, school dropout in 1914. Miss Bessie including The Johns Hopkins Guide to Sumners, who knew Faulkner from Literary Theory and Criticism; Noel Polk, childhood, once mentioned how on Faulkner commented on some new professor of English at Mississippi State Saturdays, when the country people furniture she and Phil had purchased, “I University, author or editor of over a would come into Oxford to do their didn’t think you’d notice.” He replied, “I dozen volumes, including, most recently, weekly shopping, Faulkner would stand see everything.” Outside the Southern Myth; and Judith L. for hours at the corner—where Square The 32nd Faulkner and Yokna- Sensibar, professor emerita of English, Books is presently located—and simply patawpha Conference—“Faulkner’s Women’s Studies, and Humanities at watch and listen. Emily Stone said, when Inheritance”—will explore for five days Arizona State University, author of two

Page 12 Winter 2005 The Southern Register books on Faulkner and editor of on Faulkner’s need, in the context of photographs, and memorabilia; and the Faulkner’s Vision in Spring. Her current his multilayered inheritance, to sweep University Press of Mississippi will project is the completion of “We Have away everything that preceded him, exhibit Faulkner books published by Waited Long Enough”: The Story of including his own previous work, in university presses throughout the United William Faulkner, His Black and White order to create “something that did not States. Films relating to the author’s life Mothers, and His Wife, forthcoming from exist before.” Martin Kreiswirth will and work will be available for viewing Yale University Press. deal with “the uncanny and race in during the week. Among the topics that will be taken Absalom, Absalom!” The conference will begin on up at the conference will be Jon Smith In addition to formal lectures, there Sunday, July 24, with a reception at the on Faulkner’s environmental will be a number of shorter panel University Museums and a special inheritance as a member of the so- presentations, discussions by Faulkner exhibition and presentation by Boyd called Lost Generation, Adam Gussow friends and family, and sessions on Saunders, painter, sculptor, illustrator, on blues music in Faulkner, and Susan “Teaching Faulkner” directed by James and printmaker. The exhibition will Donaldson on the “culture of B. Carothers, University of Kansas; feature lithograph prints from his segregation.” Judith L. Sensibar will Charles Peek, University of Nebraska at illustrations for Faulkner’s Spotted examine Faulkner’s relationship with Kearney; Terrell L. Tebbetts, Lyons Horses. After the Museums reception, his mother, Maud Butler Falkner, and College; and Theresa Towner, University the opening papers of the conference the “white maternal” complement to of Texas at Dallas. The University’s John will be presented at the Johnson his relationship with Caroline Barr, the Davis Williams Library will display Commons Auditorium and will be “black maternal”; Noel Polk will speak Faulkner books, manuscripts, followed by a buffet supper at historic Memory House, formerly the home of John Faulkner. The Sunday evening program will begin with the announcement of the winner of the 16th Faux Faulkner Contest, coordinated by the author’s niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, and sponsored by Hemispheres Magazine/ United Airlines, Yoknapatawpha Press, and the University of Mississippi. Dramatic readings from Faulkner’s work will then be presented. Other events will include “Faulkner on the Fringe”–an “open- mike” evening at the Southside Gallery; guided day-long tours of Northeast Mississippi; a picnic served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak; and a closing party. For more information about the conference contact the Office of Outreach and Continuing Education, Post Office Box 879, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848; Southern Writers, Southern Writing telephone: 662-915-7283; e-mail: [email protected]. Graduate Student Conference For information on the conference The 11th annual Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate Student program, course credit, and all other Conference will be held at the University of Mississippi July 22-23, 2005. inquiries, contact the Department of Creative and critical readings will address various topics on or about the South. English, Box 1848 Bondurant Hall, The Critical topics are not restricted to literature; we welcome submissions from other University of Mississippi, University, MS disciplines and are particularly interested in interdisciplinary perspectives. 38677-1848; telephone: 662-915-7439; Students whose papers are accepted may register for the 32nd annual Faulkner e-mail: [email protected]. For on-line and Yoknapatawpha Conference without paying a registration fee. For more registration, visit us on the Web at information, visit either the graduate conference Web site at www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events www.olemiss.edu/conf/swsw or www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner or /faulkner/. write to Southern Writers, Southern Writing, Department of English, C128 Bondurant, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848. DONALD M. KARTIGANER

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 13 New Ventress Order Members Ron Nurnberg and Joe Osgoode

The Center is delighted to announce addition, he helped start, co-owned, that Ron Nurnberg and Joe Osgoode of and operated Dressel’s Pub in St. Louis, Oxford, Mississippi, have joined the Missouri, a town favorite that honored Ventress Order, an organization that the arts, especially Welsh and administers gifts to the departments of American literature, opera, jazz, and the University’s College of Liberal blues. Arts. Nurnberg and Osgoode have Nurnberg left the for-profit business designated their gift to the Center. world to pursue his degree in Southern “Rolling our annual giving into a Studies. His work in the program focused Ventress Order membership made on the preservation and reinvention of sense,” said Nurnberg, who is an alumnus Vicksburg’s St. Francis Xavier Convent of the graduate program in Southern and Academy previously run by the Studies. “The Center gave so much to Sisters of Mercy. Closed in the early Joe Osgoode (left) and Ron Nurnbert Joe and me. My years in Southern 1990s, the complex of 19th-century Studies were golden years, which were buildings, one of them antebellum, faced wonderful and life- altering.” an uncertain future. Building on the work Osgoode, an artist whose works of three prior Southern Studies graduates also regularly offer Ditch Crest as a include photographic collages of and drawing his vision from other cultural gathering place for visiting writers to Ventress Hall, Barnard Observatory, centers throughout the Southeast, the Oxford Conference for the Book: and the Lyceum, agreed, commenting, Nurnberg worked closely with the city of previous guests have included Jill “Southern Studies brings in a very Vicksburg to purchase the property, McCorkle and Lee Smith. lively group of people. Even though I transforming it into the Southern “Joe and I believe in what the Center was not a student, it offered so many Cultural Heritage Foundation. He also for the Study of Southern Culture is events that I felt as though I was a part led the search for the Foundation’s first doing, and wanted to take part in of the community.” executive director. supporting that. The Ventress Order Prior to embarking on his master’s Following graduation in 1995, was an ideal way to do this.” degree in Southern Studies, Nurnberg, Nurnberg went to work for the National Named in honor of James Alexander who earned a bachelor’s degree in Trust’s Main Street program in Helena, Ventress, a founding father of the business and interpersonal com- Arkansas, as the project’s executive University, the Ventress Order encourages munication from Central College in director. Nine months later, he became recognition of the College of Liberal Arts Pella, Iowa, was associate director of a executive director for Teach for America as one of the country’s outstanding centers study abroad program for American in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta, a of learning. College of Liberal Arts students at Trinity College, Wales. In position he has held ever since. Having graduates, family members, friends, or expanded its presence from 32 teachers in organizations may join the order and 1996 to 134 teachers currently, he is designate their gift to particular Center Ventress Order Members focused on helping his teachers close the departments or programs within the Ann J. Abadie academic achievement gap by up to two college. Corporate and full individual Nancy Lippincott Ashley years for every year that Teach for memberships are available by pledging Vasser Bishop America recruits spend in the classroom. $10,000 and $5,000 respectively. Gifts are Peter & Marnie Frost “Educated youth in these communities payable in lump sums or installments not Ebbie (Mrs. William) Hart, in honor are a countermeasure to the brain drain to exceed 10 years. Affiliate memberships of Juliet Hart Walton & Gerald that the Delta has been experiencing,” he are also available through a pledge of W. Walton said. Another of his goals is to turn Teach $1,000, payable in a lump sum not to Mary Lucia & Don Holloway for America alumni into lifelong exceed four years. Jamie & Ernest Joyner advocates for this pursuit. For more information about the Carlette McMullan Nurnberg and Osgoode remain Ventress Order for Southern Studies, Lynn & Holt McMullan involved with the Center. Each year, at contact Angelina Altobellis at 662- Deborah Monroe the home they call Ditch Crest, they 915-1546 or [email protected]. Ron Nurnberg & Joe Osgoode host a welcome party for new graduate Patricia & Phineas Stephens students in Southern Studies. They ANGELINA ALTOBELLIS Dorothy Lee (Mrs. John) Tatum Lesley & Joseph Urgo

Page 14 Winter 2005 The Southern Register Reading the South Voices of the American South. Edited by Suzanne Disheroon- Mason also includes the intriguing section includes a rare selection of Green; associate editors, Lisa fact that the Kentucky author’s female regionalists, with stories by Abney, Philip Dubuisson Castille, latest book is a biography of Elvis Mary Murfree, Grace King, Ruth Barbara C. Ewell, Sarah E. Gardner, Presley. As an icon of the South, McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Joe Marshall Hardin, Julie Kane, Elvis is probably even more widely Mississippians will be pleased by the and Pamela Glenn Menke. New recognized around the world than recognition of the state’s long line of York: Pearson Longman, 2005. Johnny Reb; their differences hint literary talent. Prominent in the 1,404 pages. $52.00 paperback. at the great variety of authors, plots, “Southwestern Humor” cluster, from and characters brought together in a “Part I: Antebellum Period,” is the Twenty years ago, in an essay titled book that begins decades before the rambunctious story “The Dance” by “The Study of Southern Literature,” Civil War and ends with some of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, an early M. Thomas Inge noted the today’s most admired authors. president of the University of continuing vitality of a distinctive In his 1985 essay, Inge made the Mississippi. While any recent literary culture in the South, a startling remark that, “If the Southern literature anthology would tradition whose origins he traced to Confederacy had succeeded and reprint William Faulkner, Richard the early 19th century. In the past become a separate nation, what we Wright, and Eudora Welty, Voices of decade, however, scholars have know as Southern literature would in the American South further extends to increasingly argued that the region’s effect be a national literature.” This Margaret Walker, Larry Brown, Ellen writing has lost its distinctiveness, historical perspective is consonant Douglas, and Elizabeth Spencer. Three becoming not simply postmodern but with the chronological organization of the University of Mississippi’s post-Southern as well. Pop music of Voices of the American South, whose former Grisham Visiting Writers in allusions and generic mall settings in section headings highlight such Residence are also present: Mary Bobbie Ann Mason’s fiction, for crucial events as the Civil War, Hood, Randall Kenan, and Tim example, are often cited as a clear Reconstruction, growing indus- Gautreaux. break from the South’s past trialization, and the civil rights As the editors admit, they lacked literature—and from the past itself. movement. The scholarly expertise both the space and the bankroll to Voices of the American South, an of Disheroon-Green’s associate include additional “exemplary” anthology of poetry, fiction, drama, editors guaranteed special strengths works. Even at 1,404 pages, the and nonfiction, stresses such within these divisions. For instance, anthology omits Barry Hannah’s discontinuities in the headnote for Louisiana poet Julie Kane was an fiction, Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, Mason’s “Drawing Names,” the tale excellent resource for the wealth of Janisse Ray’s nonfiction, and any of an awkward Christmas reunion. 20th-century poetry anthologized drama besides Tennessee Williams’s Discussion questions that follow the here, including such lesser known Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But it’s story further encourage readers to writers as Margaret Danner (“The impossible to think of any type of observe instances of “dirty realism,” Slave and the Iron Lace”) and Southern writing that’s omitted. along with major changes in the Rodney Jones (“Mule”). And Barbara The gothic, the grotesque, the grit structure of the Southern family. C. Ewell and Pamela Glenn Menke, lit are all here, along with the Equally significant social editors also of Southern Local Color: genteel tradition, the slave transformations are evident in Stories of Region, Race, and Gender narrative, proletarian fiction, selections by Richard Ford, (2002), surely recommended the Jefferson Davis’s second inaugural Frederick Barthelme, Jill McCorkle, diverse representation of popular address, Martin Luther King Jr.’s and other recent writers. local color writers—from the African “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” Undeniably, change is pervasive in American Charles Chesnutt to The Martha McFerren’s “The Bad contemporary literature, including Clansman author Thomas Dixon Southern Cooking Poem,” and the literature of the South. Yet, the Jr.—in “Part III: Rebuilding and Marilyn Nelson’s tribute to the anthology headnote on Bobbie Ann Repression: 1880-1910.” This same Tuskegee Airmen. Section

Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, For these and other books call 800-648-4001 or fax 601-234-9630. Students, and Friends of the Center for the 160 Courthouse Square • Oxford, Mississippi 38655 Study of Southern Culture

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 15 Reading the South continued

introductions, maps and timelines, she writes, “and dream myself invisible, author headnotes, discussion folded and folded into a piece of black questions, and an up-to-date cloth made of me, so small I did not bibliography are here as well. I can’t exist. Like this, I was safe.” wait to introduce my Survey of In unfolding that darkness, and the Southern Literature students to many tight, black places into which Voices of the American South. she both literally and metaphorically takes us, McElmurray surrenders a JOAN WYLIE HALL great deal to the reader—we have the sense that she holds nothing back from us, and the sheer rawness of her account meant that on several Surrendered Child: A Birth occasions I simply put the book down Mother’s Journey. for a while, uncomfortable that I had By Karen Salyer McElmurray. been told so much about the inner Athens: University of Georgia workings of a life, embarrassed that I Press, 2004. 272 pages, 22 grew up just a few years later and a photographs. $29.95 cloth. few miles away in a stable household where only other people had babies as Winner of the Association of teenagers. But I couldn’t leave the Writers and Writing Programs Surrendered Child conveys a mature book alone. I kept picking it back up, Award for Creative Nonfiction. certainty that happy endings do not and that impulse, the reader comes to erase a lifetime of pain. They can realize, mirrors McElmurray’s own Karen McElmurray’s memoir, only mitigate circumstances, even if drive to understand her life. For years, Surrendered Child, is a rare book, rare they serve as new beginnings. she avoids her past or holds it at a safe for a series of surprising reasons. In Necessarily, McElmurray has to share distance; she becomes a writer but the first place, “memoir” is only an with the reader a lot more than the convinces herself that she is writing approximation of its genre; it is breath-robbing pain of actual about people other than herself. She actually the tale of a life haunted by a childbirth that yields no child, travels from state to state, from job to single, irrevocable decision made by replacing an infant with bed sheets job, from man to man. But that one child to relinquish another. wet from wasted breast milk. She has delivery room moment, that nameless Sixteen years old in 1973, Karen to tell us how she came to the child won’t allow McElmurray to put McElmurray gave her son up for moment of relinquishment before she them down for long. She is adoption in the delivery room of a delivers us into the moment of particularly plagued by the fact that Kentucky hospital without ever so reconciliation. In telling that dark she cannot recall the date of the much as seeing his face or holding his story, McElmurray and the reader child’s birth. body. She then embarked on the rest confront the writer’s obsessive- Finally, Surrendered Child is so of her life only to discover over and compulsive mother who requires her powerful because the writer surrenders over again how utterly her future had daughter to shower in the garage herself to what she does not know but been consumed by that defining before entering the house, who tucks longs to learn. In asking who her son moment from her past. Possibilities her in at night wearing white gloves, is, McElmurray must also ask who she for other children present themselves and who teaches her that her body is is, and the very form of the narrative later in her life, but the reader joins but a dirty inconvenience. The demonstrates how difficult that second McElmurray in realizing that it isn’t numbing loneliness of her routine is question is to answer. The book begins those children she wants—she wants broken when McElmurray is 14 and with the memory of what McElmurray that one particular son. her beleaguered but imperfect father concedes may be an invented She finds him, when they are both returns her mother to the eastern moment, then moves to her admission adults. The book jacket tells us as Kentucky mountains from which to the maternity ward, before much, and the photographs located they both came. Then commences a including a copy of the letter she in the book’s center feature a picture cycle of sex, drugs, and running away received in 1998 from the Kentucky of the two of them. So the book has a worthy of any narrative about the Department of Social Services in happy ending. But embedded in that 1970s. “Nights, I could curl up on a response to her request for information conclusion is another of its rarities: mattress on the floor in the back room,” regarding the son she gave away. All of

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that has happened by page four. Eschewing chronological order, McElmurray then weaves a book, instead of telling a story, alternating clear memories that include dates and correspondence and the role of other people, with italicized plunges into shadowy recollections and what may be moments of pure fabrication. McElmurray’s larger point is this: all that she has—any of us have— is memory, meaning that the past is as reliable an indicator of the future as we allow it to be. In thus gesturing beyond the confines of any individual life, McElmurray’s book takes on its greatest rarity. It becomes about the reader’s life too, about how she will reconcile what she remembers from yesterday with what she does today. It becomes about how and why we remember, about why we may cling to the self-definition suffering affords us: “If I write, truly write, will I come to the end of remembering, of grieving, and will there then be nothing left?” McElmurray agonizingly wonders 179 pages into the book and in the midst of the very process she questions. Memory she compares to “a flooded road in the wake of a passing car,” sets of elusive images that can trap us only when we insist on their veracity. Ultimately, McElmurray surrenders some of her restless, relentless prodding at moments in time, concluding this in the afterword: “I have remembered the past and wondrously summoned what I hope is the future.” The reader may be inspired to do the same.

KATHRYN MCKEE

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Chord Changes on the Chalkboard: How Public $128 million, 100,000-square-foot understandings about “black culture” School Teachers Shaped Jazz facility that is, according to the JALC as essentially a pleasure-giving body- Web site, “the world’s first performing centered thing, a sung/danced/ and the Music of New arts center designed specifically for drummed mode of being tracing back Orleans. jazz.” “The whole space,” according to Africa and opposed to a By Al Kennedy. Lanham, to Marsalis, JALC’s Artistic Director, presumptively Euro-American Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, “is going to be dedicated to the emphasis on textualized knowledge, 2002. 204 pages. $55.00. feeling of swing, which is a feeling of deferred gratification, the law-giving Surely no Southern-born art form has extreme coordination. Everything is power of the written word, and cool, seen its stock as “culture” rise so going to be integrated: the efficient, hardworking, nicely behaved dramatically in the course of the long relationship between one space and culture builders. 20th century as that thing called jazz. another, the relationship between Wrong! Well, half wrong. It turns Presumptively originating in the turn- the audience and the musicians, will out that Wynton Marsalis—a cool, of-the-century whorehouses, night- be one fluid motion, because that’s efficient, hardworking, nicely clubs, and raucous street parades of how our music is.” behaved culture builder par New Orleans’s Storyville district, If you remain as astonished—and excellence—is merely the latest in a guilted by association with cheered—as I am by this recent long line of black New Orleans Prohibition-era gin-drinking and hair- ascendance of jazz to the status of a musical educators who were bobbing, jazz put the flap in “flapper” certified American cultural treasure, determined from the beginning to (that is, impressionable white then Al Kennedy’s monograph, defend jazz against accusations of maidenhood gone horribly wrong) Chord Changes on the Chalkboard, immorality; translate the collective and precipitated a moral panic—at can help explain just why the New improvisational energy and street- least among Jazz-Age readers of the Orleans-born Marsalis was so well sourced creativity of jazz into chord Ladies’ Home Journal. “Jazz equipped for his mission as what charts, lead sheets, and teachable disorganizes all regular laws and might be called a serious sequenced techniques; and convince order,” lamented Anne Shaw popularizer—a musician’s advocate generations of willing young people Faulkner in a now- legendary 1921 determined both to raise the cultural that jazz musicians were, in fact, article entitled “Does Jazz Put the Sin status of his chosen art and broaden culture heroes worthy of study and in Syncopation?”: “it stimulates to its appeal as democratic, people- emulation. Exactly like Beethoven, extreme deeds, to a breaking away pleasing entertainment. in fact. Except that these culture from all rules and conventions; it is The truth is, Wynton was just doing heroes purveyed their art at harmful and dangerous, and its what came naturally. Or culturally. nightclubs just down the block from influence is wholly bad. . . . The effect New Orleans is the key, in any case: the schools where the educators and of jazz on the normal brain produces not the Big Easy of Hurricanes-to-go their kids diagramed their solos. an atrophied condition on the brain and bad behavior on Bourbon Street, These culture heroes also sometimes cells of conception, until very but an indescribably rich musical visited the schools, and taught in frequently those under the environment presided over by three or them, and ended up, like Wynton’s demoralizing influence of the four generations of disciplined, father, Ellis, mentoring generations persistent use of syncopation, practical, indefatigable music of young black men (and the combined with inharmonic partial educators. Forget about “the rhythms occasional white boy like Harry tones, are actually incapable of of Congo Square” and the reputed Connick Jr.) into careers as superbly distinguishing between good and evil, naturalness with which Louisiana- well-trained jazz performers and between right and wrong.” born black folk deploy them; forget educators, which is to say musically Roll over, Beethoven! Yet roll about “the moan of the blues” and literate culture builders. over he has, and to the apparently “spontaneous block parties” and “feets The Ladies’ Home Journal got it delighted approval of those who man don’t fail me now.” All those things wrong, in other words, and Wynton (and underwrite) the cultural contribute to the magic of New has it exactly right: jazz isn’t about battlements up in New York. Orleans jazz, of course, but they’re moral disorder and loss of control; Spearheaded by the efforts of jazz beside the point of Kennedy’s book. it’s about disciplining yourself with a trumpeter/composer/educator/ Chord Changes on the Blackboard is teacher’s help so that you and the advocate Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at concerned with musical literacy: a band are capable of swinging hard Lincoln Center recently settled into concept that makes hash of our with extreme coordination—and its new home at Columbus Circle: a received (and subtly racist) taking care of the business side well

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enough that you can make a living and composition. This ethos lives on Kennedy’s book is, as I say, a good at it. Yet as Kennedy makes clear, in the multidimensional, institution- and needed corrective to jazz history early black jazz educators in New building approach of Wynton as primitivist mythmaking. To be Orleans had a difficult time on Marsalis, Donald Harrison, Terence fair, it’s an uneven effort, as revised various fronts; white disapprobation Blanchard, and other young lions of dissertations sometimes are. The was a less pressing challenge, in fact, New Orleans jazz. Above all, the opening chapter, which narrates the than the disapproval of a black pedagogical stress back in the day was early days of musical education in middle class committed to an on sight-reading as a route to both New Orleans’s black public schools, ideology of uplift and the egregious professional success and the social contains far too many we can underfunding of black education in solidarity that comes when talented assumes, would haves, and must have general. Simply putting instruments individuals do the hard work necessary hads. A later chapter on the New in the hands of eager students for to blend themselves into a swinging Orleans Center for the Creative any sort of musical education took collective. Arts (NOCCA) is a tedious review extraordinary resourcefulness. Yvonne Busch, who took over as of internecine warfare within One pivotal figure in Kennedy’s Booker T. Washington’s band director various arts organizations that could narrative, trumpet player and in 1951 at age 22 after spending her profitably have been cut by half. But bandleader Clyde Kerr Sr., came up precocious preteens touring as a these quibbles don’t finally detract by way of McDonough 35— New trumpeter with the International from the book’s achievement, which Orleans’s only public high school for Sweethearts of Rhythm, “knew [that] is to fill in the back story to Wynton African Americans until 1941, a self-discipline was a necessary Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Rampart Street institution within ingredient for a student to become a stellar arrival of “America’s Classical honking distance of the Eagle musician, and group discipline was the Music.” There’s no sin in Saloon and the Funky Butt Hall. only way a group of musicians could syncopation, it turns out, and a Kerr ended up becoming a longtime become a band.” Faced with a strict great deal to be proud of down in fixture at Booker T. Washington proscription against jazz, swing, and New Orleans. Senior High, where the Clyde Kerr rhythm-and-blues handed down by Studio Orchestra became a her school-board supervisors, she ADAM GUSSOW legendary training ground for New nevertheless fed her students’ interest Orleans schoolboy musicians. in jazz by writing arrangements on the Valmore Victor, an elementary blackboard for them to copy. Not just school music teacher who gave several jazz, either. “At Werlein’s Music Hungry for Home: Stories of generations of New Orleans musicians Store,” notes Kennedy, “all of the Food from Across the (including Ellis Marsalis) their start clerks knew Busch, and they would Carolinas. between 1928 and his retirement in immediately pull out the latest sheet By Amy Rogers. Foreword by John 1953, was remembered as the same music for her when she came into the Egerton. Charlotte: Novello sort of musical provisioner by sax man store. She was a regular customer, Festival Press, 2003. 390 pages. Earl Turbinton: “He had a house which purchasing music—often with her $29.95 hardcover. must have had a thousand own money—for her students. She instruments; tuba, maybe twenty or would buy everything from marches, Shoppers at the S. H. Kress variety thirty saxophones, twenty or thirty to classical selections for her concert store in Charlotte, North Carolina, trumpets and trombones. You’d bring band, to the sheet music of songs such offered baker Dolores Stowe cash your own mouthpiece and Professor as Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the Clock’ bribes if she would turn loose of the Victor would say, ‘Go in there and get and songs by Elvis Presley.” pecan chiffon pie recipe. True to an alto ’til you find one that feels good Roll over, Louis Armstrong! company policy, she resisted. But in to you. Play all these horns.’” Except that he wouldn’t, of course, 1972, the year Dolores retired, the Victor, like Kerr, Osceola Blanchett, because Satchmo was an impurist, as company dropped the pie from its Yvonne Busch, and the other all the great jazz players are. menu, and the Charlotte Observer musician/educators whose stories American popular song, of whatever talked the Kress regional office of Kennedy has assembled here, imbued provenance, is merely the meat; it’s Atlanta into parting with the recipe. his students with a both/and rather the motion—the swing, the blues- Trouble is, it lost something in the than either/or mentality—both cry, the rhythmic and melodic translation from 30 pies to two, and classical and jazz, both sight-reading intelligence—that counts when 125 people called the paper to and improvisation, both performing you’re talking jazz. protest. Longtime food columnist

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 19 Reading the South continued

Being Dead Is No Excuse: Helen Moore had been on vacation The Official Southern when the furor broke, and she was Ladies Guide to Hosting the told to fix it. She tracked down Dolores Stowe, and they Perfect Funeral. manipulated brown and white sugar, By Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte vanilla, eggs, and pecans until Hayes. New York: Miramax Books, Dolores declared, “This looks like 2005. 236 pages. $19.95. my old pie.” That recipe is reprinted, The funerary ritual, as it applies to and the story recounted, in Hungry the Mississippi Delta, is revealed in for Home: Stories of Food from Across a new book entitled Being Dead Is the Carolinas, by Detroit native Amy No Excuse: The Official Southern Rogers. Each of the recipes in the Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect book, more than 200 in all, is Funeral by Gayden Metcalfe and prefaced with a story connected to Charlotte Hayes. Although the title North or South Carolina. assumes a region-wide familiarity, “When it comes to food, nearly all the Delta community of Greenville, of us are mongrels,” Rogers writes. Mississippi, is really the star here. She leads off the book with her own The authors (both natives of the Around the World Salad dressed with describes how his father-in-law, area) use humor, gossip, and Middle Eastern sesame tahini sauce, Carroll Robinson, bakes and tradition to spin this yarn of Asian soy, and Italian basil leaves. poaches country ham in a water- manners and heritage, entangling Immigrants tell about bringing to the brown sugar-vinegar solution then local families and their lore into Carolinas Vietnamese cold shrimp tests for doneness by plunging his what amounts to a peek inside the noodle rolls, Greek avgolemono, and bare hands into the liquid. “Carroll otherwise insular community of an Italian Nonna’s chicken soup sent doesn’t give out recipes, he gives Greenville. While it is an South from Syracuse, New York. advice,” Huntley writes. Between entertaining read at times, the Marisa Rosenfeld from Brazil shares lavender-hued pages, Rogers offers societal mores and eccentricities of the collard green recipe from her valuable hints in marginal which the authors speak may be too homeland and describes her North starbursts: “If you stray too far from unfamiliar for some readers. Class- Carolina neighbors’ wonderment as the recipe for blueberry pie, you’ll conscious moments such as “[a Delta her plants approach six feet in height. get blueberry soup.” lady] can never be too thin or have Recipes in Hungry for Home have a Some may take issue with the too much silver” may alienate some; community cookbook simplicity to assertion that cooks can substitute this is definitely a book written with them. Writer Frye Gaillard’s applesauce for dried apples in a a certain audience in mind. That traditional Catawba Indian recipe for mountain stack cake, or the said, it is the funeral food that venison pot roast relies on a package contention that chicken spaghetti deserves—and really gets— of Lipton onion soup mix. Tammy was invented by Episcopalians. But, attention. With tried and true family Wilson defends her family’s practice of as Rogers knows so well, kitchen recipes comprising the bulk of the making potato salad with Miracle table debate is a defining text, readers of Being Dead Is No Whip since, as her mother insisted, characteristic of Southern eaters, Excuse will feel like they have hit “Real mayonnaise is too greasy.” transplanted or indigenous. pay dirt. Surprises such as fried In preparation for her garlicky Emerging from the pages of Hungry walnuts, vodka cake, and the oddly crab claws, Josephine Humphreys of for Home is a portrait of a diversified named Visiting Dignitary Spinach Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, and evolving Carolina food culture, offer a well-rounded peek into the provides a lesson on how to lure the from the killed lettuce of the cookbooks and cupboards of the blue crustaceans out of the water uplands to the crab bisque of the ladies of Greenville, Mississippi. with half a catfish tied to a string coast, all in a tone of front porch And if you are in need of a new twist weighted with a bolt. Rogers offers comfort, as warming as Brad on an old favorite, coconut cake and two recipes for the fall highland Legrone’s bread pudding baked with cheese straws find their way into the delicacy persimmon pudding, one day-old Krispy Kreme doughnuts. funeral procession as well. with eggs and one without, from a grandmother’s handwritten notes on FRED SAUCEMAN AMY EVANS woodstove cuisine. Dan Huntley

Page 20 Winter 2005 The Southern Register New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Project Well Under Way There’s been a considerable buzz around Mar y Beth Lasseter the Center lately about the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the progress it has made in production. The multiyear project has gotten off to a strong start, and its momentum is steadily increasing. The New Encyclopedia—an update and revision of the 1,634-page Encyclopedia of Southern Culture that was originally published in 1989 and described by U.S. News & World Report as the “first attempt ever to describe every aspect of a region’s life and thought, the impact of its history and politics, music and literature, manners and myths, even the iced tea that washes down catfish and cornbread”— is being published as a series of paperback volumes, representing a corresponding section of the original edition. In all, 24 volumes will be released, each one substantially Charles Wilson (left) and Jimmy Thomas updated and with a significant amount of new material on everything Southern—from Agriculture and include lengthy thematic entries such as published per year, and the first four Industry in the American South to “Food and Gender” and “Cultural volumes—Foodways in the American Violence in the American South. Representations of Food” and more South; Geography in the American South; Collectively, the paperbacks will concise topical articles such as “Grits,” History, Manners, and Myth in the represent the New Encyclopedia of “Bourbon,” and “Barbecue.” American South; and Religion in the Southern Culture. The Language in the American South American South—are scheduled to be The new format will allow the volume, although not entirely new, will published in the spring of 2006. Included inclusion of a sizeable amount of new include such a vast amount of new among various other volumes to follow illustrations, graphs, tables, and scholarship that it will be one of the first over the next five years will be Literature photographs, as well as, at minimum, a published works to deal extensively with in the American South, Law and Politics in 20 percent increase in the number of language in the South. Michael the American South, Music in the American articles per volume. Also, a new area of Montgomery, Distinguished Professor South, Race in the American South, and scholarship is being added. Foodways in Emeritus at the University of South Ethnicity in the American South. the American South will appear for the Carolina and coauthor of the Dictionary Over the last 15 years, the South has first time as a collection of articles, some of Smoky Mountain English, will serve as continued to be a paradoxically of which were included in the original consulting editor of the Language volume evolving yet static region. Its culture edition, most of which, however, will be with Ellen Johnson, assistant professor of continues to reflect both of those new. John T. Edge, director of the English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry aspects. The new and updated Southern Foodways Alliance at the College. Montgomery and Johnson have scholarship included in the New Center, is the consulting editor for the compiled a comprehensive list of articles Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is new volume and has developed an that includes such topics as “The ‘R’ in intended to illuminate that which extensive list of new topics to include, as Southern English,” “New Immigrant defines the South, intriguing and well as a first-rate group of contributors Languages,” “Gullah,” and “Perceptions enlightening those who live within as from across the South and from afar to of Southern English.” well as beyond its nebulous borders. author the new articles. Articles Four to six volumes of the New composing the Foodways volume will Encyclopedia of Southern Culture will be JIMMY THOMAS

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 21 Southern Leaders Championing Ideas of 35-Year-Old Lamar Society

The consensus among the some hundred Southern leaders who gathered at the University of Mississippi November 18-20, 2004, to consider the region’s future was that, although progress has been made, much work remains. Comprising the area’s preeminent journalists, politicians, and academics, the group was on campus for the Center-organized symposium The American South, Then and Now: From the L. Q. C. Lamar Society to the Endowment for the Future of the South to share ideas about how to address that progress and the work that must be done if the South is to overcome such problems as racism, ignorance, and poverty. Former Mississippi governor William Winter set the tone for the meeting in his keynote address, delivered to a (above) From left: Mike Cody, Tom standing-room-only crowd at Barnard Naylor, and Ed Yoder participated in an Observatory, the Center’s home. “Now opening panel on the L. Q. C. Lamar it is time for us to have an accounting Society. of where we are today,” Winter said. (right) Brandt Ayers, publisher of the “The kind of South we pass on to our Anniston (Alabama) Star, spoke at the children will be a measure of our luncheon. priorities.” (below) Tom Naylor, at the podium, Symposium participants looked recalled the founding of the Lamar specifically at the progress that has Society. been made since the 1969 formation of

the L. Q. C. Lamar Society, named for the Mississippi statesman who called for reconciliation between North and South in his 1874 eulogy of former abolitionist and fellow U.S. senator Charles Sumner. During its existence, the Lamar Society’s priorities were much the same as those Winter outlined in his speech: racial reconciliation, a “world-class” educational system, and economic and job growth. Winter lauded the society for “bringing a new tone to the political arena” in the early 1970s—primarily through meetings and the publication of its manifesto, You Can’t Eat

Page 22 Winter 2005 The Southern Register Magnolias—when most of the South’s governor’s mansions were home to progressive thinkers like Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Reubin Askew of Florida. And he credited the society with the creation of the Southern Growth Policies Board, a North Carolina-based think tank whose goal is economic development and whose work, Winter said, allowed the South to “come through an unprecedented period of change (in the 1970s and ’80s) better than it might have otherwise.” Founding Lamar Society members themselves recounted their work at a symposium panel. Thomas Naylor, professor emeritus of economics at Duke University, said that when the society was founded, “the South was considered by many to be America’s biggest problem.” But, he said, “the Lamar Society, with some degree of success, offered the new breed of Southern politicians a positive alternative to the racism and demagoguery of the past.” Founding president Mike Cody, a lawyer who represented Martin Luther King Jr. during the Memphis sanitation workers strike of 1968, said that the goal of the society was “to gather people from around the South, people of all races, (above) Governor William F. Winter delivered the symposium politics, educational backgrounds, and religions to share keynote address. common ideas and common experiences” in order to solve (below) Sociologist John Shelton Reed looked into the future, the South’s problems. Cody pointed out that the society and his advice was to the point: learn Spanish, as Hispanic dissolved as its members went on to serve on the staffs of the immigration is remaking the region. South’s new progressive governors and with organizations like the Southern Growth Policies Board. The American South symposium, which also featured panels on such topics as the media, politics, and religion, is the first project of the Endowment for the Future of the South—a new Center initiative, that, in many ways, is an attempt to replicate the work of the Lamar Society. Created through a $500,000 matching grant from Meridian’s Phil Hardin Foundation, the Endowment promotes examination of contemporary Southern social issues. “The work of the Lamar Society took place at a key period of social change in the South,” said Center director Charles Reagan Wilson. “We are at another key moment in time, especially after the drama of the presidential election. We want to provide at the University of Mississippi through collaborations with other universities and organizations an institutional anchor for the kinds of ideas the Lamar Society championed.”

JENNIFER SOUTHALL

The Phil Hardin Foundation has provided a grant to begin the work of the Endowment for the Future of the South. The Center is currently raising matching funds for the grant. Anyone who is interested in finding out more about Future of the South projects, and contributing to the Endowment, should contact Center Director Charles Reagan Wilson at 662-915-5993 or contact Angelina Altobellis at 662-915-1546 or [email protected].

The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 23 Portrait of Former Professor and Liberal Arts Dean at Home in Barnard Observatory

Barnard Observatory might not be the most obvious place to hang a portrait of Dean Arthur Beverly Lewis, but according to those who knew him, it is no doubt the best place. “My father had such affection for the Observatory,” says Lewis’s daughter, Mary Lewis Poole. “It was the heart and soul of his life at the University.” Long before the Observatory was home to the Center, it was home to Ole Miss’s physics and astronomy program; Lewis, who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UM (in 1923 and 1925), spent many hours in the building as a student, and many more there during the first few years of his 35-year professional career at Ole Miss. (Lewis was named associate professor of mathematics and physics in 1936, then served as professor of mathematics and physics, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, professor of physics and astronomy, and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts before retiring in 1971.) Lewis was in fact so strongly connected to Barnard Observatory, that he delivered an address at the building’s 1992 rededication. Poole and Jason Bouldin, the painting’s creator and a Lewis family friend, both say it is fitting not only that the portrait hangs in Barnard but also that it is located across from a portrait of F. A. P. Barnard, the Arthur Beverly Lewis. Portrait by Jason Bouldin University’s first chancellor and Nathan Latil/University of Mississippi (left) Members of the Lewis family at Barnard the man for whom the Observatory for the dedication of Jason Bouldin’s Observatory is named. “We’re portrait of Dean Lewis. benefitting from the University being strong now because of people like Dr. Lewis and Dr. Miss before transferring to Harvard, where he Barnard,” Bouldin says. “They earned his bachelor’s degree. “His entire made sure we had something to professional career was tied up with the inherit.” University, and even though he was advancing “In many ways Dr. Barnard was in age he maintained a clarity of mind and a a mentor for my father,” Poole lively spirit. The juxtaposition of his failing body says. “He felt like Dr. Barnard laid and strength of mind and spirit were worth the groundwork for him.” recording.” Winner of the Grand Prize in Bouldin’s painting shows Lewis in regalia, the Portrait Society of America’s seated between symbols of his “academic 2002 International Portrait training”: a book and stack of papers on his right Competition with public and a celestial globe on his left. Also, Bouldin commissions hanging in the U.S. has painted Lewis as if he were answering a Department of Agriculture, the question, with the professor’s left hand raised, a Judiciary Room of the U.S. House of Representatives, traditional symbol of oratory. Harvard’s University Hall, and the Oxford Federal Building Center director Charles Reagan Wilson agrees that Lewis’s and Court, Bouldin asked Lewis for his permission to be spirit was worth recording and is pleased to have the portrait painted shortly before the professor’s death, in 2000. The hang at the Observatory. “Dean Lewis was a student in this resulting portrait was itself a finalist in the 2001 American building and as dean was obviously a great friend of all of us Society of Portrait Artists International Portrait who are interested in the liberal arts. We’re glad that he’s Competition. been honored with this portrait and that it’s hanging here.” “Dr. Lewis had such a wonderful mind and a great love of the University,” says Bouldin, who studied for a year at Ole JENNIFER SOUTHALL

Page 24 Winter 2005 The Southern Register SOUTHERN FOODWAYS REGISTER The Newsletter of the Southern Foodways Alliance

SAVE THE DATES! SFA FIELD TRIP 2005 Join the Southern Foodways Alliance for our annual Field Trip. In keeping with this year’s theme of sugar and the sweet life, we explore New Orleans and environs. Dates to save are July 7-10. Details are forthcoming at www.southernfoodways.com. Mississippi Delta Meets the Founders Oral History Project Culinary Institute of America In October, the Southern Foodways Alliance–with funding Viking Range Corporation and the Culinary Institute of America support from Jim ’N Nick’s—launched its Founders Oral (CIA) present Tasting the South, a tour of Memphis and the History Project. At the helm is Amy Evans (named “one of Mississippi Delta, set for May 16-22, 2005. The tour, part of CIA’s the most fearsome talents in wine and food” by Food & Wine Worlds of Flavor Travel Program, offers chefs, home cooks, and magazine). This important undertaking will forever preserve food lovers the opportunity to immerse themselves in the food the history of the SFA through interviews with the culture of such far flung destinations as India and Vietnam. The organization’s 50 founding members. By recruiting active Delta tour is CIA’s first domestic offering. members in locations across the country to conduct the John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, interviews, SFA supporters have the opportunity to be more will lead the tour, which will feature such Southern foods as actively involved in its mission–and its history. If you would smoked or fried Mississippi pond-raised catfish, grits ground like to get involved, e-mail Amy at [email protected].

Fr ed Sauceman SFA Board Meets at Blackberry Farm Matt W illcoxen.

Hot Tamales

fresh each morning from Delta Corn, hot tamales, and barbecue. The trip begins in Memphis, Tennessee, known as the largest city in Mississippi and the de facto capitol of the Delta. Travelers will spend a morning in the Memphis pits, learning the secrets and surveying the conditions that conspired to make Memphis the pork barbecue capital of America. Mississippi chefs Ann Cashion (Cashion’s Eat Place, Washington D.C.), Dan Latham (L&M’s Kitchen and Salumeria, Oxford, Mississippi), John Currence (City Grocery, This January, the Southern Foodways Alliance Board gathered Oxford, Mississippi), and Wally Joe (KC’s, Cleveland, for its annual retreat. Host was John Fleer of Blackberry Farm in Mississippi) as well as such culinary and cultural authorities as the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. First Lolis Eric Elie (author of Smokestack Lightning) will host classes row, from left: Scott Barton, New York City; Mary Beth Lasseter, at the Viking Culinary Centers in Memphis and Greenwood. Oxford, Mississippi; Charla Draper, Hoover, Alabama; Elizabeth Sims, Asheville, North Carolina; Carol Puckett Daily, Jackson, The Memphis and the Mississippi Delta tour promises to be Mississippi; Fred Sauceman, Johnson City, Tennessee. Second one of the most entertaining and informative tours that row: Peggy Galis, Athens, Georgia; Matthew Rowley, Worlds of Flavor has offered. The tour has 18 spaces available. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; John T. Edge, Oxford, Mississippi; To register, contact Education Department, Travel Programs, John Fleer, Walland, Tennessee; Damon Lee Fowler, Savannah, Attention: Michael Coon, The Culinary Institute of America Georgia; Marcie Ferris, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Mike Riley, at Greystone, 2555 Main Street. St. Helena, CA 94574; fax Bristol, Virginia; Ann Abadie, Oxford, Mississippi. 707- 967-2410 or 707-257-3756; e-mail [email protected]. The Pat Conroy Cookbook: New Orleans Museum Celebrates Recipes of My Life By Pat Conroy with Suzanne Southern Food and Drink Williamson Pollack Doubleday, 2004, $26. While she was head of the University of New Orleans Foundation, attorney Elizabeth Williams helped set up two museums, the National D-Day Museum and I’ve been a devoted fan of Pat Conroy’s the Ogden Museum. When she left the foundation, she realized that “what I really fiction since being inspired by The wanted to do was set up a museum that dealt with my own longtime interests in Water Is Wide when I was studying food, food culture, and food history, and that New Orleans was the prefect place to elementary education at the University do it.” She soon joined forces with fellow enthusiasts Gina Warner and Matt of Texas many years ago. As I devoured Konigsmark, and the three of them formed a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation and each eagerly awaited subsequent book, set themselves up as a small board to get things rolling, planning to expand the I learned that Conroy’s fiction is often board later on. enriched by the emotional experiences Williams knew from her earlier experience that, in most people’s minds, a of his personal life. When his fictional museum is a building. She didn’t have one and didn’t want to spend the museum’s characters began to demonstrate a first few years, and the financial and political capital of its directors, on bricks and passion for food and cooking, I mortar. She was eager to get on with the main business of the museum—exploring suspected we might be kindred spirits. I the glories of Southern food and cooking—well aware that an opening exhibition already knew we are both Southerners, might give the museum the visibility it needed with the prospective donors who but Conroy appeared to be revealing a could make a permanent home possible. profound love of food and the pleasure The museum’s first exhibition, A Toast of New Orleans, devoted to the legendary of sharing it with others—something drinks and drinking habits of the city, opened June 12, 2004, at the New Orleans else we certainly have in common. My City Centre, a shopping mall next to the New Orleans Superdome. The exhibition suspicions were confirmed with the closed in August, but will reopen March 10 in the U.S. Mint in the French Quarter. arrival of Conroy’s cookbook, which he As curator Elizabeth Pearce notes, “Drinks can be taken for granted; they wash describes as his “autobiography in down a po’boy or keep us cool inside a sticky, sultry jazz club, and they are as food.” Once it arrived, I couldn’t put it important as the food, music, and architecture in making New Orleans unique.” down, vicariously spending an entire A second exhibition, Tout de Sweet—All about Sugar, is scheduled to open in June weekend with the author and all the 2005, timed to coincide with the SFA’s 2005 field trip to New Orleans. The sugar folks with whom he loves to cook and exhibition, which will also be housed in a shopping center, will be devoted to the eat. Conroy makes the point that a sugar culture of the South—history, families, politics, slavery, current issues, “recipe is just a story with a good meal recipes, innovative modern uses of sugar, traditional sugar sculpture, even the Sugar at the end,” and goes on to serve up Bowl. hilarious stories, poignant anecdotes, It is hoped that the exhibitions will give the museum visibility, but meanwhile and revealing vignettes, sauced and the board is going on with behind-the-scenes activity that will make the institution garnished with mouth-watering recipes. a valuable resource for research on Southern foodways. An agreement has been The chapter “Why Dying Down reached with UNO to house the museum’s culinary archive, which will include a South Is More Fun” leads to pickled comprehensive collection of menus from Southern restaurants. Southern shrimp, a unique macaroni, and University will catalog and describe the artifacts that the museum collects. Several country ham with bourbon glaze. other institutions have expressed interest in partnering with the museum for The touching story about Conroy research purposes. preparing the bridesmaids’ luncheon The search for a permanent home for the museum continues. Elizabeth Williams for his daughter Megan’s wedding envisions it as a cultural center where visitors can experience the food and drink of brings forth cucumber soup, the South in all its complexity—the many ethnicities that have combined to create swordfish salad, and an heirloom it; the farmers, fishermen, and hunters who have produced it; the inventors, chefs, pound cake recipe. There’s business people, and home cooks who pass it on. In addition to exhibitions and everything from low country oyster research opportunities, the museum will eventually encompass a test and roasts to Roman home cooking, all demonstration kitchen, lectures and demonstrations, perhaps even a restaurant. “A from the pen of a master storyteller. huge number of people are turning this into a labor of love,” says Elizabeth Read this book, cook from it, savor Williams. it. It’s a wonderful read, and it eats SFA members who would like to learn more about the Southern Food and every bit as good as it reads, as well. I Beverage Museum may find information at www.southernfood.org. am once again totally smitten. And Mr. Conroy, if you go before I do, I’ll THOMAS HEAD be proud to come to your funeral and bring pickled shrimp.

VIRGINIA WOOD Iconic Southern Restaurants: The Menu Project Researching food trends, menu design, Blue & White, Tunica, Mississippi restaurant fads, and the economics of Gambling has changed Tunica, Mississippi, in so many ways that it’s impossible to list all food will be easier because of the Menu of them. But one thing that has remained—so far, anyway—is the Blue & White. Project of the Southern Food and One day, perhaps, the rising cost of real estate will do what the rising cost of real Beverage Museum, begun in conjunction estate always does to places like the Blue & White, which has been a landmark with the University of New Orleans. almost since it opened in 1937. Until then, the Blue & White remains what it has The museum, working with state always been—solid, dependable, Southern cooking for breakfast, lunch, and dinner restaurant associations, is systematically in solid, dependable Southern cooking surroundings. The gas pumps are gone, but collecting menus from restaurants from the big blue and white sign remains, which means it’s almost impossible to miss the every Southern state. The menus will be restaurant, located on U.S. Hwy. 61 just far enough south of most of the casinos and collected every year and put into a development. database, to form a rich source of material One highlight at the Blue & White is real redeye gravy, made with ham drippings for future researchers. The museum is and leftover coffee and served with Virginia ham. This is an acquired taste, salty collecting as many menus as it can get, and dark, but for anyone who remembers what it’s supposed to taste like—or who both from small holes-in-the-wall and wants to try—it’s almost worth the drive down from Memphis. Needless to say, the white tablecloth places. grits and biscuits are up to the quality of the gravy. Members of the Southern Foodways Alliance can participate in building Blue & White Restaurant, 1355 U.S. Highway 61 N, Tunica, MS 38676; 662-363-1371 this important research tool by sending us a menu from all of your restaurant JEFF SIEGEL meals. Your help will ensure that no menu falls through the cracks. The museum wants the collection to be as complete as possible. And of course we SFA Contributors would welcome any older menus that THOMAS HEAD is the Washingtonian magazine’s executive wine and food editor you may be ready to part with. We and one of its restaurant reviewers. He writes regularly for the Washingtonian have a growing core of menus and and other publications on food, drink, and travel. hope to build it through the continued JEFF SIEGEL, a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern cooperation of restaurants and diners. University, has authored six books, and his writing has appeared in Sports Help us create this database by Illustrated, Gourmet, and Travel & Leisure. sending your menus to Southern Food ELIZABETH WILLIAMS is the president of the Southern Food and Beverage and Beverage Museum, 1435 Jackson Museum in New Orleans. Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70130. VIRGINIA WOOD is the food editor of the Austin Chronicle. ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

Southern Foodways Alliance

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company

address

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email MEMBERSHIP

Please make checks payable to the J $50 student J $75 individual J $100 families Southern Foodways Alliance $200 nonprofit institutions $500 corporations and mail them to the J J Center for the Study of Southern Culture University, MS 38677.

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 email at [email protected] Yoknapatawpha Arts Council Third Annual Oxford Film Festival September 5-11, 2005 www.oxfordfilmfest.com 662.236.6429 Film submission deadline is May 1, 2005.

WILEY AND THE CHECKMATES Welty Introducing Wiley and the Checkmates Pickmark Records 15001

Newsletter Anyone who’s lived in Oxford for a The Winter 2005 issue of the Eudora time probably knows Herbert Wiley, Welty Newsletter includes essays on who until recently ran a shoe repair Czech translations of Welty’s works, the business just off the Square. Back in scholarly significance of and use of the ’60s and early ’70s Wiley was the humor in The Shoe Bird, the roots of front man for a soul band, the King MacLain, and Welty’s use of Checkmates, who played on the Beethoven in “June Recital.” The “Roses local chitlin’ circuit as well as in Welty’s Garden” column discusses the fraternity parties. Wiley retired from Dainty Bess, and there is also the scene to raise a family, but several information on Mittie Elizabeth years ago a local band inspired him Creekmore Welty, as well as other News to dust off his matching gold lamé and Notes. Subscriptions are $10 hat and suit and return to the fray. domestic and $14 international for two The new Checkmates, an octet who perform largely in a classic deep soul style, issues per year. To subscribe, please visit have become the most popular band in Oxford. As the title of this CD suggests, it’s www.gsu.edu/~wwwewn/order.htm or their debut, and was jointly produced by the band and Fat Possum Records’ Bruce mail your request to Eudora Welty Watson. While the Checkmates’ live performances contain many soul and blues Newsletter, Department of English, gems, the CD is composed solely of originals that demonstrate their ability to work Georgia State University, P.O. Box within a variety of genres without being derivative. 3970, Atlanta, GA 30302-3970. The band’s penchant for deep soul is expressed on “Dog Tired,” which melds James Brown and Rufus Thomas, the jaunty “Gonna Find a Way,” which evokes Sam Cooke, and “Can’t Pull the Wool over My Eyes,” whose punchy horns and percolating bass rhythms bring to mind Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Cut You Loose.” “Another Man’s Home” is a player’s lament that sounds straight out of the Friends of the Center contemporary chitlin’ circuit, while “Messed Up World” is a timely political Your annual donation commentary that builds musically around early ’70s blaxploitation motifs. “Streak- through our Friends A-Leon,” featuring hipster jive from Wiley on top of guitarist J. D. Mark’s distorted programs helps the Center guitar riffs, finds the band in the same territory as some of Fat Possum’s recent develop and expand our collaborations of bluesmen and garage bands. excellent programming, and Wiley’s skills as a crooner are highlighted on the mid-tempo opener “Sweet Breeze,” which features female backup singers, the Muscle Shoals-style ballad your donation also provides “Sixteen Miles,” and Wiley’s own “Eyes of the World,” a lover’s declaration that funds for publishing the features elegantly arranged strings, courtesy of the Ole Miss Music Department. Southern Register. Introducing Wiley and the Checkmates is a strong outing from a young band that has Thank you for your yearly improved considerably since these sessions were recorded last year. No nostalgia trip, this CD suggests the exciting possibilities that lie in respectfully modernizing gift to the Friends of the deep soul. For more information, visit www.wileyandthecheckmates.com. Study of Southern Culture! SCOTT BARRETTA

Page 28 Winter 2005 The Southern Register Nassour Donates Arts and Entertainment Collection to Williams Library

Journalist, author, and playwright Ellis Nassour recently donated an extensive art and entertainment collection to Ole Miss “as a way to give back.” The 1964 University of Mississippi graduate said at a September ceremony at the J. D. Williams Library that he was motivated to donate the collection because “of a great lack of anything arts related” in Mississippi when he was growing up in Vicksburg. The Mamie and Ellis Nassour Arts and Entertainment Collection—which was given in memory of Nassour’s parents—contains videotapes, compact discs, vinyl LPs, audio cassettes, bound plays, books, and art pertaining to musical theater. “The Nassour collection gives the university a new breadth of research material, stretching from Hollywood to the New York stage and back to the South,” says Center director Jennifer Ford, interim head of Ole Miss Archives and Special Collections (left), Julia Charles Reagan Wilson. “The primary Rholes, dean of UM Libraries, and Ellis Nassour with items from Nassour’s recently sources on Patsy Cline, in particular, donated collection. help support the Center’s new emphasis on the study of Southern music.” Besides honoring his parents, Those interested in making A former New York Times and New Nassour’s collection also salutes several donations to help sustain and build the York Daily News journalist, Nassour is the people who influenced him at Ole Mamie and Ellis Nassour Arts and author of two books on Cline—Patsy Miss, including Chancellor and Mrs. Entertainment Collection are Cline (Leisure Books) and Honky Tonk John D. Williams, Tom S. Hines, Sam encouraged to contact the University Angel: The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline Talbert, and Mildred Spurrier Topp, of Mississippi Foundation at 662-915- (St. Martin’s). Ellis also coauthored Rock Ellis’s creative writing teacher, whose 5944. Opera: The Creation of Jesus Christ efforts brought “out the best of what Superstar (Hawthorn Books). talent I had,” he says. TOBIE BAKER

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The Southern Register Winter 2005 Page 29 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ANGELINA ALTOBELLIS joined the Center’s Violence and the Blues Tradition, winner of JENNIFER SOUTHALL is a communications staff in July 2003 as advancement the C. Hugh Holman Award for the best specialist for the Office of Media and associate. She earned her MA in book of literary scholarship or criticism in Public Relations at the University of comparative literature from the Southern literature published in 2002. Mississippi. She taught high school University of Texas at Austin. English and worked as a magazine editor JOAN WYLIE HALL teaches in the English before returning to the University, where TOBIE BAKER is a communications Department at the University of she received a BA in English. specialist for the Office of Media and Mississippi. She is the author of Shirley Public Relations at the University of Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction and JIMMY THOMAS is managing editor of the Mississippi. Formerly a newspaper articles on Tennessee Williams, William New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. reporter in Grenada, he received his BS Faulkner, Grace King, Frances Newman, He received BA degrees in English and in journalism from the University of and other authors. philosophy at the University of Mississippi in 1996. Mississippi and has worked for KATHRYN MCKEE is McMullan associate publications in Oxford and New York. SCOTT BARRETTA is the former editor of professor of Southern Studies and Living Blues. He is a freelance writer and associate professor of English at the DAVID WHARTON is assistant professor teaches sociology at Ole Miss and University of Mississippi. She has and director of documentary projects at Millsaps College. published essays and lectured about the Center, where he teaches courses in writers of the 19th- and 20th-century Southern Studies, fieldwork, and AMY EVANS is associate director of the South, including William Faulkner, photography. He is the author of The Southern Foodways Alliance’s Oral Ellen Glasgow, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, History Initiative and a special projects Sherwood Bonner. Memories, and History from McDade. consultant for Viking Range Corporation. She is also an exhibiting FRED SAUCEMAN is executive assistant to CHARLES REAGAN WILSON is director of artist, freelance photographer, and the president for university relations at the Center and professor of history and cofounder of PieceWorks, a nonprofit East Tennessee State University in Southern Studies. Among his arts and outreach organization. Johnson City. He writes a weekly column publications are Baptized in Blood: the on food for the Kingsport Times-News and Religion of the Lost Cause and Judgment and ADAM GUSSOW, assistant professor of has published several magazine articles Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from English and Southern Studies at the describing his region’s foodways. His essays Faulkner to Elvis. University of Mississippi, is the author of about mountain food culture are heard Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir monthly on Inside Appalachia, produced by and Seems Like Murder Here: Southern West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

(above) Robin Yekaitis, Little Princess, Halloween Parade, New Albany. (left) Susie Penman, Mr. Aron with a Picture of His Grandchildren, Bruce.

Page 30 Winter 2005 The Southern Register For a complete list of posters, cds, videos, and other items, see the Southern Culture Southern Culture Catalog Catalog on our Web Site The University of Mississippi International Orders Barnard Observatory • University, MS 38677 Other video formats Phone 800-390-3527 • Fax 662-915-5814 may be available. POSTER Please call for information. The Sixth Oxford Conference for the Book Sold To: Poster (1999) Poster features Name Eudora Welty portrait by Address Mildred Nungester Wolfe City State Zip from the National Portrait Gallery, Country Smithsonian Institution, Daytime Phone Washington, D.C. J Payment enclosed (check, money order, international money order in U.S. currency or international check drawn on a US bank; made payable to The Southern Culture Catalog) J Charge my: J Visa J MasterCard Account # Full color, 17.5 x 23.5” M9901 ...... $10.00 Exp. Date Signature Friends...... $9.00 How To Order Delivery By mail: Southern Culture Catalog Orders for delivery in the continental United 29th Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Barnard Observatory • The University of States are shipped by US Postal Service unless Conference Poster (2002) Mississippi • University, MS 38677 other means of delivery are requested. Orders for delivery outside the continental United “Faulkner and His Contemporaries” By e-mail: Credit Card orders only: States are shipped by Parcel Post. Poster is illustrated with Sidney J. Waintrob’s [email protected] image of Eudora Shipping and Handling Costs By telephone: Credit Card orders only: Welty and United States: $3.50 for first video or other item, 800-390-3527 (Monday-Friday, 8:15 William Faulkner $1.00 each additional item sent to the same a.m.-4:45 p.m. CST) in the US. on the occasion address. Foreign: $5.00 for each item. Outside the US call 662-915-5993 of Faulkner’s Posters. United States: $3.50 for any number of receiving the By fax: Credit Card orders only: posters sent to the same address. Foreign: National Institute 662-915-5814 (Daily, 24 hours a day) $10.00 for any number of posters sent to the of Arts and same address. Letters Gold Medal for Fiction All sales are final. No refunds will be made. If an order in May 1962. Return Policy contains faulty or damaged goods, replacements will be made when such items Black & white are returned with problem(s) noted. photograph, mauve background M1107 ...... $10.00 Item # Title/Description Qty. Price Total Friends...... $9.00 CD “The Memory Is a Living Thing” Songs based on the writings of Eudora Welty Lester Senter, mezzo-soprano 1996 ROS Production. SR2001 ...... $16.00 Friends...... $14.40 Songs of Faith: African American Shape Note Order Total Singing from the Deep South, Volume One This form may be Mississippi residents add 7% sales tax Selections from shape note singing conventions photocopied. throughout Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. Shipping and Handling SR2002 ...... $16.00 Faxed orders Friends...... $14.40 accepted. TOTAL

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