WINTER 2021 DIRECTOR’S COLUMN

This issue’s cover image—the first of 2021—is, the “Flood Gates” heading will appropriately enough, of the River. Restless, be a contribution to regional self- murky, and somewhat foreboding, it might just as easily awareness and to the creation of characterize 2020, a year winding to an unsteady conclu- knowledge that empowers south- sion as I write, leaving us drenched in uncertainty. The erners to envision and then bring pandemic is ongoing; the summer’s demands for racial to pass the world in which they want to live. justice and reform are unresolved; the opening days Climate change is not a challenge strictly in the South, but of the new year rocked our democracy on its heels, as studying it here also helps to trace the complexities of work we moved in a single day from finally establishing the at a regional studies center like this one. The coin of the composition of the Senate to seeing that very chamber realm in Southern Studies was once exceptionalism, the idea under assault. I am not the first person to borrow the title that “the South” was unto itself an unparalleled world that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 book, Where Do We Go mystified outsiders. In today’s Southern Studies, the oppo- from Here: Chaos or Community?, to describe the moment. site is true. As much as any other subject, declining environ- As my colleague Andrea Morales’s provocative mental health insists on binding places together rather than Mississippi River photo suggests, we might turn to the holding them apart. If the pandemic has served no other rhythms of the natural world persisting around us. Following good, it has, once again, reminded people around the globe thoughtful and ongoing engagements with topics connected of their interconnection. Of course places have local particu- to “Movement and Migration” and the lives of LGBTQ larities—histories and climates and habits—but more powerful southerners through the Invisible Histories project, we turn than particularity is the understanding of one place as our collective attention in 2021 to the next Future of the multiplying into spaces of interdependence. Melting glaciers South initiative: “Flood Gates.” Among a series of interre- matter to Mississippi; an unruly Mississippi River matters lated classes and interlocking programming, we will focus to people living close to the Gulf of Mexico in different but on “environments” broadly conceived, with a particular equally important ways as it does those upstream. emphasis on climate change. Extreme weather, including Political mapping likewise reveals that treating the South record hurricane seasons, routine coastline destruction, and as an isolated, impenetrable phenomenon offers an incom- regular inland flooding, makes an image of moving water an plete picture. Results from the 2020 presidential election, apt introduction to our effort. Much is unresolved around for example, disrupt the staid notion that “red states” and the subject of climate change as well, but not engaging a “the South” are synonymous, reinforcing a more complex, topic of such significance threatens more dire consequences nuanced view, not just of the South but of the American than confronting what science makes it difficult to deny. electorate at large. Asked in a November 10 interview Water takes us also to questions linked to environmental about the “New South,” a term with a complicated history, racism and negotiations involving people, power, and Georgia politician Stacey Abrams pivoted to what she access. Speakers featured in our SouthTalks series, at the prefers to call the “Now South.” When we solve challenges Oxford Conference for the Book, and at Southern Foodways around education, health care, housing, and employment Alliance events will introduce pertinent topics enriching in the South, Abrams said, we solve them for the country. classroom study, culminating in a series of documentary Malcolm X had something related but somewhat different projects unfolding over the next several years. Although still in mind when, in 1964, he reminded audiences that the in its initial stages, the work we develop collectively under South was everywhere below the Canadian border. His intention was not to give the region a pass for its behavior

THE on questions of racial equity, but rather to challenge the SOUTHERN REGISTER country to measure its guiding principles against a sustained A Publication of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture • The University of Mississippi history of black disfranchisement. In both formulations, the

NEWSLETTER ULISHED UARTERL OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI, U.S.A WINTER 201 Published by South isn’t an outlier to the nation. It is the nation, and in The Center for the Study of Southern Culture Abrams’s vision the South isn’t just America’s basement for The University of Mississippi storing what it otherwise doesn’t know what to do with, but Telephone: 662-915-5993 • Fax: 662-915-5814 the ground-level living room where it works out the most E-mail: [email protected] • southernstudies.olemiss.edu difficult problems it faces, including climate change. Taking Winter 2021 the temperature in Mississippi, where everyone expects far On the cover: River, by Andrea Morales more than the weather to be hot, does not yield only local REGISTER STAFF information. In studying the South around us, we likewise study a country, a hemisphere, and a world we share. Editor: James G. Thomas, Jr. Editorial assistant: Margaret Gaffney Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee Katie McKee

Page 2 Winter 2021 The Southern Register Living News Let It Roll with Robert Wilkins

Issue #269 ® Issue 269 marks the end of our canceled, artists couldn’t Vol. 51, #5 © fiftieth-anniversary celebration of play club dates, labels are Living Blues. It has been quite a ride still struggling to release producing two of the largest, most records with no tour complex issues in LB’s history during support, and sadly, blues THE NEXT a global pandemic. I hope everyone artists have died of Covid- GENERATION can appreciate the hard work put in 19. We lost one of our last by dozens of our magazine’s writers, direct links to the prewar OF THE BLUES photographers, and staff. blues era when Rev. John Dom Flemons I want to thank all of you who Wilkins, son of Memphis Jontavious Willis reached out with kind words about bluesman Robert Wilkins, our Blues issue died from complications Layla McCalla (LB #268). It was a monster to pull of the virus. Wilkins was Cedric Watson together, but in the end, I am very a gem of a man and had proud of the issue, which I hope been battling the illness And many more! shines a light on the never-ending for several months. fount of blues talent that comes from It looked like he had $6.95 US $6.95 CAN www.livingblues.com the Mississippi Delta. turned the corner and Breaking Out with Songhoy Blues Before I began to work on our was going to be okay, fiftieth-anniversary celebration, I but then he had a knew how I wanted to close out the rapid decline and passed away on year. (Little did I know what kind of October 6, just four days shy of his about the pandemic popped year it would be!) I wanted to look seventy-seventh birthday. up a couple of months ago, along forward to the future of the blues We also lost Sterling Magee, with a number of scathing songs with a Next Generation issue. One a.k.a. Satan, on September 6 to addressing the recent presiden- of the things that gives me the most Covid-19. Bluesman Dave Riley tial election, as well as a recent joy as the editor of LB is discov- was also stricken with Covid-19 and selection of very powerful record- ering young artists and helping spent two weeks on a ventilator, ings addressing the George Floyd spotlight them at an early stage of only to discover when he regained murder and the Black Lives Matter their career. I love being able to use consciousness that he had suffered a movement. At its core, the blues the influence and exposure ofLB stroke while in his induced coma. has always been protest music. And to give young artists national and As blues artists have always 2020 certainly provided us with a international attention. That has done, they’re raising their voices rich source of material. always been a core element of LB to speak to the many challenges and was the reason we started the we continue to face. The first songs Brett J. Bonner Breaking Out column. Perhaps the most exciting thing about pulling this issue together was the fact that there are so many brilliant new players. Not since the 1990s have I seen such a wealth of young talent rising in the blues scene. (See Jim DeKoster’s “The Blues Will Never Die” for a list of fifty artists under the age of fifty.) Of the eleven musicians we cover, not one of them is over the age of forty, and the vast majority are in their twenties. This is exciting news for the future of the blues. 2020 was quite a year. It rocked all of us to our cores. And the blues world was, of course, rocked, too. Nearly all blues festivals were

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 3 Winter 2021 SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link. This spring’s SouthTalks continue last semester’s focus on community activism. Guests explore how south- erners are engaging both natural and built environ- FEBRUARY 10 ments, transforming athletic playing fields and class- rooms, and moving across “borders” both literal and Wednesday, noon symbolic to shape the future of the South. “Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020” JANUARY 27 Edward L. Ayers Wednesday, noon In his talk “Southern Journey,” Nonviolence before King Edward L. Ayers narrates the evolution of southern history Ed Ayers Anthony Siracusa from the founding of the nation In early 1960 Black students to the present day by focusing on the settling, unsettling, across the nation launched and resettling of the South. Using migration as the domi- nonviolent direct-action nant theme of southern history and including Indigenous, campaigns in more than Anthony Siracusa white, Black, and immigrant people in the story, Ayers seventy cities across the cuts across the usual geographic, thematic, and chrono- nation, challenging Jim Crow segregation and violence. logical boundaries that subdivide southern history. These students took courageous action knowing they Ayers explains the major contours and events of would face arrest, expulsion, or even lose their lives. So the southern past from a fresh perspective, weaving why did they do it? Anthony Siracusa argues that the geography with history in innovative ways. He uses political philosophy of religious nonviolence was a key unique color maps created with sophisticated tools to motivation for many. Siracusa excavates the history of interpret massive data sets from a humanistic perspective, this idea in his forthcoming book, Nonviolence before King: providing a view of movement within the South with a The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle, and clarity, detail, and continuity we have not seen before. explains how what he calls a “politics of being” came to The South has never stood still; it is—and always has occupy a central place in the Black freedom struggle. been—changing in deep, radical, sometimes contradictory A historian of modern America and a civic ways, often in divergent directions. Ayers will be in engagement professional in higher education, Anthony conversation with Ted Ownby, of history and Siracusa works at the intersection of the community Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. and the academy. He has written extensively about Edward L. Ayers has been named National Professor nonviolence and the Black freedom movement, and of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal his first book, Nonviolence before King: The Politics of Being from President Obama at the White House, won the and the Black Freedom Struggle, will be released by UNC Bancroft, Beveridge, and Lincoln Prizes in American Press in June 2021. He teaches a variety of courses history, was a finalist for the National Book Award on African American history, religion, and politics in and the Pulitzer Prize, served as president of the addition to community-based learning courses. He also Organization of American Historians, and worked as develops and administers projects and programs in the founding chair of the board of the American Civil partnership with communities beyond the campus to War Museum. He is executive director of New American, enhance student learning and strengthen community dedicated to sharing innovative work in words, maps, impacts. Siracusa is a native of Memphis, , and audio, and video with broad audiences and the nation’s lives in Oxford, Mississippi. schools. He is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of

Page 4 Winter 2021 The Southern Register Richmond, as well as a former poems document in real time the myriad of challenges dean of arts and sciences at the presented by the multiple pandemics of Covid-19 and University of . racial injustice. They also offer edifying pockets of solace Ted Ownby is William F. as the poet shares his family’s survival tips, strategies, and Winter Professor of History and discoveries in the midst of so much loss, while properly Southern Studies, coeditor of The laying blame at the feet of the administration that unnec- Mississippi Encyclopedia, and essarily politicized, misled, and further complicated this author of Hurtin’ Words: Debating country’s response to the virus. University of Mississippi Family Problems in the Twentieth- associate professor of English and African American Century South and other works. Ted Ownby studies Derrick Harriell will facilitate the Q&A portion of this event. Frank X Walker is the first African American writer FEBRUARY 11 to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. He has published Thursday, 3:00 p.m. eleven collections of poetry, including Masked Man, Black: Pandemic and Protest Poems and Turn Me Loose: The “Protests in Pro Football, Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 1965–2020” NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus Chuck Ross American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. Voted one of the most creative in the South, Chuck Ross’s “Protests in Pro Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and cofounded the Football, 1965–2020” exam- Affrilachian Poets. He is the founding editor of pluck! ines both the events leading up The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture and serves as to the 1965 American Football Chuck Ross professor of English and African American and Africana League All-Star game protest studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. and the events that led to Colin Kapernick’s 2016 NFL Derrick Harriell is the Otillie Schillig Associate protest. Ross will also discuss the legacy of Kapernick’s Professor of English and African American Studies at actions in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the the University of Mississippi. different responses by professional sports leagues and His poem collections teams in America. are Cotton (2010), Ropes (2013, Chuck Ross is a native of Columbus, , and currently winner of the 2014 Mississippi is professor of history and African American studies at the Institute of Arts and Letters University of Mississippi. He holds a BA in history from award in poetry), and Stripper in Stillman College. He has an MA in Black studies, an MA Wonderland (2017). His poems, in history, and a PhD in history, each from The Ohio State stories, and essays have been University. He is the author of, Mavericks, Money, and Men: published widely. The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football, Co-sponsored by the which was published by Temple University Press in 2016, University of Mississippi’s MFA Derrick Harriell and Outside the Lines: African and the Integration English Program. of the National Football League, which was released by University Press in 1999. His teaching interests include twentieth-century US history, African American FEBRUARY 24 history, and sports history. He has appeared on ESPN’s Wednesday, noon Outside the Lines and on ESPN Radio. “The Emmett Till Generation: Youth Activism, FEBRUARY 17 Radical Protest, and Social Change in Jim Crow Wednesday, noon Mississippi” Masked Man, Black: Pandemic Daphne Chamberlain and Protest Poems Daphne Frank X Walker Daphne Chamberlain’s talk Chamberlain highlights the role of children Frank X Walker will read from as leaders and participants in the Mississippi civil rights and discuss his latest collection movement between 1946 and 1965. This presentation of poems, Masked Man, Black: also offers a new perspective on the origins of the civil Pandemic and Protest Poems. The Frank X Walker rights struggle and gives credence to how instrumental

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 5 MARCH 17 young people were to engaging in radical protest and grassroots activism in Mississippi. Wednesday at noon Chamberlain completed her undergraduate studies “Indigenous Cultures and at Tougaloo College in 2001 and received her MA and Histories of the Southeast” PhD in history from the University of Mississippi. Before Dwanna L. McKay returning to Tougaloo as a faculty member, Chamberlain was the founding director of the COFO Civil Rights The Original Peoples of the Education Center at Jackson State University. In 2013 Southeast differed culturally, Chamberlain returned to Tougaloo College, where she politically, and linguistically is an associate professor of history and the associate from other tribes across North Dwanna L. McKay provost and vice president for academic affairs. America. The Cherokee, Co-sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council. Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole Nations were forcibly removed from their traditional homelands and relocated to . In her talk, Dwanna L. MARCH 3 McKay examines some of the unique cultural practices and Wednesday, noon diverse histories of Indigenous Nations originally of the southeastern woodlands from precontact to current day. White Kids: Growing Up Dwanna L. McKay is a citizen of the Muscogee with Privilege in a Racially (Creek) Nation and an assistant professor in the race, Divided America ethnicity, and migration studies program at Margaret Hagerman College. McKay holds a PhD in sociology, a graduate certificate in Indigenous studies, an MS in sociology, American children are living an MBA in management science, and a BA in polit- in a world of ongoing public ical science. Raised culturally within the boundaries debates about race, daily Margaret A. of her tribal nation in Oklahoma, McKay centers her displays of racial violence, Hagerman teaching, research, service, and activism on an overall and for some, an increased awareness of inequality. commitment to social justice. Her research focuses on Based on two years of ethnographic research with social inequality and Indigenous identity, and has been affluent white kids and their families, Margaret A. published in numerous scholarly journals, including Hagerman’s talk examines how white kids learn about Sociological Compass, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, race, racism, inequality, and privilege in the contexts of American Indian Quarterly, American Indian Culture and their everyday lives. This talk explores how white racial Research Journal, and the European Sociological Review. She socialization is a process that stretches beyond white has also authored multiple book chapters, poems, essays, parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and opinion editorials. McKay currently serves on the and includes not only the choices parents make about national advisory committee for the Native American neighborhoods, schools, peer Student Advocacy Institute and previously held an groups, extracurricular activities, appointment as Secretary of Education for the Muscogee and media, but also the choices (Creek) Nation. made by the kids themselves. Margaret A. Hagerman is an associate professor of sociology at MARCH 24 Mississippi State University and Wednesday, noon is a faculty affiliate in the African American studies and gender Arts in Barnard Lecture studies programs there. She is “Traditional Crafts of the author of White Kids: Growing Coastal Louisiana” Up with Privilege in a Racially Maida Owens and Divided America (2019), and she is a nationally recognized Janie Luster expert on white racial socialization. Her research can be found in publications such as the Journal of Marriage In the talk “Traditional Crafts of and Family, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Ethnic and Coastal Louisiana,” Louisiana Maida Owens Racial Studies, among others. She has visited a number of state folklorist Maida Owens schools and communities across the country to share her talks about the crafts made by the many traditional work with parents, teachers, neighborhood associations, cultures found on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Some are school administrators, and young people. made from native plants, such as the Spanish moss Co-sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council. crafts, decoy carving, and boatbuilding, while others,

Page 6 Winter 2021 The Southern Register such as embroidery and cloth dolls, are crafted from At the center of this story is a traditional textiles. All of these cultures are endangered student organization known as as a result of increasing population movements due to Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. (Freedom land loss. Houma Indian Janie Luster will talk about her Organization for Racial and family traditions of using garfish scales and palmetto Cultural Enlightenment). basketry. She studied museum artifacts to revive the half- Cofounded by Ras Baraka, the hitch weave. group was at the forefront of Maida Owens has been with the Louisiana Division organizing the student mobiliza- of the Arts since 1986 and manages the state’s folklife tion at Howard during the spring program, where she has worked with hundreds of of 1989 and thereafter. We Are traditional artists and their communities and curates the Worth Fighting For explores how program’s Folklife in Louisiana website. The program’s Black student activists—young current project is the Bayou Culture Collaborative, men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward which helps to sustain the cultures of coastal Louisiana. shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. Janie Luster is a master This history adds to the literature on Black campus A basket made by palmetto basket weaver activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histo- Janie Luster and cultural preserva- ries of African American life in the 1980s. tionist of the United Joshua M. Myers is an associate professor of Africana Houma Nation. Hailing studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at from the community Howard University. He is the author of We Are Worth of Bayou DuLarge in Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Terrebone Parish, Luster Protest of 1989 (2019) and the editor of A Gathering comes from a long line of Together: Literary Journal. traditional healers and is a tribal advocate. This talk is co-sponsored by the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History and the Native American and MARCH 31, 2021 Indigenous Studies working group. Wednesday at noon I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, APRIL 14 Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life Wednesday, noon B. Brian Foster “Still Worth Fighting For” Joshua Myers In the last six years, B. Brian Foster has talked with hundreds Black students have struggled to of Black Mississippians B. Brian Foster reimagine the university. That about race, the blues, poli- struggle is one still worth fighting tics, memory, community, for. In the 1980s, when the right- and more. In this talk, he shares with us some of what ward momentum shook the world Joshua M. Myers they’ve shared with him, and he considers what it all to its core, Black student move- might mean both now and for the future. Some of that ments offered an alternative vision. Joshua M. Myers’s work is included in his new book, I Don’t Like the Blues: presentation looks to Howard students during that era as a Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life, in which he model for what we still might do with the university. considers the value of non-affirming sensibilities like Myers’s book, We Are Worth Fighting For, is the first pessimism, frustration, and exhaustion for how we think history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The about Black identity and lived experience. three-day occupation of the university’s administration B. Brian Foster is a writer and storyteller from building was a continuation of the student movements Mississippi. He earned his PhD in sociology from of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of currently works as assistant professor of sociology and the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. Foster Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the also serves as coeditor of the journal Sociology of Race and operations of the university. The protest, inspired in Ethnicity and is director of the Mississippi Hill Country part by the emergence of “conscious” hip-hop, helped Oral History Collective. to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent Black Nationalist ethos.

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 7 SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE

Filmmaker Jon- Ashtin Berry Sesrie Goff to Curate SFA Virtual Spring Symposium

The Southern Foodways Alliance is delighted to announce Jon-Sesrie Goff as the guest curator of the 2021 Spring Symposium. Goff is the 2016 recipient of the SFA Honors Ashtin SFA’s John Egerton Prize for a body of Berry with 2020 work that addresses Jon-Sesrie Goff the theme of social and environmental justice through the prism of food. He John Egerton Prize was awarded the prestigious Princess Grace award in film in 2015. In addition to his filmmaking and interdisciplinary art Drawing on a two-decade track record in the hospi- practice, Jon-Sesrie Goff is the museum specialist for film tality business, a sociology degree from the University at the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art and of , and a drive to make equity-fueled progress, Culture in , DC. Ashtin Berry of New Orleans, Louisiana, changes the way As a multidisciplinary artist whose work crosses different people think about hospitality. mediums and platforms, Goff is renowned for his penchant A sommelier, bartender, educator, and activist, Berry to seamlessly integrate social engagement, film, moving founded RadicalxChange, a content agency that places image, performance, photography, and installation. His marginalized people at the center of hospitality work. She practice explores the intersection of race, power, identity, also conceived and now stages Resistance Served, an annual gender, and the environment by unearthing the visceral food, beverage, and hospitality symposium that celebrates representational value and authenticity behind images and contextualizes contributions of the African diaspora propelled across varying diasporas. through seminars, discussions, and experiences that inspire Goff has traveled extensively and offered his lens to community and encourage nuanced conversations. award-winning documentaries, including Out in the Night The John Egerton Prize, endowed by SFA member (2015), Evolution of a Criminal (2015), and The New Black contributions, awards $5,000 each year. John Egerton (2014). He is currently in the final stages of production for Prize winners live or work in the American South, exhibit his first feature-length documentary,After Sherman. exceptional creativity, apply the rubric of food and drink In 2021 SFA will focus on environments. Exploring to their work, and show the potential to make a genuine natural and built and imagined environments, we’ll ask difference in one or more fields. To share the story of questions that connect climate change and deer hunting to the Egerton Prize winner, SFA also produces a film. lunch counter design and literary landscapes. Those ques- The 2020 film,Radical Vision, directed by UM Southern tions begin in the South and stretch across the world. Studies alumna Zaire Love, premiered digitally on The SFA Spring Symposium will be coming to a October 11 via a partnership with the Southern Festival of computer screen near you on Saturday, March 13, and Books in Nashville, Tennessee. (In addition to being one Sunday, March 14, 2021, via the Eventive platform. Look of the founders of the SFA, John Egerton was one of the for information about ticket sales beginning January 2021 founders of the Southern Festival of Books.) Visit south- on SFA social media. ernfoodways.org to watch Radical Vision.

Page 8 Winter 2021 The Southern Register SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCESOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE SFA Honors Hanan Shabazz of Asheville, North Carolina, with Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award JOE YORK An Asheville, North Carolina, native, Hanan Shabazz has long fostered local food movements and nurtured the political, social, and cultural power of Black foodways. In the 1970s, she owned and ran Hanan Shabazz Restaurant on Eagle Street in Asheville. Shabazz now works with a new generation of Asheville cooks at Southside Kitchen, a project of the not-for-profit Green Opportunities, which trains, supports, and connects marginalized communities to sustain- able employment pathways. Hanan Shabazz She also works to showcase the stories of Black Asheville for contem- porary audiences. Among the benefi- Each fall since 2000, the SFA, with by UM Southern Studies alum and ciaries of her work are her seven support from the Fertel Foundation, longtime collaborator Joe York. That grandsons—all of whom she taught to has honored a relatively unsung film,Hanan , is available at south- cook, and all of whom now work in hero or heroine, a foodways tradi- ernfoodways.org. Celebrating these commercial kitchens—and Ashleigh tion bearer of note, with the Ruth Keepers of the Flame, we also pay Shanti, the former chef at Benne on Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award. homage to the late Ruth Fertel, the Eagle in Asheville, who focuses on We pay homage to their life and work beloved and respected New Orleans the foodways of Black Appalachia. through a documentary film, directed restaurateur and entrepreneur.

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 9 CENTER NEWS Rowan Oak Gets New Digital Address, Website Southern Studies Alum Gives Faulkner’s Famous Home Popular Domain Name

Rowan Oak—the internationally recognized home of Nobel KIRSTEN FAULKNER Prize-winning author —has quietly moved to a far more popular and easily accessible piece of digital real estate with a new address: rowanoak.com. The reloca- tion of this celebrated University of Mississippi-owned property in Oxford, Mississippi, to a more visible corner of cyberspace occurred thanks to a gift of the rowanoak. com domain name by Peter Askew of Atlanta, Georgia, a Southern Studies alumnus and Faulkner fan. While the 176-year-old Greek Revival house has had a presence on the internet for many years, information about Rowan Oak was difficult to find because of the many pages on the UM Museum and Historic Houses website. Making web searches for information even more difficult was the fact that the iconic home had a “dot-edu” Peter Askew, a Southern Studies alumnus and William web address instead of a “dot-com” address. Faulkner fan, provided Rowan Oak, the internationally “It’s difficult to over emphasize how important Peter’s recognized Oxford, Mississippi, home of the Nobel Prize- gift of the rowanoak.com domain name is to the univer- winning author, a more visible corner of cyberspace thanks sity and those who admire the life and work of William to his gift of the rowanoak.com domain name to UM. Faulkner,” said William “Bill” Griffith, curator of Rowan Oak. “This new domain name puts us right at the very onions grown in Vidalia, Georgia, to customers nation- top of every internet search for information about wide. This year he and his farmer partner shipped thirty- Rowan Oak and enables us to greatly enhance and two tons of Vidalia onions to customers. Now, Askew is expand our website.” launching a new business centered on another recently In October 2020, UM unveiled a vibrant rowanoak.com acquired domain name, birthdayparties.com. “My wife, site containing much more information and features. “This Sara, and I have a nine-year-old daughter, Sloane, so investment in an improved Rowan Oak website would not we’ve been reintroduced to the whole birthday party be possible without having the dot-com domain name,” experience,” he said. “I found there wasn’t a place online Griffith said. “We’re off to a great start and will make Peter where I could find out what amenities the more than one proud to have given this domain to us.” hundred birthday-party event venues in Atlanta offer.” The gift reflects two of Askew’s primary passions: being During searches of domain names, Askew also kept an a professional builder of dot-com businesses and a 1995 eye out for sites associated with his alma mater. While graduate of the university’s Southern Studies program. the rowanoak.com domain was owned by someone, it After completing his degree, Askew eventually settled in was not active. He negotiated to acquire the name and his hometown of Atlanta. In the late 1990s, he became has since devoted some of his free time for more than interested in the role an attractive domain name played a decade to creating the site. “I tried to make it a good in the success of startup web enterprises. “The industry resource for visitors and those interested in Rowan Oak fascinated me, and I started paying attention to the and then it started taking on a life of its own,” he said. expiring domain names market,” Askew said. “Every day, “Anytime a national magazine or media outlet, such as anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 names expire, and Southern Living or the New York Times, published an article while 99.9 percent of them are junk, sometimes you find on Rowan Oak, Faulkner or literary tours of the South, one that is a diamond in the rough. And when I identify they would link to my website and the site would be hit one of those, I build a boutique business around it.” with an enormous amount of traffic. “It was fun, and I just Askew created one of his first successful domain name- held onto it until it ended up in the right hands. When based businesses around vidaliaonions.com, which is a university representatives asked whether we could work seasonal farm-to-door company shipping sweet Vidalia together, I said, ‘I would love to work with you to get

Page 10 Winter 2021 The Southern Register CENTER NEWS this domain back underneath the Brittany Brown oversite of the university.’ So now, the university is putting in a lot of time and resources into rebuilding the site into something I could never have built. The site looks beautiful and truly represents this unique property.” The Friends of the Museum funded the design and launch of Rowan Oak’s new website, which provides information about Faulkner, the house and grounds, and the Bailey Woods area surrounding Rowan Oak. While the new site is already “live,” new features will gradually be added. In the near future, rowanoak.com will feature a “store” where visitors and Faulkner enthusiasts will be able Covering the South to purchase merchandise and tickets to tour the house, Griffith said. “This Brittany Brown Receives Inaugural new site allows us to add a lot more details that we haven’t had online,” Emerging Reporter Fellowship Griffith said. “It brings us into a Most graduate students are busy people, but Brittany Brown may be busier modern age so individuals will be than most. As a second-year Southern Studies master’s student, Brown has able to purchase tickets, buy unique her schoolwork and a graduate assistantship with the University of Mississippi items, and obtain directions, while Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. Most recently, she has been also helping our visitors and Faulkner awarded a brand-new fellowship with a nonprofit news and media company. fans to be better informed and Brown is the first recipient ofMississippi Today’s Emerging Reporter perhaps even more eager to come by Fellowship, which aims to promote diversity in journalism by helping to Rowan Oak and interact with us.” create a pipeline of young investigative reporters of color who want to Considering that Rowan Oak annu- remain and work in Mississippi. During her eight-month fellowship, she ally attracts tens of thousands of visi- will be reporting on criminal justice issues. tors from around the world, the site Brown reached out to Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief Adam Ganucheau to is expected to help a variety of online see if he had any freelance work, and soon after he contacted her about this viewers, said Rob Jolly, managing opportunity. “I was in tears of joy,” said Brown, a Chicago-born, Mississippi- associate director of development for raised journalist who graduated from the University of Mississippi with a the University Museum and Historic BA in journalism. “My reporting focus is the criminal justice system with an Houses. “Faulkner fans live across eye for racial justice and equity. That means reporting on police, prisons, the America and all over the globe,” Jolly overall criminal-legal system in the state of Mississippi, and interrogating how said. “This site provides a platform we arrived at our current conditions. From looking at the impact of Covid-19 for us to connect with a diverse group on incarcerated Mississippians to covering general and breaking news, my of individuals who share a love and reporting varies but always centers on the justice system in Mississippi.” affinity for Faulkner’s literature. As a student in Patrick Alexander’s mass incarceration literature class, she “It also gives Faulkner fans the has added extra framework to her reporting abilities. “The justice system opportunity to provide financial remains one of the most important but chronically undercovered issues in support to preserve the treasure the state,” said Ganucheau, when announcing the fellowship. “Brittany’s that is Rowan Oak. We are excited interests and academic expertise align perfectly with our mission of about the possibilities and look holding leaders accountable—and no leaders need accountability more than forward to engaging with generous the ones who oversee our justice system, which has often and needlessly donors worldwide.” harmed too many Mississippians.”

Jonathan Scott Rebecca Lauck Cleary

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 11 FUTURE OF THE SOUTH INITIATIVE Southern Environmentalism A Southern Studies Reading List

This fall, Center programs focused on the themes of Catherine Coleman Flowers, Waste: One Woman’s “Movement and Migration,” as a way of thinking about Fight against America’s Dirty Secret urgent issues connected to borders and belonging, and In this powerful book Flowers tells the story of “Voting Rights and Community Activism,” which spoke systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that directly to the flashpoints of 2020 and some central ques- foster Third World conditions, not just in but tions around the responsibilities of citizens. across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal This spring, the focus turns to “Southern Environments,” , , the urban Midwest, and on Native which is part of the Future of the South Initiative. Below is American reservations in the West. Waste is the inspiring a list of reading materials to help everyone get a head start story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to on the topic. student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. Kate Orff and Richard Misrach, Petrochemical America Her book shows how sanitation is becoming too big a Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical more backyards, and not only those of poor minorities. Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Janisse Ray, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a Natural History of the Altahama River series of “speculative draw- Drifting into Darien begins with an account of Ray ings” developed through finally pursuing her childhood research and mapping of data dream of making a journey down the from the region. Altamaha River: paddling its entire length to where it empties into the Leah Penniman and Karen sea, turning to meditations on the Washington, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s many ways we accept a world that Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land contains both good and evil. With Some of the most cherished sustainable farming prac- praise, biting satire, and hope, Ray tices have roots in African wisdom. Yet, discrimination contemplates transformation and and violence against African American farmers has led to attempts with every page to settle their decline from 14 percent of all growers in 1920 to less peacefully into the now. than 2 percent today, with a corresponding loss of more than fourteen million acres of land. In Farming While Rick Van Noy, Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in Black, Penniman offers the first comprehensive manual a Climate-Changed South for African-heritage people to reclaim their rightful place Like Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking work Silent of dignified agency in the food system. Spring, Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring is a call to action to mitigate the current trends in our environmental degrada- Gilbert M. Gaul, The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, tion. By highlighting stories of people and places adapting Rising Seas, and the Cost of America’s Coast to the impacts of a warmer climate, Van Noy shows us In his book The Geography of Risk, Gilbert M. Gaul what communities in the South are doing to become argues that federal incentives have resulted in one of the more climate resilient and to survive a slow deluge of worst planning failures in American history, and the costs environmental challenges. to taxpayers are reaching unsustainable levels. We have become responsible for a shocking array of coastal ameni- Silas House, Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting ties: new roads, bridges, buildings, streetlights, tennis Mountaintop Removal courts, marinas, gazebos, and even spoiled food after Something’s Rising gives a stirring voice to the lives, hurricanes. The Geography of Risk will forever change the culture, and determination of the people fighting the way you think about the coasts, from the clash between destructive practice of mountaintop removal in the coal- economic interests and nature to the heated politics of fields of central Appalachia. regulators and developers.

Page 12 Winter 2021 The Southern Register CENTER EVENTS The Twenty-Seventh Oxford Conference for the Book March 8–12, 2021

Let’s face it, for innumerable of Writing and Rhetoric at reasons, 2020 was a bad year. the University of Mississippi. And like everyone, we were The panel of judges looks for disappointed to not have been works that enact, in the words able to host the Twenty-Seventh of the late author, “hope for Oxford Conference for the belonging, for a belief in Book in town or on campus. We people’s better nature, for had a great lineup ready to go— steadfastness against all that only to have to cancel just two is hollow or crass or rootless weeks before the event. or destructive.” Of course, 2021 won’t be In addition to the prere- “business as usual” either, and corded sessions, Square Books for the health and safety of will host live readings in the all involved, we’ve made the evenings, Thacker Mountain decision to host the Twenty-Seventh Eternal Glory That Is Ham Hocks” Radio will air a special Oxford Oxford Conference for the Book from his latest story collection, If I Conference for the Book episode online. Even in March large in-person Had Two Wings, published only days that Thursday night, and the confer- gatherings will still be impossible, so before his passing in August 2020. ence will cosponsor a keynote we are recording panels and conver- Past and present Grisham writers in lecture by Dorothy Allison on April sations with speakers and sharing residence will read the story. 16 during the Glitterary Festival. them online via the conference’s Poet and UM associate professor As always, the conference is free website. Sessions will go “live” on of English, Beth Ann Fennelly, and accessible to the public. Keep an the website beginning on Monday, will host the always highly antici- eye on the conference website, www. March 8, and we will highlight events pated poetry session, and Southern oxfordconferenceforthebook.com, throughout the week. Foodways Alliance Associate for the latest information. Sessions this year include awards Professor of Southern Studies ceremonies for both Willie Morris and associate professor of anthro- Awards for Southern Writing, pology, Catarina Passidomo, will which came to the University of be in conversation with Catherine Mississippi in 2020 to be adminis- Coleman Flowers about her book tered by the Department of Writing Waste: One Woman’s Fight against and Rhetoric. Awards are given in America’s Dirty Secret. Flowers is both fiction and poetry. founding director of the Center for The conference will carry over Rural Enterprise and Environmental a number of sessions previously Justice and the rural develop- scheduled for 2020, but some with ment manager for the Equal Justice modifications. Instead of “University Initiative. Her session is part of the Press of Mississippi: Fifty Years of Center’s spring Future of the South Academic Publishing,” we will host initiative, which focuses on the “University Press of Mississippi: The theme “Southern Environments.” Next Fifty Years.” As a memorial The conference will also host tribute to longtime book conference virtual awards ceremonies for the participant and John and Renée Willie Morris Awards for Southern Grisham Writer in Residence in Writing in both fiction and poetry. 1997–98, we will record a collective The Willie Morris Awards are reading of Randall Kenan’s “The administered by the Department

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 13 CENTER NEWS Virtual Documentary Showcase Celebrates Student Work

The fall Documentary Showcase is an annual exhibition by Southern Studies students producing docu- mentary work in a range of MFA and MA classes. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, documentarians came together in a virtual gathering on November 13 to discuss their recent projects. Each artist presented their work, and a Q&A session followed their presentations. A recording of the event is available on the Center’s YouTube channel. “This year marks our fourth Documentary Showcase, and even though the format was different this year, we were just as excited to share what our MA documentary track and MFA in Documentary Expression students had been doing,” said Andy Bristol, by Catherine Jessee Harper, director of the Southern Documentary Project. “In addi- webpage so everyone could see stories, and documentary films by tion to the live online showcase, the works in their entirety before eleven students.” we featured the student work on and after the showcase. There was Annemarie Anderson is the our Center Documentary Studies a great mix of photography, audio Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian, and she is pursuing her MFA in Documentary Expression. Her audio documentary Making Sorghum weaves the voices of sweet sorghum syrup makers from the Southern Sugars project. Second-year student Brittany Brown’s short filmWe Go to Church on Sunday explores the historical and contemporary significance of Black church music and how people are keeping music, worship, and praise alive in the time of a global pandemic. Christina Huff, also a second- year student, used her short film Surviving and Thriving: Covid-19 in the Mississippi Delta to show how the communities in the Mississippi Delta are handling the pandemic. In this From Velvet Ditch Goddam, by Andrea Morales

Page 14 Winter 2021 The Southern Register CENTER NEWS

Photo of singing duo A and A Double Portion, from A Worshipper’s Heart, by Janeth Jackson piece, Sumner, Mississippi, resident the virus has impacted the mental in Southern Studies in May and Willie Williams discusses community health of different members of the immediately began the MFA in response and how accessibility to Black community. The multigen- Documentary Expression program. information in rural Mississippi has erational subjects document the Her audio documentary, Bake Sales: been difficult because of wi-fi and complex effects of Covid-19. The Social Justice Works in the South, broadband issues. underlying theme of “connectivity” explores southern bake sales through Janeth Jackson, a first-year student, is critical to the execution of the the experiences of bakers, restaurant produced A Worshiper’s Heart, a film project and reveals a shared plight owners, employees, and customers of the duo singing group A and A among the group interviewed. as they navigate a global pandemic Double Portion, giving a closer look Christian Leus, a second-year that threatens their livelihood. at what is entailed in worshipping, Southern Studies master’s student, Originally from Louisville, revealing the lifestyle and energy produced an audio podcast of What Kentucky, Lilly Slaughter is that goes into ushering people into Remains, which contextualizes a pursuing an MA in Southern Studies the presence of God. true crime story within questions with a focus on food systems. In her Finding Rhythm without the of family, memory, and landscape documentary film,A Day with Sam, Reunion, first-year student Catherine in Altheimer, a small town in the she shares a story of gender identity Jessee’s short audio documentary, Arkansas Delta. and queerness. explores the year-round influence Andrea Morales is a documen- Braxton Thomas, a first-year MA of a growing festival on the local tary photographer and journalist student from Tupelo, produced community, as well as the impact who is working on her MFA in Georgia’s Way, a short film that of Covid-19 on making music in documentary expression. Her focuses on her grandmother Georgia Bristol, Tennessee. photographs in the series Velvet R. Wheeler. Through this work, she Raegan Kelly Johnson is a Ditch Goddam are a retelling of amplifies the voice of a Black woman second-year history master’s what the summer of 2020 looked who spent her life in the South navi- student whose project Black in the and felt like in Oxford while orga- gating Jim Crow. Pandemic: A Personal Reflection of nizing in a place where moderate Covid-19 utilizes audio, recordings, attitudes have prevailed and the Rebecca Lauck Cleary photographs, and interviews to path for radical change is narrow. highlight the various ways in which Kelly Spivey earned her MA

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 15 GettingAlumni Find Success Creative in Film Film has become a nearly essential Zaire Love part of pandemic life. Journalism in the news, activism in documenta- ries, online streaming, and even the Center’s SouthTalks have included many films and documentaries. Southern Studies alumni Jonathan Smith, Mary Blessey, Zaire Love, and Jamison Hollister have each created, completed, or exhibited original film and soundtrack works in 2020 that have reached new heights and won awards left and right.

Jonathan Smith earned his MFA in Documentary Expression in 2018. Since then, his short film Remembering Elwood Higginbottom, which was created as part of his thesis, has been shown to commu- nity groups and city governments in support of lynching memorialization, and has shown at several regional into public view. The Oxford- institutions such as the Equal Justice film festivals. This past September, Lafayette County community, along Initiative, the memorial can be a first Remembering Elwood Higginbottom with Higginbottom’s descendants, step in healing community bonds.” won the PBS WNET Reel 13 Online placed a memorial to him in Oxford, Short Film Competition, which is and Smith’s film details some of the Zaire Love is a freelance film- a weekly competition that gives impacts on the family. maker, music maker, and documen- viewers the opportunity to vote “I was thrilled to see my short tary photographer from Memphis, online for which short they would had been selected for the WNET Tennessee. She earned her MFA in like to air alongside the station’s Reel 13 showcase,” Smith said, “and Documentary Expression in 2020 featured films during the Reel 13 I was excited that the story would and says her ongoing work is “an Saturday-night cinema block. Smith be aired outside the local region. ode to being Black and southern in received an award of $250 for his I really wanted to get this story America, because the Black South winning film. of Higginbottom’s memorial out has always had meaningful ‘corn- Remembering Elwood Higginbottom there. It shows a different side of bread’ to share,” a reference to her is based on the lynching of the memorial process that I think recently founded the ideation and Elwood Higginbottom (also people just aren’t familiar with. The film agency, Creative Cornbread. spelled Higginbotham) in Oxford, process can impact the entire family Her mission is to honor and amplify Mississippi, in 1935. After the network, often for the better. Valerie the stories and voices of the Black lynching, Higginbottom’s wife Reaves notes in the film that they South. She is a graduate of Spelman and children fled the area, and the have connected with hundreds of College, Houston Baptist University, memory of his murder faded within relatives through the memorial’s and the University of Mississippi. the local community. A sequence of publicity, and it has brought some Love was recently awarded a events, beginning with the publica- scattered branches of the family $5,000 unrestricted nonfiction film- tion of the Equal Justice Initiative’s back in contact. Done properly, making grant to produce her short Lynching in America report, brought with community involvement and film,Slice. “Summer for Black boys his and many other lynchings back following the guidance set out by and men in Memphis has proven to

Page 16 Winter 2021 The Southern Register ALUMNI NEWS be a season of danger and death,” same Black folks to look at them- Jamison Hollister earned his said Love about the film, “but these selves and see something that makes Southern Studies MA in 2012. An Black men refuse to drown in a pool them proud.” accomplished musician before of low life expectancy. Slice explores arriving at the Center, Hollister how Rico Golden and his homeboys Mary Blessey earned her MFA in wrote his master’s thesis on from Memphis dealt with the pain of Documentary Expression in 2019 “Mississippi Breakdown: A New summers by submerging themselves and is currently an independent Look at Mississippi Old Time Fiddle in a swimming art form of athleticism, documentary filmmaker based in Music.” Since graduating, he has creativity, and joy called slicing.” her hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. played pedal steel, fiddle, mandolin, The newly created grant is Her thesis film,You Asked for the dobro, and guitar on the hit tele- awarded by the Memphis arts orga- Facts: Bobby Kennedy at the University vision shows American Idol, The nization The CLTV (Collective). of Mississippi, premiered at the Voice, the Grammys, Later . . . with “We felt like it’s a fresh idea and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Jools Holland, and Glee, and he has represented the spirit of Memphis,” in December 2019. You Asked for performed, recorded, and toured says The CLTV. “Black communities the Facts explores how, four years with artists such as Dwight Yoakam, have a fraught relationship to swim- after the historic enrollment of Dolly Parton, John Fogerty, Blake ming, and this short documentary is James Meredith at the University of Shelton, Lisa Marie Presley, Brandy a great way to shed light on that in Mississippi, students there devised Clark, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Jimbo a way that sparks joy and spotlights a plan to get around Mississippi’s Mathus, and others. the innovation of Black youth.” speaker ban and bring Robert F. In 2020 Hollister began work “I want to tell Black southern Kennedy to the university to reveal scoring Showtime’s upcoming stories minus the gentrification and the truth about phone calls with limited series The Good Lord Bird, exploitation of our native tongue, former governor Ross Barnett. starring Ethan Hawke. He had mannerisms, and experiences,” Love “Progress requires a real reckoning previously written the original score said. “This is my inspiration. It is to with real history,” Blessey said. for the ABC’s show American Koko, listen, capture, imagine, and mani- “We need to confront the history produced by Oscar Winner Viola fest Black southern life and for those of people like Ross Barnett, for Davis, and the award-winning film example—the huge damage He Could’ve Gone Pro. He has also caused by allowing people contributed music to the Del Shores like that to be leaders. filmA Very Sordid Wedding, as well as Mary Blessey We need to understand the score for the upcoming filmJesus the ways in which those and Jimmy Ray. same ideologies manifest The Good Lord Bird, a seven-part today and continue to drama, is told from the point of cause harm. The state of view of a fictional enslaved boy who Mississippi, and the entire becomes a member of abolitionist nation, still has a very, very John Brown’s motley family of long way to go.” soldiers during Bleeding and Blessey’s film has won eventually finds himself participating a number of awards, in the famous 1859 raid on the US including the San Diego Armory at Harpers Ferry. Hollister International Film said his time in the Southern Studies Festival’s Artistic Director’s program was influential on his work Award. The film has been on the score: “Whether taking a class an official selection at the or researching my thesis, I unearthed March on Washington Film all sorts of music that has opened up Festival, the Oxford Film my worldview as a composer. My Festival, the Kansas City time at the Center helped with The FilmFest International, Good Lord Bird specifically, as both the Indie the historical and musical compo- Film Festival, and, most nents were integral to my whole recently, the Montclair approach for the score.” Film Festival in Montclair, . Martha Grace Mize

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 17 A State

Katie Blount Reflectsof onChange the Process of Changing Mississippi’s State Flag In November’s election, the ballot a possible new flag, known as the “In first (adopted in 1894) and the last to in Mississippi included the state God We Trust Flag.” The previous include explicit Confederate iconog- flag referendum Mississippi Ballot state flag prominently featured the raphy. The adpotion of the new Measure 3 and a full-color image of Confederate battle flag and was the design passed on November 3 with 71 percent of the vote and surprisingly little controversey. The new flag design is the culmination of many years of Mississippians advocating for a state symbol not rooted in the Lost Cause narrative. The recent legis- lative process to do so was final- ized on June 30, 2020, when Gov. Tate Reeves signed House Bill 1796, which removed the official status of the previous 1894 state flag and led to the establishment of the Commission to Redesign the Mississippi State Flag. On June 27, 2020, the Mississippi House and Senate had approved the bill, which stipulated that “the new design for the Mississippi state flag . . . shall not include the design of the Confederate battle flag, but shall include the words ‘In God We

House Speaker Philip Gunn, left, Executive Director of Mississippi Department of Archives and History Katie Blount, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann prepare to deliver the state flag to the Mississippi Civil

MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY Rights Museum on July 1, 2020.

Page 18 Winter 2021 The Southern Register Trust,’” thus the name at the meetings because of the new state flag. it was a public process, The redesign commis- public meetings. So sion consisted of nine people got to watch every- members, including a thing on Facebook Live.” representative from the The flag is only one of Board of Trustees of the many things in Mississippi Mississippi Department that have changed. As the of Archives and History state of Mississippi has (MDAH), Katie Blount. changed tremendously, A Southern Studies MA so has the Mississippi graduate (1990), Blount Department of Archives serves as the current and History. “We were director of MDAH, and established in 1902 really The new Mississippi State flag she has thought deeply about this as an outgrowth of the Lost Cause moment in Mississippi history. movement to promote the glories “I think it has been building up Mississippi Museums collections, of the Confederacy,” Blount said, over time,” Blount said. “The flag MDAH played an integral role in “and that was the purpose toward had already come down on a lot of the commission’s work to put forth which our initial collections were campuses, and a lot of private busi- a new flag. “I think the fact that the built. Changing from that agency nesses had taken it down. People leadership turned to us to contribute to the agency that opened the Two increasingly saw it as a problem. to the process of choosing a new Mississippi Museums, which take I think a turning point was the flag, really highlights the message a very candid look at every aspect shooting in Charleston and the that this department is about the of our state’s history—from Indian courage of House Speaker Philip future as well as the past,” Blount removal to lynchings to the atrocities Gunn to advocate for changing the said. The central role MDAH of the civil rights era and the heroism flag. The killing of George Floyd, I played in helping to facilitate the of that era—took years. That flag, the think, was another one. The strong flag change concluded on September 1894 flag, is not going to go away. It’s national reaction to that murder 2, 2020, after a long public process. in our museums, and it’s part of our galvanized the people who wanted An open call was put forth to design story. It’s a really, really important to make a change, and in the end it a new flag according to the legis- part of our story, and what we believe came down to legislators coming to lative stipulations. “Ultimately,” here at the Department of Archives see this as a moral issue.” Blount said, “we had more than and History—and what I think people The first role MDAH had in three thousand submissions, and across the nation and world are the flag process was the removal we thought we’d just have the staff increasingly seeing—is that none of of the 1894 flag. “The flags were go through all of those and present the stories from our history go away. taken down and presented to the a set of finalists to the commission. When George Floyd was murdered, lieutenant governor, the speaker, But the commissioners weren’t my thoughts turned, as lots of and me,” Blount said, “and we interested in that. They wanted to people’s did, to Emmett Till’s murder carried them down the steps and see every flag. And if you watched and the impact it had in galvanizing brought them to the Two Mississippi any of the commission meetings, people who wanted change. We Museums. The speaker and lieu- they were fully engaged. They asked can’t understand the world around tenant governor presented them to us to arrange for a flag specialist, us today unless we understand our Reuben Anderson, who is the chair a vexillologist, to come and speak history. We can’t understand why of our board of trustees. It was a with them, which we did. And he, the 1894 flag was so offensive and tremendous honor to participate in Clay Moss, was instrumental. He upsetting to many people unless we that.” Blount said the decisions of came and talked to them about flag understand our history. We have to June 28, 2020, were not meant to design, and they really listened and confront it, and we have to build a erase history, but to ensure that the took that to heart. Then the deadline shared understanding of it. We have importance of the past not be used came, and we developed a process to, as much as we can, be working to the determent of the future. “The where they could gradually, over from the same understanding of Two Mississippi Museums created a period of weeks, narrow those what happened and why and how it an exhibit telling the story of the choices down. Initially, they did it affects us today. And that’s really our 1894 flag so that people could come by each of them ranking their top mission here at the Department of and see it.” twenty-five, and then those went Archives and History.” In addition to the respectful retire- into the second round, and eventu- ment of the 1894 flag into the Two ally, those choices were happening Martha Grace Mize

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 19 Setting the Record Straight Southern Studies Alum Puts His Degree to Work Researching New Orleans Street Names

As so many citizens across the Andrew Mullins a book about the history of Lost nation have looked around at their Cause memorialization and urban statues, buildings, and monuments, development across the South that they have realized that those that professor Nancy Bercaw assigned to honor the legacy of white supremacy my SST 401 class,” Mullins said. “It needed to come down. Southern was definitely an interdisciplinary Studies alum Andrew Mullins didn’t effort involving different types of settle for looking above ground ‘texts.’ To help make our point and for those commemorations of the provide better context, we expanded Confederacy, though. He began our research to include other types researching how that city’s streets of resources, such as promotional were named. pamphlets, folk histories, adver- Mullins is the archivist-librarian tisements for lot sales, drainage at the City Archives and Special documents, and speeches given to Collections at the New Orleans local Confederate history groups. Public Library, which is the offi- We also used lists of problematic cial repository for the municipal street names created by community records of the City of New Orleans. groups, such as Take ’em Down He earned his bachelor’s degree in Processing and Digital Initiatives NOLA, to supplement the list Southern Studies in 2009, winning for the Howard-Tilton Memorial provided by the city council.” the Coterie Award in Southern Library at Tulane University. “We In August, the report went to the Studies for Best Undergraduate found several discrepancies between Street Naming Commission, who Research Paper that year. He popular assumptions and the actual had a similar reaction to the city went on to earn a master’s degree street names, when we could find council. “They sort of thought it in American studies from the information at all. Brittanny Silva, a would be relatively straightforward,” University of and a colleague and partner on this project, Mullins said. “The Confederate master of library and information and I met with council staff members monuments all had very baroque sciences from LSU. and outlined each street: this one ceremonies accompanying their Staff members from the New is obviously this person, this street unveiling: fiery speeches about Orleans city council reached out could be this Confederate general dark days of Reconstruction and to the public library as they began or that Confederate general, those displays of schoolchildren making to examine the history of the city’s streets are under the jurisdiction a ‘living’ Confederate battle flag. urban geography after the nation- of the US Army, and we have no They thought the process would wide protests. They sent a list of record of any streets being officially be similar: identify the street, then street names and asked for brief named in city records.” The Streets locate the ordinance, and it will tell histories of each person, as well as Renaming Commission formed and you who the street is named after city ordinances that dictated the started meeting, and the city coun- and when it was named after them.” original names of the streets. cil’s office wanted a deeper dive into However, Mullins said that was “Their office and ours incorrectly the history of two neighborhoods the reality for maybe one street out assumed local media outlets had (Carrollton and Lakeview). of twenty. For example, Mullins accurately identified the people Mullins credits his Southern said that the Lakeview neighbor- memorialized in the street names,” Studies degree as being directly hood was planned as early as 1867, said Mullins, who previously was helpful with this particular research but wasn’t built until the 1920s. the library associate for Archives project. “We cited The Southern Past, There wasn’t any city ordinance

Page 20 Winter 2021 The Southern Register the majority of our reference work engages with on-the- ground research rather than big scholarly questions,” he said. “We’re helping residents—most of whom have very few research skills—find property information to resolve a dispute, locate ordinances and city directories for legal research, gather naturalization documents to apply for dual citizenship, or figure out if their ancestor is buried under the Bonnet Carre spillway. Each day introduces a new type of research question that stretches our skills.” “Having spent a while researching street name changes throughout New Orleans history, I can say that this process with the City Archives, the report, the Streets Commission, and panels of experts is far more transparent and open than any attempt to rename streets in the past,” Mullins said. “It’s fun to watch this report grow into a life of its own.” Since the report is a public document, Mullins thinks it influenced the amount of research. “We often joked about leaving no stone unturned to find a silver bullet in a haystack,” Mullins said. “The city council stressed that they wanted as much clarity and proof as possible, so they could be prepared for town hall meetings with neighborhood residents. I think they received a lot of pushback from a vocal minority of citizens when they removed the Lost Cause monuments, and they wanted to be prepared for the same type of questions. We found a lot of evidence, but less proof. So, we had to specifying that streets in a subdivision needed to be look beyond the city records and research the history approved by the city, so developers named them what- of certain neighborhoods and people, and it felt like a ever they wanted. “I noticed a pattern that many of Southern Studies project.” the streets were named after Louisiana Confederates For a complicated research project such as this, they and/or participants in the Battle of Mansfield, the only had a month, which, of course, was not enough only major Confederate victory in Louisiana,” Mullins time. “So many people that are memorialized in street said. “Brittanny then did a deep dive into the history names had connections with the Confederacy, the Lost of Lakeview’s development and discovered the main Cause, Jim Crow, or just white supremacy in general,” developer, Charles Loque, was a big member of local Mullins said. “We could still be identifying new streets Lost Cause organizations. In another example, the city for renaming or tracking down records. People in the council swore that Leonidas was named after Leonidas community are doing just that.” Polk, the so-called Fighting Bishop. Several books While researching the street names, Mullins also found published about the history of New Orleans street he loved using the nineteenth-century survey records and names backed up that assertion. But, we learned that plans. “They weren’t static records created for posterity street was probably laid out several years before Polk or used for a single task,” he said. “A surveyor made the was appointed Bishop of the Southwest of Louisiana map in 1853, then another surveyor drew an update on from looking at survey documents and maps of the it a few years later, and finally another city employee Carrollton neighborhood.” copied the plan into a city plan book a few years after The Street Commission also put together a panel of that. That one survey is a dynamic record being used experts to do this type of work, just as the City Council and updated and copied over a fifteen-year period while had. “We reached out to them early on to let them know a neighborhood is being built, updated, and rebuilt. It what we were doing,” Mullins said. “They were very certainly frustrated the quest for clear answers, but using appreciative that we researched the history of the streets, those survey records and comparing them with not-very- neighborhoods, and people who planned them. Our honest maps of the city was a fun challenge.” report freed them up to focus on more detailed biogra- After discovering those records, Mullins used them to phies of the people supposedly being memorialized, as research Leonidas Street in Carrollton. He learned the well as to begin coming up with new names for streets.” street was surveyed prior to Leonidas Polk becoming For Mullins, this project was somewhat of a depar- the Bishop of the Southwest, but it could have been ture from his day-to-day interactions with the public. named within the fifteen-year-period in which Polk came “Public archivists, or those of us who work with govern- to Louisiana, left the state, and died on the battlefield. ment records, definitely support academic research, but So it might be named after him—or it might not. “Some

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 21 historians and members of the community seem to think somebody named Leonidas lived in that area. Still, I like that it is,” Mullins said. “Other sources said it was named that idea. It might not be true at all, but I like it. Some after the Spartan general from the legend of Thermopylae. faceless dude named Leonidas could have a street named Even with all of the weird love the Confederacy had after him. The thought made me laugh.” for Sparta, we thought that was a stretch and found no evidence. There wasn’t a whole lot of evidence to say Rebecca Lauck Cleary Me and Matt and Grits and Southern Studies By Steve Cheseborough I still have the sourdough starter I We became friends, or as close to cultured about twenty years ago in it as can be during Covid. We had Mississippi, but it had been hanging some conversations at his door while out in the back of my fridge most of I was picking up flour, otherwise the time until the Covid lockdown communicating via email, text, or started in March. Like many other Instagram. Nearly always, we talked people, I got back into regular home about bread.

baking, sourdough bread in partic- Then, after we had known each CLARA STEMWEDEL ular, at that time. other more than six months, I Bread baker Matt McMillen, left, and I also started posting photos of my bought some superb grits online— blues musician Steve Cheseborough breads on Instagram and following Jimmy Red, an heirloom variety meet in Portland, Oregon. other sourdough bakers—including from Marsh Hen Mill (formerly Matt McMillen, who posts as Geechie Boy) in . gospel quartets; mine was 1920s and @quartet1977. After admiring his Since Matt is a grain connoisseur, I ’30s blues. So we had encountered gorgeous breads, I noticed that he told him about them. He asked if I some of the same local characters, lived in Portland, Oregon (as I do), would trade him a sample for some including Clarksdale deejay Early and he gave away pizza dough on home-milled local corn, and I said Wright and several members of the Sundays. I tried some of his dough sure. We talked about grits cooking musical Junior Kimbrough family of and soon was buying hand-milled methods. I asked if he had ever lived Holly Springs. flour from him for my own creations. in the South. He said, “I spent a year Someday after Covid is under Matt is no ordinary home baker: he and a half in Oxford, Mississippi, for control Matt and I will sit down to mills flour from locally grown grains, grad school.” beer and homemade sourdough bakes in a special oven that recently Omigod. What were you studying? pizza and talk for hours about replaced his regular stove, uses special Omigod. Yup, we both were in Southern Studies, Oxford, and pans and other gear—and comes out the grad program in Southern music, as well as baking. But in with beautiful loaves, some of which Studies. Matt started in 1995 and the meantime it’s just astounding he sells, delivering them himself. The left, without finishing the degree, and cool that we established our name of his home-based nano bakery just before I arrived in 1997. His Southern Studies connection in the is the Quartet Bread Company. main interest was African American most appropriate way—through grits.

Page 22 Winter 2021 The Southern Register FACULTY INTERVIEW Black Folks Be Livin’ A Front Porch Kickback with B. Brian Foster Interview by Zaire Love ZAIRE LOVE ZAIRE Brian Foster is a writer and sociologist who writes about Black folks livin’, talkin’, and makin’ in the South at the intersection of race and place. He is an assistant professor of sociology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, coeditor of the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the director of the Mississippi Hill Country Oral History Collective. In his first book, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life, he writes about his time with Black folks in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and artfully captures the stories they tell about the blues of life and blues music and how they really feel about it all. This front porch kickback with Brian Foster is one that I’m excited to have because Brian and I always talk about how the mission of our work is similar and almost identical in that Brian Foster we want to honor and amplify Black voices of I’d fit the story into a dissertation. When I finished the and in the South and make dissertation in 2017, I knew it wasn’t the book. I got some sure that they are on the stuff true, and some stuff wrong. Then I wrote the book, record. So, y’all get to be again and again, in 2018 and in 2019; there’s no doubt a fly on the wall, reading that I’ve cut more words from this manuscript than I’ve the realest written conver- let stay in. And all of that revision is why I’m excited. I sation that y’all probably don’t care at all how well the book sells. I don’t care at have read this entire year. all what it means for my professional aspirations. Don’t If the spirit moves you, pass need a single award. And I mean that. I just care that the around the collection plate. story I tell in the book is real and true—if flawed and still in process—and that it shows and tells of Black southern Zaire Love: Brian! Your first book is out in these life in all its ordinary significance. And that’s what makes streets. How does it feel? me scared. The story is now out in the world and, as a Brian Foster: Z-love! The book is out out, and there colleague said to me recently, folks will do with it what are lots of feels. I’m grateful and excited and scared and they will. Letting things go is scary. and and. It starts with gratitude because it must. It always does. I don’t know that I always knew—or believed—this ZL: I’m really proud of you. Not only for publishing moment would come. And I mean that. When I first got a dope book but also for making it feel like Black folks to Clarksdale in 2014, I didn’t know what story I’d leave because it’s about us and folks like us. Why was that a with. When I left at the end of 2015, I wasn’t sure how priority for you while writing this book?

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 23 FACULTY INTERVIEW I wanted to tell a story about the rural Black South. Ain’t no way to do that (right or well) without making it sound and feel like the rural Black South.

BF: Thank you for saying that. My at hello. What story were you trying as people, while dodging things metric for how satisfied I am with a to tell in “re-naming” these people? designed to make you dead. And thing that I’ve written is—and, I think BF: First of all, “They tell stories at imagine that every time you got will always be—what the folks I write hello,” is poetry. And true. Second, to something, folks took it and was about have to say about what I write. your question: it is a pretty common mad that you got it in the first place. Not do they like it, but do they feel practice for ethnographers to use From slavery to Jim Crow to housing it rings true. Does it sound and feel pseudonyms when writing about the segregation and beyond, that’s a part like them. You the Black South, like people in their work. Some won’t even of the story of Black life in America Clarksdale. So, I appreciate that. name the place(s) where the work is and of Black Americans in the South— To answer your question a little bit, set. But because “place” is so central not the whole story but part. What one of the most frustrating parts of to the story of I Don’t Like the Blues, I Kizzy and Auntie and the rest of graduate school for me was constantly knew I’d need to name Clarksdale. them folks were showing and telling being asked the paralyzing “So what?” And because I knew I’d need to name me—and what Black Americans question about my work. I’d say some- Clarksdale, I thought it best to not have been showing and telling for a thing like, “I want to do an ethnog- name the people with whom I spoke long time—is that they’ve taken the raphy in the rural Black South because (even though many of them told me nothing that this nation wanted them it’s been a hundred years since we’ve that they’d be okay if I did), many of to have and made something from had a good one,” and I’d hear some- whom were openly critical of local it. A strange, regular, and beautiful thing like, “So what?” I’d say, “We elected officials, public stakeholders, something. They were telling me how need it because the rural South is and sometimes each other. So, as you much they “loooved” some parts of different from other places, and we note, I “re-named” everyone. I took the something they’d built, and how need to document and chronicle those that decision, and process, seriously. they didn’t like what had happened to differences.” And, I’d hear, “So what?” Because it is. A part of the case that the the something since they built it. Like It was never a bad faith question, I book makes is that Black southerners Mrs. Irene says in the last line of the don’t think. It just didn’t fit. It didn’t use language to “do” lots of things— book, they were saying, why don’t fit with how I saw myself as a writer. to mark and constitute self identity, y’all just let our something be ours. And it damn sho’ ain’t fit with what I to define and reinforce notions like was hoping to do with what I wrote. “community,” and, of course, to ZL: Black ownership of Blackness I wanted to write about a people who communicate. How we say and spell and what it manifests is key. Now, have survived four hundred years of our names is a part of that. The rural Black musical invention and expres- plunder. I wanted to say they are still Black South that I know is full of Mrs. sion is used to bring millions to here, surviving, with memories and Irene’s, and Mr. Jimmy’s, and Pooh Clarksdale. But Black folks still got feelings, with frustrations and fears, Baby’s, and Mac’s, and Thea’s, and the blues? with with and laughter and anger, with Teryeia’s. A book about the rural BF: Song and verse. That’s one of all the things that make life. Black South had to, too. the takeaways from Pooh Baby’s story To answer your question all the in chapter 1. The tourists who flock way: I wanted to tell a story about ZL: You see how I came with the to Clarksdale and the Delta each year the rural Black South. Ain’t no way poetry. I feel you about the origins of come in and get their blues fix. They to do that (right or well) without naming. In the book, Kizzy says, “We shop and sing and tip musicians like making it sound and feel like the got our own thing,” and Auntie said, Pooh Baby well. Then, they leave. rural Black South. “We just did our own stuff.” They’re And Black folks, like Pooh Baby’s both talking about this separation or folks, are, again, left with the blues. ZL: Now, we’ve talked about the distinction from whiteness. What’s It’s clever word play perhaps. It’s a book casually, and you talked about the gem in what they’re saying? haunting reality for real. the names of the people in the book. BF: Imagine you had to make a Names for Black folks are important, life in a place that you didn’t know, ZL: That’s real. Listen, I like especially nicknames. They tell stories around people who didn’t see you Pastor Early in the book. He says,

Page 24 Winter 2021 The Southern Register “The blues say, ‘I’m going through.’ Gospel say, ‘I’m pressing on.’” What Brian Foster: Shaping the does pressing on look like for the blues and Black folks that don’t like Discourse the blues in Clarksdale? Brian Foster’s year ended quite BF: I love Pastor Early, and I love pleasantly. In quick succession, how he talks about the relationship happy news popped into his inbox— between blues and gospel—James first that he was selected as coeditor Baldwin says that blues and gospel of the journal Sociology of Race and constitute the two poles of Black Ethnicity, and second, that he was the life. In a recent conversation, Pastor University of Mississippi Humanities Early called them thunder and light- Teacher of the Year. This is in addi- ning, which I took to mean different tion to the publication of his new manifestations of the same sensibility. A book I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, simple reading of the blues is, as an Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life. expression of pain and despair. A The official journal of the simple reading of gospel is, as a cry American Sociological Association’s of hope and triumph. That is what Section for Racial and Ethnic pressing on looks like in Clarksdale: Minorities, the Sociology of Race Humanities Month in October people having good days and bad and Ethnicity publishes the highest and at the Mississippi Humanities days, making strides forward and quality, cutting-edge sociological Council’s annual awards ceremony sometimes tripping up along the way, research on race and ethnicity in the spring. All state universities again loving and not liking. It looks regardless of epistemological, meth- and community colleges honor a like people organizing, and voting, odological, or theoretical orienta- faculty member. and tutoring folks after school, and tion. Foster, along with James M. “The College of Liberal Arts asks looking to laugh on the weekends, “JT” Thomas, associate professor for nominations from department and bringing food for the fellow- of sociology and anthropology, will chairs who have humanities faculty, ship on Sunday. It looks like people help publish critical and engaged and then a committee of three speaking truth to power at town hall public sociological scholarship on former winners chooses the winner,” meetings, and sweet nothings to loved race and ethnicity. said Donald L. Dyer, associate dean ones in the night, signing petitions, “The editorship wasn’t something for faculty and academic affairs and and hoopin’ at the park. All of that— that was on my radar initially,” said distinguished professor of modern the mundane, the quiet, the active, Foster, assistant professor of Southern languages. “Every year, working with the intentional—is pressing on. Studies and sociology. “Once I the Mississippi Humanities Council, learned a little more about it, though, we are so happy to have the oppor- ZL: We could sit here and talk and I was instantly interested. Sociology tunity to pause and honor a member talk all day, but I know we got things of Race and Ethnicity has become the of our humanities faculty who is to do and the folks that’s reading this premier journal for scholars who doing great work in the classroom.” gotta get some stuff done, too. Could do work on race and ethnicity. I see Foster said when he saw the email you give us a benediction about the the editorship as an opportunity to from Dyer, the honor surprised him, book that’ll get us through until we immerse myself in the discipline and then immediately validated him. meet again? to help shape the discourse.” Foster also expressed appreciation ​BF: Just, listen. Soon after Foster learned he for Center director, Katie McKee,

COURTESY ZAIRE LOVE ZAIRE COURTESY had been selected for the coedi- and Jeff Jackson, chair and professor torship, he learned he was the of sociology, who nominated him. Mississippi Humanities Teacher of “I always appreciate the posi- the Year. The College of Liberal tive and excited feedback that I get Arts and the Mississippi Humanities from students about the classes that I Council cosponsor the Humanities teach,” Foster said, “and I’m grateful Teacher of the Year Award recog- for the nice things that many of my nizing outstanding contributions of colleagues have had to say about my humanities faculty at the University work in the classroom.” of Mississippi with a free public Zaire Love lecture during National Arts and Rebecca Lauck Cleary

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 25 FACULTY INTERVIEW Whose Blues? A Conversation with Interview by Greg Johnson

In addition to his role as professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, Adam Gussow is an accomplished blues player and educator, performing these days—once the pandemic lifts—with his new trio, Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors. His performing career with Sterling “Mister Satan” Magee is documented in the filmSatan and Adam and in Gussow’s first bookMister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir. Gussow is also the author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York, Busker’s Holiday, and Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition. I recently spoke with Gussow about his most recent book, Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Greg Johnson: You tackle a lot in this one. You pretty cleverly organize it along the structure of a 12-bar blues, where each chapter becomes a bar in a 12-bar blues cycle. You use a number of lenses to examine blues through two ideologies that you call “black bluesism” and “blues universalism.” Tell us about these two positions. cultivate an argument about it, they use what Adam Gussow: I should start by I call the lens of “Black bluesism” or “blues saying that the original title I gave to universalism.” I talk about a sort of competi- the publisher was Blues Talk: Making tion between slogans. Sense of the Music in a New Millennium. I The first is “blues is Black music.” On the was interested in the range of ways that face of it, as many people might say, well, of people talk about the blues. And what course it is. Blues is Black music in so many occurred to me when I thought about different ways, from its African sources, to those is that there were two primary ways that people the principle of call and response, to the Black vernacular ideologize the blues, meaning the way in which people that seems to be a part of it no matter where it travels do something other than just being purely scholarly around the world, so that everybody knows “Got My about it, or discographical about it, or just listening to Mojo Working” and “Hoochie Coochie Man,” with it with some whiskey in hand. When people want to their language of Black hoodoo/voodoo religion tracing

Page 26 Winter 2021 The Southern Register FACULTY INTERVIEW back to Africa. If one wants to be Black music. But if we’re using the gestures at the idea that if we get an empiricist, though, and think phrase “blues is Black music” to say things right, the blues scene can be critically about the phrase “blues is that everybody else in the world who a place where people are coming Black music,” one might say, well, plays it, or only white Americans together, sharing in some pursuit, it certainly was Black music in some who play it, are somehow suspect, teaching each other, learning from profound way between 1920, when that a world of judgment can be each other, and making great music Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” came leveraged against anybody who’s together that is, in some ways, more out, and maybe 1960, but between not African American making use than the sum of the parts. And it is 1960 and 1970 (and B. B. King is of the music, I say, that’s a form of where we are. a very good example for this) the fundamentalism. In that case, the blues audience was transformed in a phrase “blues is Black music” is not GJ: In your book you quote radical way. The younger Black audi- being used just to honor the music, blues poet Tyehimba Jess, essen- ence fell away and moved towards but to actually beat people back. As tially saying there is no separation , and King talks about this an empiricist, I’m troubled by that. between African American litera- as a hurtful thing, the loss of that Because I want to know the answer ture and the blues. What do blues audience. Meanwhile, there’s a huge to the question, “How is the music fans need to know about the writ- sort of swelling white audience for being used?” ings of Richard Wright, Zora Neale blues, and we begin to have white At the other extreme, there’s the Hurston, or Sterling Plumpp for a blues musicians to the point where opposing slogan, “No Black. No richer understanding of the blues? the Black Arts Movement—people white. Just the blues.” Now there’s a AG: When we talk about the like Larry Neal, Stephen Henderson, lot of people, and I’m one of them, blues, what are we talking about? Ron Welburn, and other Black who want to roll their eyes when Kalamu ya Salaam says it’s a mistake Arts Movement intellectuals—said, they hear that. It’s a t-shirt slogan. that many people make to think that “Whites are stealing the music, and If there’s an argument between the blues is just music. One thing I the media’s going to crown the king slogans, more of the truth is clearly do is take the blues apart in a way and queen of the blues, and they’re on the side of “blues is Black that I’ve done when I teach it in liter- going to be white people!” You music”—not all of it, but more of it. ature classrooms: I talk about blues know, Janis Joplin and Tom Jones As for “No Black. No white. Just the conditions, blues feelings, blues and Paul Butterfield at Madison blues,” it’s unfortunate, weird, and music (or blues expressiveness), and Square Garden. And so there was a especially clueless if you start off the blues ethos. But I think it’s really lot of rage back in the late sixties at by saying “no Black,” because it’s important to understand that the the fact that this white blues thing impossible, I think, for a Black blues corollary to me saying that, in the seemed to have supplanted [the practitioner or Black blues lover global context, far more non-Black creative work of ]. to hear that and not feel as though people are using the blues than Black One of the arguments I make is Blackness is being erased right off Americans, is that if we add litera- that we’re living in the aftermath the top. Part of what my book’s ture in, that’s really not true at all. of that period—and I’m still now trying to do is create a conversation There’s a continuing African thinking critically about that slogan where I ask white blues aficionados, American literary tradition that uses “blues is Black music.” But if you who may not want to bring race into the blues, that thinks about the blues, look globally at the blues today, it’s the music, to listen to how that might that’s as powerful now, in some indisputable that the number of non- feel. Vincent Leitch’s book Theory ways, as it’s ever been. It arguably African American people who play Matters has a chapter called “Blues begins with Langston Hughes. He the music, listen to the music, record Southwestern Style,” in which he gets slammed by the Black middle the music, make use of the music, talks about the Oklahoma City blues class, the journalists of the time, for is a much greater number than the scene. It’s white, it’s Black, it’s Native putting all this Black working-class number of African American people American, and it’s a place where stuff, this “sex, drugs, and rock and who are still doing that. working-class and middle-class roll,” on the page, all of this lower- It’s important, of course, never to folks get together, where gay and class behavior that the Black middle- forget about the soul blues market. straight get together. It’s sort of one class was trying to sweep under the For the sort of clueless white aficio- nation—or one city—under the sign rug. But Hughes says, this is vitality! nado who says “Black people don’t of the blues. At its best, the phrase, For many people, and especially for listen to the blues anymore,” that’s “No Black. No white. Just the blues,” contemporary Black Americans, if I not true at all, if you live where we gestures at what I’d call beloved use that word “blues,” they may be live in the Deep South. Soul blues is community in a blues context. It thinking about [the band] Southern

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 27 FACULTY INTERVIEW

Avenue or B. B. King, but they may also use it as a sort of placeholder for “the Black experience in America,” The Song in for historical legacies of pain and oppression, for family life. Adam Gussow’s Head There’s some wonderful sort of memoiristic texts that take people New Track Calls for Unity and Understanding into juke joints, where their cousins or grandmothers hung out. Zandria For the last three years, a strange chord progression has haunted Southern Robinson, our former colleague here Studies and English professor Adam Gussow’s very musical mind. It was at the university, writes about her an uncommon tune, but it was usually there, in all its weird glory, for the father and her going back through professor who teaches about blues music and is a recording artist in his his recordings, a playlist she’d gotten own right. He’s also a notable figure in the music world from the Netflix together for him, and thinking about documentary Satan & Adam. it from his perspective, thinking The chord progression that haunted about how things hadn’t him is the backbone of an uplifting new worked out between him track featuring Gussow, Rod Patterson, and her mother and thinking and fellow UM professor Alan Gross about the pain and the loss called “Come Together.” It all started that were part of his life in with a noise in his head: a clarion call Mississippi. There are some in A-C-D-F. “There’s some magic to this, deep and powerful medita- I thought,” Gussow said. “It has a sort tions. Sterling Plumpp, some- of blues rock feel to it. I started looking body whose work I’ve taught around online thinking, ‘Surely, I didn’t for a long time, has an amazing make this progression up.’” poem, “Mississippi Griot,” Gussow also plays with Gross in a where blues is not just music. duo called the Blues Doctors, a play It is music, but it’s a music that on the fact the band is made up of two contains multitudes, he would guys with PhDs. Patterson is an Atlanta- say. It gestures at Emmett Till. based motivational speaker who It gestures at the disappeared crusades against bullying in the city’s schools. down through Black history. So, to He’s also a performer who does shows in nursing homes where he dances talk to blues music aficionados about and sings karaoke-style to the songs of , Michael Jackson, this would be to say, you get a much Sam Cooke, and . deeper and richer understanding of Patterson and Gussow have an unusual connection: Sterling “Mr. the music if you read, not just imagi- Satan” Magee. Patterson’s uncle’s friendship and collaboration with the native literature, of course, but auto- professor over twenty-three years is the focus of Satan & Adam. Their biographies like Father of the Blues by partnership began when Gussow and Magee played for five years on the W. C. Handy. streets of . Gussow, Gross, and Patterson all got together in February for a session This interview has been edited for length at a historic home in Water Valley. Gussow had written the music for and clarity. In the full interview, posted “Come Together” three years earlier, and he and Gross had subsequently at egrove.olemiss.edu, we discuss early recorded it. Patterson later wrote lyrics over their backing track. The day global influences on the blues, B. B. after they met they had the song. King’s role in spreading the blues around The band wrote the tune out of frustration with divisions in the the world, and Gussow’s memories of country, specifically with racism and intolerance. The song began in his friend, mentor, and blues-performing 2017 as an instrumental. When Patterson wrote the lyrics to the song, partner Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, who they were about a metaphorical virus. Covid-19 wasn’t making nearly passed away on September 6, 2020. as much news then, Gussow said. It seems eerie to him now. “This was mid-February,” he said. “Nobody in America was really talking about Covid-19. Patterson’s lyrics spoke to this thing that wants to kill us, but at the time the virus was racism.”

Michael Newsom

Page 28 Winter 2021 The Southern Register r FROM STUDY THE SOUTH The Center Publishes New Study the South Essays New Work Focuses on Racial Injustice and Health Disparities in the American South

On September 24, 2020, Study the South published the essay, “Vanishing Acts: Civil Rights Reform and Dramatic Inversion in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence.” In his essay, GerShun Avilez exam- ines Ward’s satirical stage play about an imaginary southern town where all Black people have suddenly, and mysteriously, disap- peared. According to Avilez, Ward explores Black labor and mobility and, in doing so, creates opportunities to invert the dynamics that have histori- these disparity gaps are closing, three remain consistent: cally characterized US society. Avilez shows how Ward’s 1) the South fairs worse than other US regions, 2) racial experimental play functions as an extended meditation and ethnic minorities are disproportionately impacted, on the precarious lives of Black Americans, concluding and 3) rural spaces do not keep pace with urban centers. his essay by drawing connections between the ideas in In many ways, these disparities, because of their persis- Ward’s play and our current social moment. The central tence, are normalized or offered up as pretext for why concerns in Ward’s play, first performed in 1965, mirror some places are not ‘resilient’ or ‘flourishing.’ Addressing those of contemporary activists for racial justice and these disparities is difficult, from both a practical and suggest that Black Americans are still seeking full recog- a conceptual standpoint. They are ‘wicked’ problems, nition as citizens. multifaceted in nature and require complex, interdisci- GerShun Avilez is associate professor of English plinary, multi-stakeholder approaches that are hard to and director of graduate studies at the University of manage and fund.” Maryland–College Park. He specializes in contemporary Anne M. Cafer is an assistant professor of soci- African American and Black Diasporic literatures and ology and Meagen Rosenthal is an assistant professor visual cultures, and he teaches courses on the Black Arts of pharmacy administration, both at the University of Movement, Black sexuality, art and political activism, Mississippi. Brookshield Laurent is executive director civil rights, race and medical humanities, and twentieth- of the Delta Population Health Institute at Arkansas century American culture. State University, and Jennifer Conner is deputy director On October 27, 2020, Study the South published a of the Delta Population Health Institute at Arkansas roundtable conversation with stakeholders from across State University. Raeda Anderson is a research scien- the region who are exploring health conditions of the tist focusing on technology and big data analytics for rural South and the consequences that marginalized Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia. groups here (poor/rural/people of color) disproportion- Study the South is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, online ately experience. This essay, “Health Landscapes in the journal, published and managed by the Center for the South: Rurality, Racism, and a Path Forward,” not only Study of Southern Culture. Contact James G. Thomas, Jr. explores the health disparity gaps that exist in the rural at [email protected] for more information. South, but it focuses the conversation on actional steps for Upcoming essays include work on John Kennedy moving the needle in these communities. Toole’s portrait of small-town southern life. To read essays “Health disparities in the are well docu- in the journal, please visit www.southernstudies.olemiss. mented,” Anne M. Cafer and Meagen Rosenthal write edu/study-the-south. in the introduction to the conversation. “While some of

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 29 FROM THE VAULT: SOUTHERN WORKS FROM THE UM MUSEUM Jesse, Go Carve Jesse James Aaron’s Untitled (Three-Horned Head)

Jesse James Aaron From the Vault is a regular column exploring southern artwork found in the permanent collection of the University of Mississippi Museum.

Stuart Purser, the former Chairman of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Mississippi, first met Jesse James Aaron (1887–1979) while passing by Aaron’s home in Gainesville, Florida, in August 1968. Purser noticed a large wooden carving on of Aaron’s porch and inquired if he could purchase it. Aaron sold him the piece and insisted he would have new and better ones the following week. When Purser returned he was so impressed with the work that MUSEUM MISSISSIPPI OF UNIVERSITY THE OF COURTESY he quickly coordinated to have o’clock in the morning,’ the Lord Aaron exhibit alongside him at the told him, ‘Jesse, go carve.’ He got up teaching gallery at the University of and went to his workshop and made Florida that October. A key advo- his first carving.” Over the course of cate of Aaron’s work, Purser intro- a year, Aaron was able to pay for his duced him to curators, coordinated wife’s operation, and he began each exhibitions, and drove Aaron to day in his shop at three o’clock in events across the country. the morning. Jesse James Aaron, one of twelve Aaron worked intuitively. He children, was born to a Seminole would see forms in tree stumps and mother and an African American limbs before he even began carving. Jesse James Aaron, Untitled (Three- father in Lake City, Florida, in 1887. The slight octogenarian would often Horned Head), ca 1975, cedar, acrylic, He spent most of his professional and metal (Collection of the University haul these heavy pieces of unhewn life as a baker, though he worked of Mississippi Museum) wood back to his studio on his own. several jobs over the years, and He would use chainsaws, chisels, he was an avid gardener, teaching and pocketknives to reveal the form neighborhood children about plants for her cataract surgery. As Purser from its raw material. Aaron occa- in his yard. When his wife Lee Anna once wrote, “He prayed to the Lord sionally added stains to the final (also spelled Lee Ana and LeeAnna to give him work that no one else product (never paint), but often elsewhere) lost her eyesight, Aaron in Gainesville could do and some- opted for burning the wood to add was desperate to find the money thing that would be useful. ‘At three color and texture. He did sometimes

Page 30 Winter 2021 The Southern Register FROM THE VAULT: SOUTHERN WORKS FROM THE UM MUSEUM CONTRIBUTORS incorporate accessories to his pieces, and he would use Brett J. Bonner is editor of Living Blues. bits of metal or resin for the eyes. His forms were repre- sentational, depicting people as well as animals, and Steve Cheseborough is an independent scholar, blues sometimes a combination of both. musician, and Southern Studies MA graduate. His work Founding director of the Center for the Study of has been published in Living Blues, Blues Access, Mississippi, Southern Culture, William Ferris, along with his wife, and the Southern Register. Marcie Cohen Ferris, gifted the University of Mississippi Rebecca Lauck Cleary is the Center’s communica- Museum with Untitled (Three-Horned Head) in 2019. The tions specialist. She received a BA in journalism from the piece, which Aaron created in 1975 in the middle of University of Mississippi and her MA in Southern Studies. his short but prolific artistic career, is indicative of his Joan Wylie Hall is a lecturer in the English Department characteristic style. The sculpture is made of cedar with at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of metal and acrylic for the eyes, and is reminiscent of both Shirley Jackson: Studies in Short Fiction and the editor of human and animal forms. As with this piece, his crea- Conversations with Audre Lorde and Conversations with tures aren’t always recognizable, yet they somehow seem Natasha Trethewey. Her work has also been published in natural to this world. As Stuart Purser said of Aaron’s numerous journals such as Legacy: A Journal of American work, “As he walks through the woods and looks at trees, Women Writers, Mississippi Quarterly, Faulkner Journal, and logs, stumps, and knots, he sees exotic forms and faces— the Review. all suggested by the physical material itself. He then does something about it.” Gary Kerley is a retired educator living in North Carolina. He wrote the entries on D. C. Berry and John Amanda Malloy Stone for the Mississippi Encyclopedia. Zaire Love is a freelance filmmaker, music maker, and Amanda Malloy received her documentary photographer from Memphis, Tennessee. MA in Southern Studies from She earned her Southern Studies MFA in Documentary the University of Mississippi, Expression in 2020. focusing on southern photography. Amanda Malloy received her MA in Southern Studies During this time she completed an from the University of Mississippi, focusing on southern assistantship with the University photography. During this time she completed an assistant- of Mississippi Museum. She is ship with the University of Mississippi Museum. She is currently the visual arts editor of currently the visual arts editor of Mississippi Folklife. Mississippi Folklife. Martha Grace Mize is concurrently pursuing an MA in Southern Studies and an MA in anthropology. She completed her BA at the University of Mississippi in anthropology with minors in business administration and Southern Studies. Andrea Morales is a Southern Documentary Project producer, a photographer, and a current Southern Studies MFA in Documentary Expression student. Katie McKee is the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and English. Michael Newsom is a communications specialist for University Communications. Jonathan Scott is a communications specialist for University Development. David Wharton is the Center’s director of documentary studies and assistant professor of Southern Studies. Charles Reagan Wilson is an emeritus director of the Center and Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he taught from 1981–2014.

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 31 READING THE SOUTH Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

Memorial Drive: A Reversing a mother’s quest to Daughter’s Memoir. reclaim her daughter from the land of the dead in the Greek By Natasha Trethewey. New myth of Demeter and Persephone, York: HarperCollins Ecco, Trethewey’s vision was revelatory and transformative. “Through the meta- 2020. 214 pages. $27.99 phor of the dream,” she says, “I had cloth, $12.99 E-book, acknowledged the undeniable pres- $16.99 paper (June 2021). ence of my deepest wound.” She has frequently remarked that this wound On the dustjacket of Memorial Drive, “hurt” her into becoming a poet—a the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet writer who achieved national recog- Natasha Trethewey is an infant in nition as nineteenth poet laureate the arms of her smiling mother, (2012–14) for an unusual double term Gwendolyn Turnbough, of Gulfport, that overlapped with her appoint- Mississippi, in 1966. The memoir ment as Mississippi’s state poet ends several years later with an laureate. In the memoir, Trethewey annual mother-daughter drive reflects: “Even my mother’s death is from Atlanta for Natasha to spend redeemed in the story of my calling, summer vacation in her birthplace made meaningful rather than merely with her maternal grandmother’s senseless. It is the story I tell myself tightknit family. These journeys empty brackets rather than a chapter to survive.” The fact that it took began after Turnbough divorced her heading. Along with three additional seven years to complete Memorial white Canadian husband and moved untitled vignettes, these short reflec- Drive suggests the devotion and to Georgia to begin graduate studies tions stand apart from the memoir’s heartbreak entailed in her calling to in social work and develop a new chronological progression, serving become a writer. Her close acquain- life for herself and their six-year-old as intense and dreamlike medita- tance with pain was clear even in her daughter. In the closing scene of tions in notably poetic prose. In first collection,Domestic Work (2000), Memorial Drive, Natasha is a teenager, the terrible vision that introduces which includes the poems “Cameo,” stretching from the passenger seat the book, Turnbough appears to the “Hot Combs,” “Limen,” and other to lean against her mother and take nineteen-year-old Natasha with light portrayals of her mother. the wheel on the empty road for an shining through the bullet hole in Although Trethewey withholds the impromptu steering lesson on the her forehead, just as she appeared at identity of her mother’s killer at the way to Mississippi, “following the arc the end of Trethewey’s elegiac fifth beginning of Memorial Drive, readers of of the sun west toward home.” Decades poetry volume, Monument: Poems her poetry realize from the start he was later, Trethewey recalled that they New and Selected (2018). The memoir Trethewey’s stepfather—Turnbough’s sat “so close we seemed conjoined, and describes the dead mother making second husband, who relentlessly I could feel her heart beating against a “slow revolution” along an “oval stalked her after they were divorced. me as if I had not one, but two.” She track,” walking shoulder to shoulder The book’s account of his physical must have felt the same closeness with her daughter, when they and emotional abuse is so unforget- when she was a baby hugged by her encounter the killer. “This time I think table that PBS interviewed Trethewey mother in the cover photograph. I can save her,” Trethewey believes, in October 2020 to mark Domestic Shockingly, however, the memoir even though she understands her Violence Awareness Month. Further begins three weeks after Gwendolyn mother is already dead in the dream. regarding the current pandemic, Turnbough was fatally shot on She narrates the underworld vision she told journalist Michel Martin June 5, 1985, in her Atlanta apart- again toward the end of Memorial that family tensions have increased ment on Memorial Drive. Like Drive, adding that she journeyed to in many cases, and she stressed the the volume’s closing journey, the “this place of shadows” with a mission long-term effect of domestic violence tragic opening segment is italicized to rescue her mother: “as if to bring on survivors, including children. for emphasis and introduced with her back.” Frequently driving her on the long

Page 32 Winter 2021 The Southern Register loop around Atlanta, her stepfa- that are spent on society’s fringe. in New Orleans and spent hours ther had repeatedly threatened to Suffering labor pains on the drive to walking with Natasha, telling her abandon Natasha or commit her to the “segregated ward” of Gulfport stories and classical myths. A student a mental health facility, even though Memorial Hospital, Gwendolyn of literature and creative writing, he she was only seven when her mother Turnbough felt “the tenor of the said his daughter would be a writer, married him and gave birth to his day, witnessing the barrage of rebel too—a dream that her stepfather later son. Speculating that they met when flags lining the streets: private citi- threatened to crush. “Most of all,” her student-mother worked at the zens, lawmakers, Klansmen (often Trethewey says, “I loved watching Mine Shaft club in an entertainment one and the same) raising them in my mother.” In this “place of my district called Underground Atlanta, Gulfport and small towns all across childhood wonder, of my parents’ Trethewey views him as “the lord Mississippi” on April 26, 1966. fleeting happiness,” everything was “a of the underworld”—the same myth Months earlier, when Natasha’s marvel”—from the jar of wildflowers she evokes in relating her dream of grandmother, Leretta Dixon catching the “bottled light” of the sun her dead mother. In her 2006 poetry Turnbough, asked the town news- to “the rhythm of language and the collection, Native Guard, the villanelle paper to announce her daughter’s power of words to alter what I saw.” “Myth” is another rendering of this Ohio wedding, the older woman was Memorial Drive glows with this power. legend of wrenching loss. put on a watch list. Mississippi did Yet, Trethewey emphasizes that not recognize mixed-race marriages Joan Wylie Hall “the tragic facts of my mother’s like that of Gwendolyn Turnbough life and mine” are “not the story” to Eric Trethewey; and Ross Barnett of Memorial Drive. Rather, the “was monitoring interracial activity.” book relates a broader narrative of Leretta Turnbough further risked remembering and forgetting. The attention by supporting Mennonite Mississippi Poets: A title of the final chapter, “Before missionary efforts in the Black Literary Guide Knowing Remembers,” comes from community; their volunteer work led William Faulkner’s comment in Light to a bomb threat against the Baptist By Catharine Savage in August: “Memory believes before church across from the Turnbough Brosman. Jackson: University knowing remembers.” The title of house, where Natasha and her Press of Mississippi, 2020. the book likewise speaks of memory; parents also lived. Trethewey says she Memorial Drive runs from mid- was “too young to recall the night the 286 pages. $28.00 cloth, Atlanta to the huge Stone Mountain Klan burned a cross in our driveway,” $25.00 eBook. monument commemorating heroes but the family’s “act of remembering, of the Confederacy. In her prologue, recounting that story” trained her to In his preface to A Dictionary of the Trethewey says she could see this be always on watch. Even though English Language (1755), Samuel “lasting metaphor for the white mind Natasha and her parents “met with Johnson says, “The chief glory of of the South” from the gate to her a great deal of hostility most places every people arises from its authors.” mother’s apartment complex: “as if we went,” her home life as as an only He could just as easily have been to remind me what is remembered child meant she had the “comfort of talking about the celebrated and here and what is not.” that small enclave of close relations” versatile writers from the state of In her memoir (her focused who doted on her, as they had doted Mississippi, but “to most of the remembering), Trethewey compares on her mother when Gwendolyn was world’s readers,” according to the the nation’s “cultural amnesia” to a girl. Natasha went fishing and gath- entry on poetry in The Mississippi the erasure of individual histories ered figs, persimmons, and pecans Encyclopedia, “the literature of like her mother’s. Gathering offi- with her great-aunt Sugar, the “family Mississippi is a literature of prose cial reports of Turnbough’s death, heroine” who always had “a sharp- and drama.” Trethewey learned that “the record tongued comeback” to white people’s In Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide shows murder, shows May 31, gets “routine terms of diminishment.” it is Catharine Savage Brosman’s the day wrong, makes the date she In contrast, Sugar’s afternoon tea aim to correct that gap by high- died invisible in the document, takes parties with her little niece made “All lighting forty-seven of the state’s five days from her, from me, as if the days sweet like that.” The elegant poets of the twentieth and twenty- they were irrelevant, as if it didn’t “high yellow” great-uncle Son Dixon first centuries, many of whom have matter, as if it were not important to and Aunt Lizzie owned a nightclub, been overlooked or underappreci- be precise, to get it right.” Natasha’s a Cadillac, and an airconditioned ated, even in their native or adopted birth on Mississippi’s centennial house with a Bible on a reading state. Brosman is a poet, essayist, of Confederate Memorial Day stand “beneath portraits of Jesus, and scholar who retired from Tulane provided another lasting image of Kennedy, and King.” Eric Trethewey University in 1997 after a career of lives that are celebrated versus lives commuted from graduate school nearly thirty years. She and Olivia

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 33 McNeely Pass, who contributed five way of explaining what it means to of the articles in this book, recently be a Mississippi poet. They all share coauthored Louisiana Poets: A Literary a common experience, whether Guide, and they bring the same expressed through traditional, erudition and thorough detail to the postmodern, Beat, experimental, study of the poets of Mississippi. or blues-influenced rhythms. John The question often raised by both P. Freeman says, “Mississippi is the scholars and readers alike is, what very subject of my poetry,” and makes someone a regional poet, Brosman quotes Lewis Nordan: “We and, in particular, what makes a ache for Mississippi . . . we carry it Mississippi poet? William Faulkner in us.” Many, however, left the state said, “To understand the world, you early and never came back to live, must first understand a place like though their memories of family Mississippi.” There is no denying and sense of place imbued their that to understand any region or writing. In the case of James Seay, any writer who is born in that the author notes that “small-town life region or whose works reflect its in Mississippi marked him,” though culture, one must also understand most of his long career was at the the physical landscape, the history, University of North Carolina. and the people. Brosman asks, “Do While many of the state’s poets the place, and its history, make the embrace their cultural past, others poet?” C. Leigh McInnis, one of To get a sense of the overall are critical of Mississippi’s infamous the book’s featured poets, says, “If structure of the entries and the history of slavery, poverty, and what happens in Mississippi has an typical method of presentation deprivation. As Albert Camus once immediate effect on your work, you in Mississippi Poets, it will help the said, “In order to understand the are a Mississippi writer.” There is a reader to highlight a particular world, one has to turn away from “Mississippi imagination,” Brosman author: Beth Ann Fennelly, the most it on occasion.” Poets such as Ann argues, and her introduction also recent poet laureate from the state Fisher-Wirth, Derrick Harriell, and quotes Natasha Trethewey, two-term (2016–20). Fennelly’s current and C. Leigh McInnis turn away from the US poet laureate and the fourth poet former academic affiliations and status quo of their upbringing and use laureate of Mississippi: “Geography a brief biography begin the entry, their poetry to raise consciousness of is fate.” It is Brosman’s purpose in including any non-poetic works, and Mississippi’s racial oppression. Others this book to bring to the forefront prizes she has won. The entry is in in Brosman’s book, such as Al Young, the lives of the poets of Mississippi chronological order, and so each believe poetry must be poetry first and to serve as a literary guide to volume is explained by the kind of and “a poet’s loyalty should go to the their upbringing, influences, style, verse form the poet usually uses and art itself, not a cause.” and best-known works. the subject matter, especially as it Mississippi Poets is a good starting Of the forty-seven poets in this relates to the region. Brosman writes point for readers unfamiliar with that work, twenty-six are also featured in in a clear, concise manner; she does state’s literary heritage. Though there The Mississippi Encyclopedia, though not gush about the author’s work, are many well-known writers, such as none written by Brosman herself. is complimentary when she deems Faulkner, Ellen Gilchrist, and Richard It is worth noting that this reviewer it warranted, and gives the reader Wright, more noted for their fiction wrote the entries on D. C. Berry enough examples, even in the four- than their poetry, there are many who and John Stone, also included in her page entry, to illustrate Fennelly’s Brosman feels deserve a first look or critical study. By their encyclopedic subject matter, tone, and style. There a second reading. An extensive list of nature, however, they are much is a summary paragraph that makes all the primary sources for each writer briefer than the eight and four pages judgments—“a very able writer”— is included, along with a helpful bibli- she devotes to them. She takes the that are neither effusive nor dismis- ography of anthologies and works time and space necessary to give sive. Each entry in Mississippi Poets about Mississippi literature in general. more details to individual volumes takes this approach, so the reader is This is a valuable reference source, and is able to cite specific poems, informed, not just presented with lists and Brosman has done a worthy job as well as flesh out influences on of published works, dates, or awards. of lifting up and appreciating these each poet’s work. I got a deeper Throughout the entries of varied representatives of “the chief glory” of understanding of Berry’s and Stone’s and unique voices, Brosman gives Mississippi poetry. poetry from her book and did not a rich and detailed cultural back- feel that I was reading another entry ground of the place, the literature, Gary Kerley from an encyclopedia. and the religion of the state, all in the

Page 34 Winter 2021 The Southern Register Road through Midnight: of Adolph Eichmann’s 1963 trial for masterminding the murders of A Civil Rights Memorial millions of Jews in Nazi concentra- By Jessica Ingram. Chapel tion camps. (It’s perhaps worth noting that Eichmann’s trial and the murders Hill: University of North described in Road through Midnight Carolina Press, 2020. 240 were occurring more or less simultane- pages. $35.00 hardcover, ously.) It might be the book’s greatest strength that it reminds us that terrible $27.99 ebook. things can happen in ordinary places, The Southern Register usually asks in seemingly ordinary times, and that me to write about photographic they could yet again. books. This involves studying the photographs (both their content and David Wharton style), whatever verbal materials accompany them, how the images are grouped and sequenced, and the book’s larger purpose. All are important, but if the pictures are gutter of facing pages. These pictures The Saddest Words: unremarkable I rarely find many are usually of the murder site: the William Faulkner’s Civil positive things to say about the book dusty crossroads in rural Mississippi as a whole. Road through Midnight is where Chaney, Goodman, and War an exception. The photographs are Schwerner were shot; the ragged By Michael Gorra. New York: largely unremarkable, yet this is one neighborhood where Frank Morris of the most powerful books of docu- was burned alive inside his Ferriday, Liveright, 2020. 433 pages. mentary content I know of. Indeed, Louisiana, shoe shop; Medgar Evers’s $29.95 cloth. some of its power may lie in just how driveway. Following the photographs unremarkable the photographs are. are straight-forward, deadpan accounts Michael Gorra presents a William Jessica Ingram began work on this of the crime, usually including the Faulkner for the moment in time project in the early 2000s. Traveling eventual fate of the murderers (many through which the South, and the throughout the Deep South, she photo- of whom were never charged or nation, are living. Published in the graphed sites of 1960s-era civil rights convicted). Next comes a variety of same year when Black Lives Matter murders, recorded interviews with materials: recorded conversations became a more compelling move- victims’ friends and family members, with family members, written pieces ment than ever before, when local searched archives for contempora- by local journalists or others with communities began taking down neous accounts of the murders and memories of the crime, photocopies of or moving Confederate monu- the investigations undertaken (or contemporaneous newspaper articles ments from prominent places, and not) by local authorities, and talked and photographs, reproductions of when Confederate-laced flags were with journalists who had reported on church funeral programs, pictures changed, the book uses Faulkner’s the murders for local newspapers. from family photo . Each preoccupation with the Civil War to Somewhat later, she was granted the segment is a dizzying and disheart- unravel the centrality of persisting use of materials from the Southern ening array, demonstrating both the racial injustices to the American story. Poverty Law Center. The fieldwork power of context in documentary Gorra goes beyond issues of strict and research took nearly two decades work and the profound evil at the literary concern to place Faulkner and were no doubt exhausting. heart of these events. in the sociocultural context of his But the extent and duration of As mentioned above, the photo- time and place, and argues for his Ingram’s work are not the only graphs in Road through Midnight are continuing relevance as a prophetic reasons for the power of Road through fairly ordinary in and of themselves. voice. The study is historical criticism Midnight. Instead, its strength is in They seem distanced and lacking in operating at a very high level. how the various pieces cohere, with emotion. Yet the book as whole packs The title comes from Quentin each providing context for the others. an emotional wallop, in large part Compson, the confused but idealistic The book is divided into twenty-two because of Ingram’s seeming detach- figure in Faulkner’s greatest novels. segments, almost all of which focus ment. In many ways this approach His father, the cynical and material- on a civil rights-era murder, in some brings to mind what has come to istic Jason Compson, tells him that cases of more than one individual. be known as “the banality of evil,” was is the saddest word in language, Each “chapter” begins with a photo- a phrase coined by political theo- but Quentin discovers that again is graph or two, full-bleed across the rist Hannah Arendt in her account even more so. The terms together

The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 35 suggest that an event in the past Civil War distorted the southern white recurs endlessly, in a deterministic psyche for generations. Faulkner lived cycle that seems to entrap people. in Mississippi, the belly of the racist Gorra’s sure-footed analysis demon- beast, and the daily observation of strates ways that Faulkner’s blurring racial realities gave him the materials of past, present, and future come to verbalize what was normally not out of the struggle to understand the said in polite company. The Jim Crow abiding presence of the issues of the society was one of silences and shared Civil War. Faulkner actually wrote falsehoods, but Gorra’s Faulkner had little about the war itself, with the the temerity to document the sordid generals sometimes romanticized but reality of slavery and segregation, the of little significance as compelling murders, rapes, incest, and general characters and the battles merely violence at the heart of race relations. off-stage events. But the war is the Southern studies has a robust dynamic force that brings together scholarship on the region’s public the prewar slave society and the memory, and this book is a fine postwar effort to reconstitute that addition to it. “The real war,” Gorra society through the Lost Cause—the writes, “lies not only in the physical memory of the Confederate cause. combat, but also in the war after the Gorra’s method is an original war, the war over its memory and one. He incorporates discussion of meaning.” Faulkner’s white South Faulkner’s novels, short stories, and Faulkner was a southern moderate cannot forget anything, remembering life in a narrative that runs from of the mid-twentieth century, and above all its Civil War defeat, its loss the 1830s to the post-World War II that meant that he was for going and yearning for a misperceived past years when Faulkner won the Nobel slow on racial change because he utopia while ignoring its rapacious Prize and became a cultural ambas- feared southern whites would rise up atrocities to its Black population. sador for the United States govern- in violent rebellion if change came Gorra examines the importance of ment. He treats the writer’s work as quickly. Both James Baldwin and trauma to the white South’s cultural a single, sweeping text, as one long Martin Luther King Jr. took him to memory and its endless cycle of was story, rather than dealing with the task for such views that could suffo- and again. The delayed response to fiction in chronological order. His cate momentum toward change that an experience that seems unknow- research is extensive, as he inves- had built through the postwar years. able at the time can foster trauma tigates regional and family history, Moreover, a liquor-infused interview and the nightmares and flashbacks other writings on the war, letters and had him saying if war between North that represent an unwilled memory. journals, accounts of battles, Civil and South came, he would be in the The Lost Cause in that regard repre- War historiography, and war memo- streets fighting African Americans. He sented what Gorra calls a “doomed rials. It is a profoundly learned study, later claimed he had been misquoted, reiteration” for a white South that held together by Gorra’s quizzical, but Gorra concludes that Faulkner was could never acknowledge the sin of informed voice, assessing and evalu- the white southerner in his everyday slavery and tried to recreate a flawed ating the war, Faulkner, and the issue views at that time, his mind filled with and unjust vision of life. of race, especially dwelling on what inherited racial stereotypes. In the end, Gorra is profound in Faulkner’s struggles to present racial The stunning revelation, though, emphasizing Faulkner’s passionate issues mean for the disappointing is that when Faulkner wrote fiction exploration of the moral drama, failure of the nation to live into what he, more often than not, transcended struggle, and paradox in Faulkner’s seems now like an overly hopeful such commonplace southern senti- “attempt to work through our history, post-racial time. He notes that much ments. His African American charac- to wrestle or rescue it into meaning.” scholarship on Faulkner deals with ters could be one-dimensional, but the He was able to think his way into the the tension between the Old South searing story of the identity-challenged minds of his characters and fearlessly and the New South, the Sartorises and Joe Christmas and the psychological examine the racial demons in his own the Snopeses, but he sees such issues understanding of Lucas Beauchamp southern psyche as he judged those as “pocket change” compared to what demonstrated a surprising depth of characters for their failures. Gorra Faulkner has to say about race. feeling about racial injustices for a emphasizes as well that Faulkner’s Anyone examining Faulkner’s white southerner of his time. Gorra broodings on race and identity was engagement with issues of race must insists that no white American writer, the nation’s story, making it relevant deal with his unfortunate public then or now, thought deeper and more to our times. statements, and Gorra does not extensively about racial problems, shrink from giving them due weight. seen here in how the legacy of the Charles Reagan Wilson

Page 36 Winter 2021 The Southern Register Eudora Welty Awards KAY BELL Each year the Center for the Study The winners will also be recognized of Southern Culture presents the at the opening of the 2021 Faulkner Eudora Welty Awards in Creative & Yoknapatawpha Conference on Writing to Mississippi high school the University of Mississippi campus students during the annual Faulkner in Oxford on July 18. & Yoknapatawpha Conference. Each entry should be accompa- Established and endowed by the nied by the entry form and post- late Frances Patterson of Tupelo, the marked by May 14, 2021. Faculty awards are given for creative writing and staff from the Center for the in either prose or poem form. Study of Southern Culture will judge This past year was an unusual the entries and select the winners. year—to say the least—and the Application and submission require- Welty Awards and the Faulkner ments will be sent to all Mississippi Conference both were cancelled public and private schools. If you as a result of Covid-19. No winner know a Mississippi student currently was named for the Welty Awards in high schools. Short stories should enrolled in high school outside of 2020, but the awards will take place not exceed three thousand words, the state or who is homeschooled, again this year. and poetry should not exceed one please e-mail [email protected] As in past years, students must be hundred lines. Winning students will for a copy. To see a list of past Mississippi residents. The compe- be notified at least a month prior to winners or to download or complete tition is open to ninth through the award presentation. The first- the application, visit www.south- twelfth graders, and writing should place prize for each category is $500, ernstudies.olemiss.edu/academics/ be submitted through students’ and the second-place prize is $250. high-school-eudora-welty-awards.

NEW FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI | www.upress.state.ms.us

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The Southern Register Winter 2021 Page 37 IN MEMORIAM Center Remembers Longtime Friends

Since August, the Center has seen she wrote a regular column on a Anderson Museum of Art, New the passing of several friends, each of range of subjects—from politics to Stage Theatre in Jackson, the whom had contributed to the success foodways—in the American South. Mississippi Humanities Council, of our work in their own ways. Reed is the author of The House and the Mississippi National Science Randall Kenan (March 12, on First Street: My New Orleans Museum. Stevens lived in a number 1963–August 28, 2020) was a writer Story; Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, of towns and cities across the South and creator of his fictional North and Other Southern Specialties: An in her lifetime, but most recently Carolina hamlet of Tims Creek. Entertaining Life (With Recipes); and she had returned to live in Jackson, He was the author of A Visitation Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Mississippi. She continued to be an of Spirits, Let the Dead Bury Their Southern Phenomena. Her last book, ardent supporter of the Center, and Dead and Other Stories, and Walking South toward Home: Adventures and at her passing her family requested on Water: Black America on the Eve of Misadventures in My Native Land, was memorials to be made to the Center the Twenty-First Century, and was a published in 2018. for the Study of Southern Culture. frequent participant in the Oxford Joe Hairston (September 30, Leila Downs Clark Wynn Conference for the Book (1998, 1937–August 30, 2020) had five (February 4, 1932–October 31, 1999, 2002) and Southern Foodways college degrees, beginning with a 2020) was a supporter of the Center Alliance symposia. Kenan was the bachelor’s degree from Harvard, since our founding in 1977. Wynn John and Renée Grisham Writer which he earned in 1960, and ending helped organize the Friends of the in Residence at the University of with an MA in Southern Studies in Center, and she maintained a seat Mississippi in 1997–98, and the 1995. Included in that number was on the Center Advisory Committee Oxford Conference for the Book is also a law degree, and he practiced for several years. In 2009 Wynn paying a special tribute to him with law in Austin, Texas, for more than provided a $100,000 challenge grant a collective reading by past and five decades, finding time to visit that was matched with $100,000 in present Grisham writers of “The more than one hundred countries funds from several sources, including Eternal Glory That Is Ham Hocks,” on six continents along the way. from other members of the Center a story from his latest collection, If I Hairston celebrated his seventy-fifth Advisory Committee. The fund Had Two Wings. birthday on top of the Eifel Tower. continues to enhance Center faculty Like Kenan, Julia Reed His MA thesis, “Jack Burden’s research on the American South, (September 11, 1960–August 28, Children: Out of History into as well as impact faculty recruit- 2020) was also a frequent supporter History,” focused on Robert Penn ment and retention. In the Fall and participant of the Center’s Warren’s novel All the King’s Men. 2009 issue of the Southern Register, Oxford Conference for the Book Patricia Land Stevens then Center director, Ted Ownby, (2004, 2005, 2009, 2012). She was (November 28, 1926–November 1, said, “Leila Wynn has been a great born in Greenville, Mississippi, and 2020) was a founding member of supporter of the Center for the was a contributing editor at Elle Décor the Center’s Advisory Committee Study of Southern Culture and the and Garden and the first woman to serve on the University of Mississippi for some and Gun UM Foundation’s board of direc- years. She studied Faulkner here, magazine, tors. She attended the University of and she knows the needs of scholars where Mississippi (1946–1948), where she from her work here and at other helped organize a chapter of Kappa colleges and universities. She knows Kappa Gamma sorority and was that scholars need time to research, selected as one of ten favorites on think, and write, and this gift will be the University of Mississippi campus. a wonderful way to allow our faculty Ever invested in her state, she the freedom to do that.” In addition served on the boards to her generous financial support, of the Mississippi Wynn often opened her home in Institute of Arts and Greenville to host Center meetings, Letters, the Walter events, and receptions.

Page 38 Winter 2021 The Southern Register IN MEMORIAM William Forrest Winter (1923–2020)

As we mourn the loss of Gov. William Winter (February 21, 1923–December 18, 2020), you can learn more about his efforts to advance education and racial reconciliation by reading this entry on him from the Mississippi Encyclopedia.

For all of William Winter’s many The campaign included more than contributions to the state of 450 speeches and public appear- Mississippi, he will be most remem- ances around the state. bered for the Education Reform In mid-November, Winter called Act of 1982, which was passed after a special session of the legislature Governor Winter called a tense to begin on 6 December. The only and controversial special session item on the agenda would be educa- of the legislature. With the excep- tion reform, and the public rela- tion of that measure, which gener- tions campaign had made sure that ated intense debate at the time but Mississippians would be watching. is now widely considered a model After two weeks of debate, legisla- of progressive educational legisla- tors passed the bill. The Education tion, Winter’s administration was Reform Act of 1982 is considered marked by an efficiency and a the most significant educational lack of controversy rarely seen in legislation enacted in Mississippi Mississippi politics. since the establishment of its public Winter was born in Grenada on 21 school system in 1870. February 1923. He earned a bach- Winter left the Governor’s elor’s degree from the University of Mansion in January 1984 and made Mississippi in 1943 and then joined one more bid for public office, losing the US Army, serving as an infantryman in the Philippines to incumbent Thad Cochran in that year’s election for the during World War II. He subsequently enrolled in the US Senate. Winter returned to practicing law in Jackson, University of Mississippi Law School, graduating first in though he continued his public service through a variety his class in 1949. In 1947, while still in school, Winter was of civic organizations. He held office in state and national elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives, and he mental health organizations and served as president of won reelection in 1951 and 1955. In 1950–51 he served as the board of trustees of the Mississippi Department of a legislative assistant to US senator John Stennis. Archives and History, as a trustee of Belhaven College and Winter conducted his first statewide campaign in Columbia Seminary, and as president of the Mississippi 1959, winning election to the post of tax collector and Historical Society and the University of Mississippi remaining in office until 1964, when the position was Alumni Association. He participated in Pres. Bill Clinton’s abolished on his recommendation. He was then elected Initiative on Race and taught for a semester at the state treasurer. Following an unsuccessful race for University of Mississippi Law School. governor in 1967, Winter was elected lieutenant governor The William Winter Professorship of History at the in 1971. He tried again for the state’s highest office in University of Mississippi has been endowed in his honor, 1975, when the Democratic nomination went to Cliff and the Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the building Finch, and in 1979, when he finally succeeded. that houses the Mississippi Department of Archives Winter had made education reform a centerpiece of his and History bear his name. While serving as lieutenant campaign, and during the first year of his term, he asked governor, William Winter received the Margaret Dixon the legislature to set up a committee to study the needs Freedom of Information Award from the Louisiana- of Mississippi’s schools. The committee recommended Mississippi Associated Press for his continuing support the passage of a compulsory attendance law, increased for the opening of the political process to both the general education funding, the establishment of a lay board of public and to the press. In 2008 the John F. Kennedy education, and state-supported kindergartens. But the Presidential Library and Museum bestowed its Profile in legislature refused to pass the reform measure during its Courage Award on Winter in recognition of his efforts to regular 1982 session. In response, the governor, several of advance education and racial reconciliation. He died on 18 his aides, and First Lady Elise Varner Winter undertook a December 2020, at the age of 97, at his home in Jackson. grassroots campaign designed to drum up public support for reform and increase pressure on the legislature to act. David G. Sansing, University of Mississippi

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