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NINTH OXFORD CONFERENCE FOR THE BOOK rom the page to the stage and screen, this year's Oxford Conference for the Book celebrates the written word and its various incarnations April 11-14, 2002, on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford. This year's conference, the ninth annual, is dedicated to Tennessee Williams, who was born and spent his formative years in Mississippi, then went on to become one of America's foremost playwrights. To honor Williams's literary legacy and to demonstrate the transendence of the written word, the conference will play host to playwrights and drama critics in addition to the usual roster of novelists, journalists, and poets. The weekend will also include a gathering of previous writers in residence from a program funded by John and Renee Grisham and a screening of Big Bad Love, the film based on short stories by local author Larry Brown. The conference kicks off early this year with a special book conference edition of Thacker Mountain Radio on Thursday, Aprilil. The hour-long live radio show will feature music by the house band and a visiting group, plus readings by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, making his third conference appearance, and poet Beth Ann Fennelly, who has been living in Oxford since August with her husband, current Grisham Writer in Residence Tom Franklin. Following the radio show, a special screening of Big Bad Love, the new film by actor-director Arliss Howard, based on stories by Larry Brown, will be held in Fulton Chapel at 8:do p.m. A panel with Brown, Howard, and Debra Winger, one of the film's stars, will take place prior to the screening; a reception will follow. The movie, which was filmed in Oxford and the surrounding area, follows a Vietnam vet as he struggles to realize his dream of becoming a writer. Friday, April 12, kicks off in traditional fashion with a welcome by the mayor of Oxford (a new one this year, Square Books owner
F
(continued
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Tennessee Williams, Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The above photograph of Tennessee Williams is reproduced on posters and T-shirts available from the Center by calling 800-390-3527.
on page 4)
Winter 2002
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Southern Register Published Quarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern The University Telephone:
Culture
of Mississippi
662-915-5993
Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: cssc@olemiss.edu Internet: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south
IN
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Winter 2001
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Ninth Oxford Conference for the Book Director's Column In Memoriam Washington Scholars Institute McKeeNamed 2001 Humanities Teacher 2002 Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference Saks Fellowships Available Center Ventress Order Trustees Student Photographers to Exhibit in Gammill Gallery Southern Studies Alumni New Season of Thacker Mountain Radio DocumentaryProject on FreedomRiders Caroline Herring's New CD Special Collections to Offer Williams Exhibition Ann Patchett's "Imagination Travel" Reading the South: Reviews & Notes 2003 Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference Call for Papers Southern FoodwaysAlliance News Historic Delta School Being Saved Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule Students Help Clean Old Cemetery A Note to Those Interested in Traditional Country Music Old Alabama Town Executive Director Position Regional Roundup Notes on Contributors Become a Friend of the Center Southern Culture Catalog Items Address Section/Mailing List Form/ Friends Information and Form
REQISTER STAFF Editor: Ann]. Graphic Designer: Mailing List Manager:
Mary Hartwell Howorth
Editorial Assistant: Lithographer:
Abadie Susan Bauer Lee
COLUMN
This year will be a special one for all of us associated with the Center. We began our work 25 years ago, and a quarter-century anniversary gives pause for reflection, for considering the past, present, and future. We hope to involve our friends in Center activities more than ever before, and we will soon have a calendar of events for the coming year. The Center formally began with a Eudora Welty Symposium in November 1977. Ann Abadie was acting director then, with Bill Ferris, our founding director, arriving in 1979. I joined them in 1981 to work on the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. We began publishing Living Blues® in 1983, and other Center projects soon followed. From the beginning, our academic work anchored other Center activities. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant helped us implement the distinctive, interdisciplinary Southern Studies curriculum. We began with a bachelor of arts degree, adding the master's in 1986. Our core faculty have always provided leadership for Center projects, and an extended network of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts assist with our academic program and other Center activities. One of our most important support groups is the Friends of the Center. Our newsletter, Southern Register, connects us to 30,000 people, and we depend on each of you for moral and financial support. I often receive letters from newsletter readers who want to know more about Center work and ways they can assist. Jim and Madeleine McMullan, chairs of our Advisory Committee who helped establish two Southern Studies faculty positions, learned of the Center's potential through reading the newsletter and becoming Friends of the Center. The financial contributions that readers can make through our Friends group provide the operating funds to enable us to support publication of the newsletter, provide assistantships to graduate students, sponsor the Oxford Conference for the Book, and work on countless other projects. Tennessee Williams, who is being honored at this year's Oxford Conference for the Book, had a character say that she depended "on the kindness of strangers." For 25 years, the Center has educated students, published books and magazines, held conferences that encouraged significant research, and generally nurtured the study of Southern culture-all partly through the generosity of, not strangers, but friends. We regard all of you as friends because YQU know of Center projects and appreciate our contributions. We hope you will enjoy knowing about the Center's activities this special year and help us build a strong foundation for our future growth. CHARLES REAGAN
WILSON
Julian Wiener April 30, 1917 - January 9,2002 Physician Philanthropist Longtime Member Center's Advisory Committee Jackson, Mississippi
Rana Wallace
RR Donnelley
Magazine Group
The University complies with all regarding affirmative action and equal its activities and programs and does against anyone protected by law color,disability, national origin, race, status as a veteran or disabled veteran.
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DIRECTOR'S
applicable laws opportunity in all not discriminate because of age, religion, sex, or
The Center for the Study of Southern Culture gratefully acknowledges the following individuals who have made contributions to our program in memory of Julian Wiener. Dale and Ann Abadie • Dorothy H. Crosby Lynn and Stewart Gammill • Pat and Phineas Stevens
I Winter 2002
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George Washington Scholars Institute for Mississippi Teachers To Take Place in Oxford in 2002 The George Washington Scholars Institute for Mississippi Teachers, a week long program for elementary and secondary teachers, offered in collaboration with the Education Department of Mount Vernon on Washington's estate in Virginia, will take place June 1-8, 2002, at the Center. This will be the fourth year that Mount Vernon has offered the institute for Mississippi teachers; however, it will be the first year that the institute will be held in Mississippi. For the first three years it was held at the Washington estate in Virginia. Henceforth the institute will alternate between Mount Vernon and Mississippi every third year, with continuing funding provided primarily by a gift from the Phil Hardin Foundation of Meridian, Mississippi. The institute's weeklong program provides an intensive study of George Washington and his world. The curriculum includes discussions led by noted Washington scholars and hands-on workshops exploring Washington's remarkable accomplishments. Participating teachers will attend sessions conducted by both Mount Vernon historians and educators and Washington scholars from around the country. Through study, discussion, and projects, participants gain a new and deeper understanding of the life and character of George Washington and his unique legacy in creating and shaping the principles of America's democracy. Upon completing the institute, teaches are required to prepare one lesson plan, suitable for publication and distribution to teaches across the nation, providing engaging, quality guidance on teaching about the life and contributions of George Washington. Participants are also required to conduct in-service training William Sommerfield, the actor for other teachers in their home school who often portrays George districts. Washington at Mount Vernon's The George Washington Scholars most important events, and actress Pat Jordan, who plays Institute is made possible thanks to the Martha Washington, will generous support of the Phil Hardin participate in the George Foundation. The Mount Vernon Washington Scholars Institute to Department of Education is planning be held in Oxford June 1-8,In the program in cooperation with the addition to meeting with Center for the Study of Southern participating teachers, Culture and the Mississippi Department Sommerfield and Jordan will give of Education. a public performance during the For additional information, teachers week, Details will be announced and educators may contact Jennifer in regional newspapers and Nance of the Mississippi Department of broadcast media and on the Education at 601-359-2586. Center's Web site (www,olemiss,edu/depts/south),
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McKee Named 2001 Humanities Teacher In celebration of national Arts and Humanities Month last October, the College of Liberal Arts named Kathryn McKee the Mississippi Humanities Council's 2001 Humanities Teacher at Ole Miss. She is McMullan assistant professor of Southern Studies and assistant professor of English.
The award includes a $500 honorarium and requires the recipient to present a lecture. McKee's lecture, presented at Barnard Observatory in October, was titled "Honey, Yer Ain't Half as Smart as Yer Thinks Yer Is: Race and Humor in Sherwood Bonner's Short Fiction." "The lecture on Sherwood Bonner, a 19th-century local color writer from Holly Springs, Mississippi, afforded McKee a chance to demonstrate her abilities as a lecturer and researcher," said Michael P. Dean, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts. "The lecture celebrated he humanities while honoring and showcasing McKee." Recognition is nothing new for McKee. Last spring, she won the Cora Lee Graham Award for Teaching of Freshman Students and was also the recipient of a Fulbright Junior Lectureship. As a Fulbright Scholar, she taught Southern literature and culture classes at the University of Maim in Germany.
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Richard Howorth), then the first of two panels on writing to be moderated by conference favorite Barry Hannah. The first panel, "Submitting Manuscripts/Working One's Way into Print," at 9:00 a.m., will feature Tom Franklin, author of the acclaimed story collection Poachers, and his agent Nat Sobel; novelist Brady Udall (The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint) and his editor, the noted Carol Houck Smith of W.W. Norton; and first-time novelist Sheri Joseph (Bear Me Safely Over). The second panel, "Finding a VOice/Reaching an Audience," at 10:30 a.m., features upand-coming short story writer Steve Almond (My Life in Heavy Metal), noted experimental fiction writer Rick Moody (Demonology, The Ice Storm), playwright/memorist Aishah Rahman (Chewed Water), poet and Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey, and Fiona McCrae, who, as publisher of Greywolf Press, is releasing Trethewey's new book, Bellocq's Ophelia. To help celebrate the launching of a new Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the University, authors who have previously held the John and Renee Grisham Visiting Southern Writer in Residence position will return to speak and read during sessions moderated by English Department chair Joseph Urgo, starting at 1:30 p.m. Among those scheduled to return are Mary Hood, Steve Yarbrough, Darcey Steinke, Claude Wilkinson, Tim Gautreaux, Randall Kenan, and current Grisham writer Tom Franklin. Next year's writer in residence will also be announced during this panel. The day winds down with a cocktail buffet at 7:00 p.m. at Isom Place, the proceeds of which go to benefit the conference. Saturday starts at 9:00 a.m. with the yearly panel "The Endangered Species: Readers Today and Tomorrow," moderated by library and literacy advocate Elaine Scott, editor of the Ledbetter
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(above) A special screening of the film version of Larry Brown's stories Big Bad Love will be shown during the 2002 Oxford Conference for the Book. A panel with Brown (above), actor-director Arliss Howard, and actress Debra Winger will take place prior to the screening. (left) Paula Vogel (below) Natasha Trethewey
Monograph Series at the Center for Arkansas Studies at UALR. Participants will include Claiborne Barksdale, executive director of the Barksdale Reading
Winter 2002
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Aishah Rhaman
Institute, book industry insider and columnist Pat Holt, and author Gloria Jean Pinkney (In the Forest of Your Remembrance) of the beloved Pinkney family of children's writers and illustrators. Pinkney will also visit local schools as part of the Young Authors Fair sponsored by the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford. At 10:30 a.m., Neal Coonerty, president of the American Booksellers Association, will lead a discussion on the book business with Pat Holt, Greywolf Press publisher Fiona McCrae, and Tim Huggins, formerly of the University Press of Mississippi and now owner of one of the country's fastest rising bookstores, Newtonville Books outside of Boston. Curtis Wilkie, author of Dixie and a recent addition to the journalism faculty at Ole Miss, shifts the focus to journalism with his panel "Covering Trouble," at 1:30 p.m. Participants will include Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize winner and chief Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and Thomas Oliphant, a nationally syndicated columnist and frequent guest on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Always a favorite at the conference is the session celebrating National Poetry Month. Led by University of Mississippi English professor Michael P. Dean, the 3:00 p.m. session will feature readings and discussions by Beth Ann Fennelly, whose first collection, Open House, received the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry for a First Book; Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey, who received
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various awards for her first collection, Domestic Work; and distinguished writer William Trowbridge, an editor of the Georgia Review whose most recent collection of poems is called Flickers. Various author readings are slated for the rest of Saturday afternoon, beginning at 4:00 p.m. Among the featured authors are Steve Almond, Richard Flanagan, whose new novel Gould's Book of Fish is a historical epic that has received rave reviews in his native Australia, and Rick Moody, whose memoir, The Black Veil, is due in May. The readings conclude with a discussion and reading at 5:00 p.m. from playwright Paula Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive. The conference day ends with a 6:30 cocktail party at Off Square Books, the proceeds of which go to benefit the conference.
Gloria Jean Pinkney
Sunday, April 14, begins at 8:00 a.m. with a continental breakfast at the Mississippi Hall of Writers in the John Davis Williams Library on the University campus. The breakfast will be hosted by John M. Meador, Dean of University Libraries. More author readings begin at 9:00 a.m., including Ace Atkins (Leavin' Trunk Blues), blues- I~ystery author and recent addition to the University's journalism department; Ole Miss professor David Galef, whose new collection of stories is called Laugh Track; GroveAtlantic author Sheri Joseph; the multifaceted Aishah Rhaman; and one of the hottest up-and-comers in the country, Brady Udall.
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The rest of Sunday is committed to the celebration of Tennessee Williams, beginning at 11:00 a.m. with a presentation of the playwright's one-act play The Gnadiges Fraulein, directed by Michele Cuomo and starring University of Mississippi Theatre students. Dramatic scholar and University English professor Colby Kullman will offer insight. At 1:30 p.m., renowned Williams scholar W. Kenneth Holditch will speak about the playwright in a lecture titled "Southern Comfort: Tennessee Williams and the Landscape of Childhood." Holditch edited the recent two-volume Library of America edition of Williams's complete plays with the acclaimed New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow, who will offer his reflections at 2:30 p.m. Gussow is one of the country's foremost experts on theater, in particular the works of Williams, Arthur Miller, and Harold Pinter. The conference winds down with final readings from Tennessee Williams's plays by off- Broadway theater director Erma Duricko and Holditch at 3:30 p.m. Also on the agenda for this year's Oxford Conference for the Book is the traditional book signing with conference authors at Off Square Books and various unscheduled parties and gatherings. Aside from a handful of events-the cocktail buffet ($50), the Off Square Books cocktail party ($25), and a luncheon on Sunday ($15 )-the conference is open to the public without charge. To assure seating space, those interested in attending should preregister. Contact the Center, either by phone (662-915-5993), fax (662-915-5814), or e-mail (cssc@olemiss.edu). The 2002 conference is partially funded by the University of Mississippi and grants from the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, and the Tribal-State Compact Fund. Sponsors are the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Department of English, Department of History, Department of Journalism, McConnellBarksdale Honors College, John and Renee Grisham Visiting Writers Fund, Barksdale Reading Institute, Sarah Isom Center for Women, Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, and Square Books. JAMIE KORNEGAY
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"Faulkner and His Contemporaries" Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha July 21 ..26, 2002 One of the most striking aspects of Faulkner's relationship to the literature of his time is the combination of his physical remoteness from its leading figures and urban centers and his intellectual grasp of its underlying dynamics. He spent the bulk of his life in the small North Mississippi town of Oxford, rejecting the "revolt against the village," versions of which most of his major contemporaries were carrying out, often to the point of leaving not only their birthplaces but the country itself. Faulkner remained where he was, and yet he was keenly aware of the extraordinary developments taking place elsewhere in the nature of literary expression, and the philosophical, psychological, and cultural shifts that were driving them. "Faulkner and His Contemporaries," the 29th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, will explore the literary and intellectual relations Faulkner shares with other writers as well as the extent to which his work is a reflection of, and a commentary on, theirs. Six scholars appearing at the conference for the first time are Houston A. Baker Jr., of Duke University, Grace Elizabeth Hale, of the University of Virginia, George Monteiro, of Brown
Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
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University, Daniele Pitavy-Souques, University of Burgundy, France, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, of Louisiana State University, and Merrill Maguire Skaggs, of Drew University. Baker, author and editor of more than 25 volumes of criticism and poetry, including Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance and Turning South Again: ReThinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T., will discuss his personal odyssey through Faulkner: he first studied him at
Houston Baker
Merrill Skaggs
Howard University with Toni Morrison, later taught his work in Paris, and has now returned to the South to read him again in North Carolina. Hale, author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, will explore the shifting politics and aesthetics of "loving and hating" the South for Faulkner and his white male contemporaries. , By the 1950s, toward the end of both of their careers, the American writer with whom Faulkner was most often linked and compared was Hemingway. Monteiro, author and editor of studies in both American and Portuguese literature, including Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams,
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Fernando Pessoa and 19th-Century AngloAmerican Literature, and Stephen Crane's Blue Badge of Courage, will trace some "debts" each may have incurred from the other, Faulkner's to Hemingway in the "Wild Palms" section of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and Hemingway's to the "Old Man" section of the same novel in some of his later work. Pitavy-Souques and Prenshaw will take up Faulkner's relationships with some of his Southern contemporaries. Pitavy-Souques, author of two volumes on Eudora Welty, as well as a booklength study of Canadian women writers, will discuss Intruder in the Dust and The Ponder Heart in the context of the civil rights movement and the way in which both texts enact a transgression against the reigning values of the time. Prenshaw, author and editor of volumes on Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, other Southern women writers, and Southern cultural history, will describe the responses of Welty, Spencer, and Ellen Douglas to Faulkner's legacy, with particular attention to the issue of racism. Skaggs, author of two books on Willa Cather, a writer Faulkner much admired, will discuss Faulkner's use of
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Cather's 1922 novel, One of Ours, part of which is set in France during World War I. Returning to the conference will be Deborah Clarke, of Pennsylvania State University, author of Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner, who will bring together Faulkner, Henry Ford, and the automobile culture; Michel Gresset, of the Institut d'Anglais, Universite de Paris 7, author of A Faulkner Chronology and Fascination: Faulkner's Fiction, 19191936, who will address Faulkner's place in the French literary scene; and W. Kenneth Holditch, Research Professor Emeritus of the University of New Orleans, author and editor of numerous studies and editions of the works of Tennessee Williams, who will deal with Faulkner and New Orleans, focusing primarily on his connections with John Dos Passos and Williams. Also returning will be Donald Kartiganer, author of The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels and coeditor with Ann J. Abadie of seven volumes of proceedings of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, who will discuss the role of "gesture" in Faulkner and Hemingway, and Thomas Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, who will consider Faulkner and the photographer Walker
Evans and their respective "images" of the South. In addition to the formal lectures, Reckon Crew, a group of four Nashville singer-songwriters, will present the song cycle As I Lay Dying, evocative musical settings of Faulkner's classic novel. Composers David Olney, Tom House, Karren Pell, and Tommy Goldsmith use folk, country, blues, and gospel styles to accompany Faulkner's story of the Bundrens' sometimes blackly humorous struggle to take Addie Bundren to Jefferson for burial. Other program events will include discussions by Faulkner friends and family; sessions on "Teaching Faulkner" directed by James Carothers, University of Kansas, Robert Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State University, Arlie Herron, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Charles Peek, University of Nebraska at Kearney; and guided tours of North Mississippi. Arlie Herron will present a slide show of photographs of North Mississippi, images, as he puts it, "of things and people that reminded me of Faulkner in Oxford, New Albany, the Hill Country, the Delta, and along the River." The University's John Davis Williams Library will display Faulkner books, manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia; and the University Press of
Saks Incorporated Fellowships Available to High School Teachers for Faulkner Conference Thirty high school teachers chosen from applicants in five Southern states will be attending the University's 29th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 21-26, 2002, without cost, thanks to fellowships funded by Saks Incorporated Foundation, on behalf of McRae's, Proffitt's and Parisian department stores. English and literature instructors in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee are eligible to apply. The Saks Incorporated Fellowships will provide the registration fee and cover expenses for the six-day conference and teacher workshops, including instructional materials and supplies, dormitory lodging, a travel stipend, and a meal stipend. The University will award 3.9 Continuing Education Units for the' teacher workshops and the conference sessions. The application deadline is April 10. Notification will be made by May 10. Requests for fellowship application forms should be submitted to Faulkner Conference-Saks Incorporated Fellowships, The University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 879, University, MS, 38677 -0879. For further information regarding the teacher workshops, teachers may contact the University of Mississippi Center for NonCredit Education by telephone (662-915- 7282) or e-mail (noncred@olemiss.edu).
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Mississippi will exhibit Faulkner books published by university presses throughout the United States. Films relating to the author's life and work will be available for viewing during the week. Ms. Booth's Garden, an exhibition of photographs by Jack Kotz, will be on display in the Gammill Gallery at Barnard Observatory. The conference will begin on Sunday, July 21, with an reception at the University Museums for Paradox in Paradise, an exhibition of mixed media artworks by Lea Barton. This will be followed by an afternoon program of readings from Faulkner and the announcement of the winners of the 13th Faux Faulkner Contest. The contest, coordinated by the author's niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, is sponsored by Hemispheres Magazine/United Airlines, Yoknapatawpha Press and its Faulkner Newsletter, and the University of Mississippi. Other events will include a Sunday buffet supper served at the home of Dr. and Mrs. M. B. Howorth Jr., "Faulkner on the Fringe"-an "openmike" evening at the Southside Gallery, guided day-long tours of North Mississippi on Tuesday, a picnic served at Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, on Wednesday, and a closing party Friday afternoon at Square Books. For more information about the conference, contact the Center for Non-Credit Education, P.O. Box 879, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 386771848; telephone 662-915- 7282; fax 662915-5138, e-mail noncred@olemiss.edu. For on-line information consult www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/faulkner/index.htm, and for on-line registration consult www.ics.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner-yok napatawpha_200 1.html. For information about participating in the conference through Elderhostel, call 877-426-8056 and refer to the program number 24225, or contact Carolyn Vance Smith by telephone (601-446- 1208) or e-mail (carolyn.smith@colin.edu). DONALD M. KART1GANER
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Center Ventress Order Trustees The Ventress Order is a donors group dedicated to strengthening departments and programs in the University's College of Liberal Arts. In recent months, a growing number of friends have joined this Order and committed their donations to the Center. Holt and Lynn McMullan, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, were the first Ventress Order members to designate their gift of $5,000 to benefit the Center. Since then, six other individuals or couples have followed their lead. Ebbie (Mrs. William) Hart, of Jackson, a 1936 graduate of the University, was perhaps the most imaginative with her gift. She made her Ventress donation as a Christmas present in honor of her daughter and son-in-law, Juliet Hart Walton and Gerald W. Walton. Julie earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University and taught here until retiring last spring. Gerald received his Ph.D. from the University, where he remained to teach English, serve as dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Since his retirement in 1999, he has served as a member of the Center Advisory Committee. Vasser Bishop, of Oxford, a founding member of the Center Advisory Committee, recently gave a Ventress Order gift to benefit the Center. In addition to Vasser Bishop and Holt and Lynn McMullan, other members of the Center Advisory Committee who have designated Ventress gifts for the Center are Carlette McMullan, of Chicago, Illinois, and Patricia and Phineas Stevens, of Point Clear, Alabama. Ventress Order donations from a couple,
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From left, Julie Walton and Gerald Walton look at plaque announcing Christmas gift, a donation to the Ventress Order in honor of the Waltons.
Lesley and Joe Urgo, and an individual, Ann Abadie, bring the number of Center-designated gifts to seven. In the coming year, during the celebration of the 25th anniversary, the Center would like to add many more Ventress Order members to its ranks. The program offers various types of contributions: an outright gift of $5,000, a pledge of $1,000 a year for five years, $42 a month for 10 years, or even transfer of property such as stocks, bonds, or art work. If you or someone you know would be interested in learning more about the Ventress Order, and making the Center your Ventress Order funds' beneficiary, please contact Perry Moulds, Liberal
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Ebbie Hart's
Arts Advancement Associate, at 800340-9542. Or, call the Center at 662915-5993 and request help in setting up a Ventress Order/Southern Studies gift. You may also seek donation information on the University's Web site: www.umf.olemiss.edu. Members of the Order have their names inscribed on a plaque displayed at the College of Liberal Arts, housed in historic Ventress Hall, named for James Alexander Ventress, a principal figure in the early history of the University. Members also have the opportunity to conduct business of the Order at its annual membership meeting. All Ventress Order gifts are tax deductible.
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Student Photographers to Exhibit in Gammill Gallery Opening in the Gammill Gallery at Barnard Observatory in late March will be Yoknapatawpha 2001: Town and Country - Work by Southern Studies Photography Students. Ten students, most of whom had no previous photography experience, came together during the fall of 2001 in a Southern Studies gradu-
ate seminar offered by David Wharton. "This was a great group," Wharton says. "From the very start, they had their own ideas of what to photograph and how to photograph it. Some of the work in the show is very poetic and stretches the boundaries of what we normally think of as documentary photography." The students whose work will be exhibited are Molly Boland, Stephen Bowles, Amy Evans, Rob Jolly, Mary
Eli & Elvis, Ole Miss Football Game
Empty Chairs, near Sardis Lake
Beth Lasseter, Preston Lauterbach, Shannon Payne, Katie Vinroot, Rana Wallace, and Joe York. With the exception of undergraduates Bowles and Jolly, all the students are enrolled in the University's master's program in Southern Studies. This exhibition is the second in what the Center projects as an annual spring exhibition of photographs by Southern Studies students in the Gammill Gallery.
At Sky Mart Construction
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Site
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Southern Studies Alumni As the Center prepares to celebrate its Silver Anniversary, the University's Master of Arts degree program in Southern Studies enters its 16th year. Graduates of the program have found jobs in diverse fields such as historic preservation, cultural tourism, documentary studies, historical studies, and filmmaking, and with both academic and cultural organizations and institutions. Also, alumni have entered doctoral programs at William and Mary, Emory, Brown, Vanderbilt, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Florida, among others. The Center is proud of its alumni and in this brief report recognizes the endeavors and accomplishments of some of them. Reports on others will follow throughout the Center's anniversary year. Tamara King (1994) received her Ph.D. in history from Auburn University in 2000 and has just completed her first year teaching history at the University of Georgia. She acknowledges the Southern Studies Program's influence on her current teaching style: "Because I learned about the' South from multiple perspectives, my history classes are better. I can use a variety of approaches to help students learn." Joel Rosen (1993) has taught at several colleges and universities since completing his M.A. degrees in both Southern Studies and sociology at Ole Miss. One of the courses he teaches, Sociology of the Blues, is a direct result, he says, of his Southern Studies classes under Bill Ferris and Peter Aschoff. Rosen is preparing to defend his doctoral dissertation, "Through a Prism of Modern Discourse: The Nature of Competition in American Sport," at the University of KentCanterbury in April of this year. Other Southern Studies alumni are also nearing completion of Ph.D. degrees. Darren McDaniel (1994) is working on his doctorate in sociology at Vanderbilt while living in Orlando and producing and directing a feature film he wrote, set in rural Texas. Bland Whitley (1996), a student at the University of Florida, is completing his dissertation on the relationships between religious and political cultures in Mississippi after the Civil War. Bland and his wife, Sarah Torian (1997), met at the Center while pursuing Southern Studies degrees. Sarah helps edit Southern Changes for the Southern Regional Council. Some Southern Studies alumni are teaching. Robin Morris (2001) was recently hired as educator of Youth and Family Programs at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina. Melissa McGuire Bridgman (1999) has found her "dream job." She has become a potter
and joined an independent potters guild in Memphis. She teaches at the Center for Arts and Education, part of the Memphis Arts Council, and in the public schools. "This was a totally new twist on Southern Studies for me, but I am so glad that I'm able to use my study of self-taught and folk art to make connections with these children's daily lives and environments." Southern Studies students have been uniquely qualified to help lead cultural institutions. Josh Haynes (2001) was recently hired as the community relations and special events coordinator at the Alabama Historical Commission in Montgomery. He joined graduate Patrick McIntyre (1995), who has been the endangered properties coordinator there since 1999. Michelle Weaver Jones (1993) administers a field office of the Historic Preservation Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History housed in the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. Meredith Devendorf operates Melon Bluff, a 3,000-acre nature and heritage center in coastal Georgia. Devendorf's parents assist with the center, which is on family land. For her work, she has received the Cultural Olympiad Regional Designation Award for Excellence and Innovation in Humanities Programming (1994-1995), Best New Tourism Product Award, State of Georgia (1996-1997), and Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year (2000), among others. Allison Finch (1996) currently serves as communications coordinator of Grace Covenant Church in Austin. She previously served as the assistant director of the Walker Percy Internet Literacy Project. The Center is continually enriched by the successesof its graduate students. Likewise, Southern Studies alumni attest to the Center's influence in their current professionsand daily lives.The unique relationship cultivated between the Center and its students and alumni remains strong long after students graduate from the Southern Studies Program. Sudye Cauthen (1993), who is building a house on the banks of the Suwannee River in White Springs, Florida, works at the North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, which she established in 1997. "The Center for the Study of Southern Culture is my proudest affiliation," Cauthen said. "The program gave me perspective on my work and my life and is, arguably, the best single decision I've ever made; friendships in Oxford still sustain me." RANA WALLACE
ANew Season of Thacker Mountain Radio With the New Year in full swing, Thacker Mountain Radio-Oxford's only live radio show- is on the air again. Last season Thacker Mountain treated fans to a great line-up of authors and musicians, and this season's 12 programs promise to be equally entertaining. The
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opening show on Thursday, February 7th, presented the sounds of Carlos Washington & Giant People and the words of author Bernice McFadden. The spring line-up includes authors James McBride, Robert Olen Butler, John Dufresne, Nevada Barr and musical
Winter 2002
guests Lynn Drury, Spencer Boren-and more. Thacker Mountain is free and open to the public every Thursday from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Off Square Books. The show is broadcast on WOXD-Bullseye 95.5 FM and on the Web at
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Documentary Project on Freedom Riders In 1961, hundreds of volunteers from across the country traveled to the South to challenge segregation in interstate bus travel. Known collectively as Freedom Riders, the volunteers met violent resistance and arrest, but their courage helped dismantle discrimination against African Americans. Forty years later, many of those Freedom Riders returned to Jackson, Mississippi, to celebrate their accomplishments. The Center was able to document this significant event as Southern Studies graduate students collected oral histories at the 40th anniversary reunion, held this past November. The students filmed more than 40 interviews, each of which lasted between 30 minutes and an hour. The original tapes will be archived in Special Collections in the John D. Williams Library, where they will be available to students and researchers. The effort in Jackson is part of a larger project led by graduate students Joe York and Amy Evans to produce a series of documentary films about the civil rights movement. Although planning for the project is in the preliminary phase, the students hope to include the films as the centerpiece of a curriculum for teaching the history of the civil rights movement to high school students. The initial plans for the venture also call for an interactive Web site that would allow for the viewer to download the films as an accompaniment to relevant text. York sees the project as a valuable tool in the continuing struggle for civil rights. "To inspire students to take an active role in investigating their own past, their present social surroundings," he said, "and to take an active interest in the future of their world ... that is what the project hopes to do; promote awareness through interesting, engaging, and compelling information." York and Evans gave a Brown Bag program at the Center on January 23. They previewed the rough cut of the first installment of the films, titled A Documentary on Progress. Produced without the benefit of profeSSional editing equipment, the film highlights the interviews with several Freedom Riders, as well as comments from James Forman, secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee from 1961 to1966. Susan Glisson, assistant director of the Center, responded to the initial efforts with enthusiasm. "I can't begin to tell how great the documentary is," Glisson said. "For all the rough technical aspects, the story is compelling. They created a wondelful narrative that's interesting and instructive and sheds new light on one of the most significant social movements of the 20th century."
m
•~
James Forman addressing a group of Freedom Riders at their 40th anniversary reunion, held in Jackson, Mississippi
Glisson and David Wharton, assistant professor of Southern Studies and director of documentary projects at the Center, are assisting the students in their efforts, which will include securing grants to fund the project. Helping York and Evans with the project are graduate students Tiffany Hammelin, Evan Hatch, Preston Lauterbach, and Warren Ables.
www.Bullseye955.com. To check the schedule, find out about past shows, and keep in touch with the folks at Thacker Mountain Radio, visit www.thackermountain.com. Square Books and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture sponsor Thacker Mountain with assistance from local businesses and grants, and we are always looking for new friends to help
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i~ ~
i
WARREN ABLES
keep us afloat. Sponsorships are available, offering businesses the opportunity to advertise to an ever-expanding radio audience. Individuals are invited to become "Friends of Thacker Mountain" by making tax-deductible gifts. For information on becoming a sponsor or friend, please send an e-mail to amy@thackermountain.com. AMY EVANS
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Caroline Herring's New CD Caroline Herring, a 1999 graduate of the Southern Studies Program, launched her first CD, entitled Twilight, on the Blue Corn Music label. Herring performs often in her new home, Austin, Texas, and the Austin Chronicle recently named her the Best New Artist in its critics' poll awards. Herring, who grew up in Canton, Mississippi, came to the University as an undergraduate, earning her bachelor's degree and then returning to enter the Southern Studies graduate program. She wrote a master's thesis on the Mississippi Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, drawing from history and documentary studies. She was a founding member of the Sincere Ramblers, a traditional/bluegrass Oxford band that performed on a late-night radio show from Blind Jim's restaurant and then as the first house band for Thacker Mountain Radio. After graduating, Herring moved to Austin, where she is a student in American Studies at the University of Texas and also works as program coordinator for the Texas Folklife Resources.
She is a regular performer as well at Stubb's Barbecue, a prime Austin musical venue. Twilight contains 10 original songs, plus a cover of Roy Acuff's country music classic, "Wreck on the Highway." Herring's own compositions reflect her feelings since leaving Mississippi and living in the vibrant musical scene of Austin. Mississippi references are throughout, as seen in such song titles as "Mississippi Snow" and "Delta Highway." One of the most evocative songs is "Standing in the Water," which ends with the lines, "goodnight cotton-
landia/ get your ghosts off of me." Many of the lyrics deal with leaving a place you know and love. "Learning to Drive" ends with a narrator observing that the "pretty girl from a Delta town" is driving her U-Haul across the Mississippi River: "lanterns on the levee and a fist full of cotton/ old times there will not be forgotten." These songs are folkcountry, unsentimental, sharply observed, and often ironic. Herring debuted her CD with a performance at Oxford's Proud Larry's last fall. She will be performing in Chapel Hill in March and will return to Oxford in late April as part of the Double Decker Festival. In considering her singing and songwriting success in Austin so far, one is reminded of a line from one song in this CD: "the Carolina moon is rising in the Texas sky." CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
Special Collections to Offer Tennessee Williams Exhibition Baby Doll. Also in the exhibition will be several vintage movie posters based on Williams's work and other paper ephemera. A number of rare Tennessee Williams items are also included in Special Collections 1975- 2000: A Silver Anniversary Exhibition. Highlighting a quarter century of acquisitions, this exhibition includes literary rarities of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Larry Brown, and Richard Wright. The Department of Archives and Special Collections is located on the third floor of the J. D. Williams Library. HOLirs are 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, except for University holidays. For more information, call 662-915-7408.
A special exhibition on Tennessee Williams will open in conjunction with the 2002 Oxford Conference for the Book, which is dedicated this year to the famous playwright from Mississippi. The exhibition, assembled by the University's Department of Archives and Special Collections, will feature several cases devoted to Williams's life and career. The exhibition will open on April 11 and continue through the end of the year. Unique items on display include a signed copy of the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales Magazine, which contains Thomas Lanier Williams's first published work, a short story, "The Vengeance of Nitocris"; a Williams poem printed in the 1932 University of Missouri yearbook; and the annotated typesetting draft for the screenplay of
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Ann Patchett's "Imagination Travel" Last summer, HarperCollins sent Ann Patchett as far north as Chicago and as far west as Seattle to promote Bel Canto, a book loosely based on the 1996 terrorist takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. Reading at Oxford's Square Books in June, Patchett captivated her audience as surely as Roxane Coss, the soprano protagonist, charmed the international guests gathered at the vice president's mansion in an unnamed South American country before the whole company was taken hostage. Patchett has signed each of her four novels at the local store, beginning with The Patron Saint of Liars in 1992, and she was especially pleased to be in town shortly after the successful mayoral campaign of Square Books owner Richard Howorth. A couple of weeks before her latest Oxford appearance, Patchett generously agreed to a long telephone interview, whose subjects ranged from Southern writing to her "musically deprived childhood." Born in Los Angeles, the novelist has lived in Nashville since she was six, and her first publisher marketed Patron Saint of Liars as a Southern novel, describing Patchett on the dustcover as Nashville born. The assumption was that readers would be more interested in a story about characters in a Kentucky home for unwed mothers if they thought she had always lived in the South-even though the novel's main character is herself from California. Reinforcing the early identification of the writer with Southern settings, her second novel, Taft (1994), opens in a Beale Street bar named Muddy's and includes a brief road trip to the Shiloh battlefield. Patchett is "very, very happy to be thought of as a Southern author because Southern audiences have been very good to me." She estimates that readers from this region buy more of her books than people in other parts of the country. Moreover, Patchett's favorite writers include many Southerners. "I'm a huge Faulkner fan-isn't everybody?" she laughed. Light in August-"three times longer and three times easier than most of Faulkner"-is among her top Faulkner novels. Patchett has often cited Eudora Welty as an important influence on her work, and she also rates Carson McCullers highly: "She's one of those authors you read when you're young, and then when you're an adult you think you need to read others, but she's really good." "For contemporary, I love Allan Gurganus," Patchett added. The North Carolina author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and White People was one of her creative writing teachers at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, "and the best I've ever had." Patchett went to Sarah Lawrence with plans t~ become a poet-"I'd spent my childhood reading poems"-but she claims she never wrote "a passingly decent poem," and she realized she wanted to write fiction as soon as she took Gurganus's class. Among the "really good newer writers" she counts Tony Early, who lives in Nashville and has read from Jim the Boy at Square Books. Morgan Freeman's great interest in Patchett's Taft could lead new audiences to consider her as part of the company of
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Ann Patchett
Southern writers. Patchett and Freeman met for the first time at a festive dinner on her visit to Oxford last summer, but she had been in regular communication with him since he bought the screen rights to the novel she calls "the book that bombed." Enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Times and other national media, Taft nevertheless has attracted a smaller readership than Patchett's other three novels. When the students in my Southern women writers course read the book a few years ago, they enjoyed the Memphis locale but suggested that the relationship between Patchett's African American narrator and the white teenager who works in his bar is implausible. Patchett has heard similar reactions from other readers. "Most of the reviews of my earlier books, whether they were positive reviews or negative reviews, said the plots were 'implausible,' even though they seemed very real to me. Anything can happen once; if you can imagine it, it can happen," she remarked. Morgan Freeman wants to play the role of bartender John Nickel, a somewhat unusual casting that necessitated differences in Patchett's screenplay since the protagonist is 34 in her novel. Proud of her mother Jeanne Ray's success as a first-time novelist at 60, Patchett told the Square Books audience that Ray's bestseller Julie and Romeo has been optioned too, by Barbra Streisand. She warned Ray that film rights are no guarantee of an actual production, but Patchett
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clearly appreciates that "Having a film option helps keep me from having a job." Patchett has occasionally taught creative writing at the University of the South and other schools for a semester at a time, leaving the rest of the year free for her own writing. "I wrote for magazines for years," she said, "and I have hundreds of my clippings in boxes at home, but now the novel business occupies my time." She still accepts such irresistible commissions as Gourmet magazine's request for a piece on Italian opera that appeared in the June issue: "Their subtitle is The Magazine of Good Living, and they joke that I'm the 'good living' writer." The Gourmet essay was a natural for the author of Bel Canto, a novel that resonates with Patchett's newfound love of opera. Reviewing the book for Oxford Town, University of Mississippi librarian Amy E. Mark proposed that "opera in Bel Canto serves to help the reader understand how genius and beauty can transform." Before Patchett could portray this transformative magic, however, she had to overcome the lack of any real background in music. "Music was torture to me growing up," she said. "My stepfather was a doctor who was hooked on easy-listening stuff on the radio, and I didn't buy a record until I was 15." Patchett knows that writing instructors often caution students not to write about anything they don't know well, but she likes to "learn something new with every book, and for Bel Canto that was opera." Unfortunately, her preliminary efforts to appreciate the form were less than inspiring: "At first, I put Wagner on and hated it." But Fred Plotkin's guidebook, Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera, taught her how to listen. Patchett spent hours reading libretti, then rereading them along with the music. She stresses the need for total concentration: "It's hard to do anything else while really listening to opera. You can't fold laundry or dust!" Consonant with the tragic melodrama of opera plots, the action of Bel
Canto "pulls out all the stops," says Patchett. "In writing courses, you hear that melodrama is a big no-no, but I wondered what it would be like to follow that melodramatic inclination." In fact, melodramatic moments occur in all her books; and her third novel, The Magician's Assistant (1997), with its startling revelations and visionary dreams, sets the stage for the high drama of Bel Canto. The vivid contrasts, in Magician's Assistant, between warm Los Angeles"where everyone is from somewhere else"-and chilly, homogeneous Nebraska anticipate the fatal clashes in the polyglot multiculture of Bel Canto. The amazing effect of Roxane Coss's beautiful singing on hostages and terrorists alike seems even more surreal and dream-like in light of this fall's all-tooreal terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Yet, author Robb Forman Dew recently found "solace" in Patchett's novel because "it delineates the way we manage to sustain hope." The scope and setting of Bel Canto are reminiscent of the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an author Patchett admires; but she sees her latest novel as "an homage to The Magic Mountain." Thomas Mann's novel takes place in a tuberculosis sanitarium, "with love and intrigue among patients from all over the world who were forced to lie down for years at a time"-analogous to the weeks' long isolation of Patchett's characters. At the end of Magic Mountain, the convalescent Hans Castorp is abruptly sent off to war; and, says Patchett, "You're pushed out into a world you weren't prepared for by anything that happened earlier." Patchett's well-crafted fiction has pushed her characters too into a series of new realms, from Saint Elizabeth's Home in Habit, Kentucky, to Vice President Ruben Iglesias's elegant South American mansion. For Ann Patchett, "The imagination is wonderful, and I like the idea of imagination travel." Her many readers eagerly await the next journey. JOAN WYLIE
HALL
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Reading the South One Family. Photographs and text by Vaughn Sills. Foreword by Robert Coles. With poems by Tina Toole Truelove. 164 pages. 143 black and white photographs. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. $29.95 cloth. One afternoon in 1979, while visiting friends in Athens, Georgia, Vaughn Sills asked the driver of the pickup she was riding in to pull over. She got out, unloaded her camera equipment, and began making photographs of two children playing in front of a small wooden house on the edge of town. By the end of the afternoon, she had also photographed the children's mother, an older sister who had arrived home from school in the midst of the picture-making, and several family dogs. She went back the following day, this time making photographs inside the Toole family's tiny home. The next day she flew back to Boston, unaware that she had embarked on a project that would take two decades to complete and generate thousands of photographs, hours of taped interviews, lasting friendships with members of the Toole family, and this very fine book. Sills didn't see the Tooles again for another year and a half, when she next visited Athens. Even then, she had no plan to continue photographing the family; she was merely doing the courtesy of taking them prints from those first two afternoons of photography-or so she thought. But she had a camera with her, more members of the Toole family were there for her to meet, and they were willing to be photographed. By the end of the day, she had made many
Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
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more pictures and knew, she tells us, that the Tooles' home "was clearly the place to be." For the next 18 years, Sills returned to Georgia almost annually, spending a week or so each time with the Tooles. Over the years, she got to know more of their extended and expanding family, watched the children grow and the adults age, and became privy to their joys and heartaches. She photographed throughout and, beginning in 1988, tape-recorded interviews with several family members. I was slow to realize what a good book this is. The first time I leafed through it, giving the photographs a quick look, I was unimpressed. Don't get me wrong: th~ pictures were well seen, nicely reproduced, etc., etc., but as images they seemed limited and repetitive-shifting combinations of the same dozen or so members of the
Toole family posing on sparsely furnished front porches; people socializing in front of dilapidated wooden houses or well-used mobile homes; a number of dingy, claustrophobic interiors. At first glance, One Family looked like just another bunch of pictures about Southern poverty-wellcrafted pictures perhaps, but still. ... I was wrong. These pictures appear repetitive to only the most cursory glance. A more careful look reveals levels of richness and depth that makes each image fascinating, especially in the book's cumulative context. Sequenced chronologically over a span of twenty years, the photographs show the Toole family growing and changing. We see those who were children in the early pictures become adults who eventually appear in later photographs with children of their own. We see Joel and Lois Toole,
For these and other books call 800-648-4001 or fax 601-234-9630'/1 160 Courthouse
Winter 2002
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Reading the South continued
the parents of that first generation of children, start to age, then begin to look ill, and eventually disappear. Interspersed throughout are excerpts from Sills's interviews with various members of theToole family. In combination, the pictures and the texts portray a four-generation family living lives made difficult by poverty but nonetheless enriched by each member's presence. One Family fits within a long tradition of using photography to examine the lives of poor Southerners. It invites obvious comparisons to Walker Evans's and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Both books focus on poor white families in their homes; both treat their subjects as individuals rather than as types; both combine words and pictures to explore depths neither medium seems apable of on its own; both achieve a level of intimacy-Evans and Agee in a brief but intense burst, Sills through long duration-unattainable by most documentary workers. But there are important differences as well, not the least of which is how radically our thinking about such projects has evolved over the 65 years separating the two, an evolution Sills has had the benefit of, while Evans and Agee did not. Suffice it to say that neither book should be burdened by-or judged against-the other. Each should be taken for what it is and judged by what it achieves within its own historical context. In the case of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, we know that to be a lot. That is also true of Vaughn Sills's book. Anyone interested in the South, or documentary practice, should be familiar with One Family. DAVID WHARTON
The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after "I'll Take My Stand." Edited by Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood. Published
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for the Southern Texts Society. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. 310 pages. $45.00. This book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the Southern Agrarians, whose ]'11Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) made a lasting impression on Southern literature and social thought. Scholars have examined the Agrarians mostly in terms of that book, but Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood open a new avenue of investigation with this carefully edited volume of primary sources. After Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the New Deal, half of the original Agrarians began writing articles refining and defending a more concrete version of an Agrarian philosophy than they had presented in their book at the beginning of the 1930s. As Bingham and Underwood note, in these new essays "they presented themselves as social thinkers whose ideas could and should be translated into public policy." I'll Take My Stand had rested Agrarianism's meaning on a spiritual rejection of industrial materialism and on embracing aesthetic meanings of life, but in these essays of the 1930s the Agrarians tried to explain the benefits of a rejection of monopoly capitalism and its values and the potential economic and social advantages of small-scale agriculture. The Agrarian writings of the 1930s have not been accessible before, and the editors have provided an important service in bringing these six extended essays together and providing appropriate scholarly annotations. In doing so, they shift the focus of interpretation as'to who commentators should see as the architects of the movement. Traditionally, scholars have seen John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, all of whom had been a part of the Fugitive poetry movement, as the founders of
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Agrarianism. Bingham and Underwood point toward three other Agrarians-Andrew Lytle, H. C. Nixon, and Frank Owsley- as being central to the movement to make Agrarianism not just a literary statement but a political ideology. The Agrarian philosophy is still relevant as a critique of American capitalism, as seen in contemporary writers like Wendell Berry embracing many of its specific points. It still figures as well in understanding of Southern racial politics in the 20th century. The Agrarians rarely wrote about African Americans until the 1930s, leaving them out altogether in their often idealized view of Southern rural life, but Bingham and Underwood show how later, racist essays by Davidson and Owsley "chart the devolution of the movement from a promising critique of modern American industrialism to a jeremiad about preserving the 'organic' structure of the South." This volume is significant in helping anyone interested in the Agrarians to see the full sweep of their thought, to more fully understand the literary, political, and cultural meanings of their work. The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal is a publication of the Southern Texts Society, founded in 1988 to produce volumes of primary documents or rare texts and to advance understanding of the culture of the American South. Michael O'Brien is editor of the series. CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life. By Hubert H. McAlexander. Louisiana State University Press, 2001. 338 pages. $34.95. For a number of reasons, most of which are too complex to go into in a brief review, Peter Taylor has never garnered the attention and praise that his work merits. A brilliant stylist and a master of the short story, Taylor is a
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Reading the South continued
Peter Taylor A Writer's Life
Hubert H. McAlexander
deeply Southern writer who was trained by many of the acknowledged Southern masters-J ohn Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warrenand whose work resembles none of them. That's part of the problem: identified closely with the big male guns of Southern literature, he doesn't write like them. Unlike most of the giants of 20thcentury Southern literatureFaulkner, Wolfe, Warren, Wright, to name several, whose fiction characteristically centers upon grand traumatic social dislocations and spectacular events, with all the required architecture of Southern defeat, gloom, and grotesquerieTaylor writes quiet and nuanced fiction focusing on complicated individuals in ordinary situations that, in Taylor's hands, tum out to be extraordinary. Taylor explores the myriad dynamics of human relationships, particularly the next-to-invisible fault lines that mark all human interaction. In all this, Taylor's work most resembles that of Henry James, an author who rarely gets mentioned in terms of Southern influence. Hubert McAlexander's new biography, Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life, no
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doubt will go a long way in helping to bring deserved attention to Taylor. Taylor's life is pretty much the stuff of his stories-not spectacularly traumatic or dramatic, but rich and complex in its own quiet way. McAlexander turns out to be the perfect Taylor biographer because he's as sensitive and nuanced in his analysis and writing as Taylor himself. And he also knows his material, particularly in providing the context of Taylor's life, which turns out to be almost as much of the story as Taylor himself. Taylor knew and hung out with scores of the most important literary figures of the century-it's pointless even to begin a list-and McAlexander does an extraordinary job in discussing these figures knowledgeably both in terms of their individual quirkiness and their artistic significance-and of course their personal importance to Taylor. Taylor emerges in McAlexander's biography in all his complexity, a man whose surface gentility and sociability masked struggles as dark and disturbing as we all suffer.Taylor is one of our masters, and McAlexander has given us a masterful biography. All in all, it's a superb work, a model of what the subtitle says it is-a writer's life. ROBERT
H.
will engage anyone interested in Blanche DuBois's fate-as well as that of New Orleans, Mississippi, and the Old South. Streetcar has now been on the stage for 54 years. Judging from Kolin's documentation and expertise in Tennessee Williams, this book is the result of years of research in various libraries, theatre archives, and theatre companies from around the world. Highly readable and accessible, Kolin's text weaves critical commentary into observations on matters of staging, characterization, and representation of place. One of the key themes that runs throughout Streetcar's history is how the South has been represented on stage and how has it changed over the years. Jean Cocteau staged New Orleans as if it were a Southern Marseilles, the South in the Tokyo premiere is a microcosm of post- World War II American culture-the scene of occupation, and the South is "Hollywood-esque" in the 1973 West Coast 25th anniversary production. Kolin knows more about Streetcar than almost any other scholar. He has
BRINKMEYER JR.
Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire. By Philip C. Kolin. Plays in Production Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 229 pages. $ 54.95 cloth, $ 19.95 paper. Tennessee Williams is Mississippi's and America's most popular playwright, and A Streetcar Named Desire is beyond doubt his most famous play. Philip Kolin's book-in the prestigious Cambridge University Press Plays in Production series-is the first production and cultural history of the play. Deftly blending critical theory with performance history, Kolin's text
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PHIlJPC.
KOLIN
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uncovered valuable information on national premieres of the play in France, Sweden, China, Japan, Mexico, England, Australia, and Ireland. Especially praiseworthy is the way Kolin analyzes the script as it has been adapted to various cultures so as to "translate or mediate" American cultural icons to these countries. Kolin also assesses Streetcar in other media-the Vivien LeighMarlon Brando film in 1951, the various white and black ballet versions, and the Andre Previn opera in 1998. In the latter, Blanche appears not as a neurasthenic personality but as a "belting-it-out" diva. Just as the South has undergone transformations, so have Blanche and Stanley. Today, argues Kolin, Blanches are more tough, comic; and it is Stanley who has become more vulnerable. For anyone interested in how the South has been represented on stage and in film, there is no better place than Kolin's history of Streetcar. In line with cultural geography, Kolin also includes coverage of how desire (sex and gender) have been exp lored through Tennessee Williams's script. In fact, Williams defined "desire" for America .. Kolin provides one of the first analyses of Belle Reprieve, a 1991 gay-lesbian adaptation of the play. He also explores the history of all-black theatre companies doing the play. No actor owns the part of Blanche or Stanley. An all-black Streetcar is also a part of the legacy of the South. Kolin's book is heavily documented with theatre materials not easy to come by-overseas reviews, playbills, photographs, interviews. Most remarkable are rare production photos (Mexico in 1948 and Germany in 1974) as well as Kolin's full bibliography and production history. This book is an excellent companion volume to Kolin's Confronting Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire": Essays in Cultural Pluralism (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1992).
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1 have taught Streetcar for the past 30 years, first at the University of Kansas and now at the University of Mississippi, and my Mid-Western students have loved the playas much as my Southern students. Its appeal is universal. If you are interested in Tennessee Williams, Streetcar-or the South or Blanche DuBois or desirethen this book is a must. You will not be able to miss it in your favorite bookstore as the cover is scarlet red. That says it all. COLBY H. KULLMAN
Radical Education in the Rural South: Commonwealth College 1922-1940. By William H. Cobb. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. 263 pages. $34.95. Radical Education in the Rural South is <in amazingly full account of an obscure little college in Arkansas that existed for only 18 years. Being familiar with Commonwealth College only from Arkansas political campaigns, I thought, at first glance, the book looked like more than anyone would ever want to know about the place. But this detailed account of the origins and operations of the College and the fascinating cast of characters involved is well written and inSightful and, best of all, fun to read. And despite, or possibly because of, William Cobb's exhaustive scholarship, the book left me wanting to know more. Cobb has access to previously unexamined materials through family connections, his scholarship is exhaustive, and his broad academic background enables him to set the college and its mission in the larger context of social and educational movements since the end of the last century. He notes in the introduction that long-time "Commoners" Raymond and Charlotte Koch
Winter 2002
termed the school an "educational commune." Cobb makes the case that it is "thus an impossible hybrid of two full-time occupations that could not successfully coexist." Each chapter of the book deals with an aspect of the development of the school, beginning with a look at its philosophical underpinnings. In the extensive documentation, however, it is frustra ting to find some of the intriguing human interest stories unexplained or clarified only later, in a footnote to something else that could easily have been missed. The only shootout at the College, described on page170 in interesting detail, is clarified by a long footnote on page179 dealing with plans for change at the College. The "continuous extramarital affairs" of one of the union officers, noted in that footnote, change the reader's perception of the shooter from suspicious crank to understandably aggrieved husband. It is especially frustrating to have, at the end of a paragraph containing a quotation one might like to revisit, a single footnote citing multiple sources. The strength of the book is that it makes the reader want to follow up on numerous fascinating connections. Some 30 pages of photographs in the middle of the book give a good sense of the isolation of the school and the rustic nature of the facilities. With the exception of one stunning photograph by Dorothea Lange, they are the kinds of pictures everyone has in family albums, and they are wonderful evocations of the time and place, a helpful addition to the scenes recreated by the text. Despite the very small number of people involved-an estimated total of 1,500 people over the life of the College, its connections with other labor and liberal organizations ranged from unions, including the AFT, to small literary magazines, to the ACLU, to theater groups, giving its students access to a wealth of influences, ideas, and heroes of the
The Southern Register
Reading the South continued
day. They, in turn, went on to influence others in a measure disproportionate to their small numbers. This history helps to clarify the stories of a number of other historical entities and movements. The story of Commonwealth College continues to resonate in the present, and knowing more about this experiment in education helps us think about the relationship of jobs and education, about teaching methods in higher education, and certainly about the difficulties of creating any new school. Perhaps the lesson of Commonwealth College (and a reason it was not a complete failure) was the very reason it could not succeed-its paradoxical nature. Although there were certainly more immediate issues of personality and politics that could easily have led to its failure, this history clearly shows the limitations inherent in such a venture and so perhaps allows us to try more workable ventures. Cobb celebrates the sense of mission and the intellectual ferment of the place and the times, and he leaves me wholeheartedly echoing his last sentence, "But wasn't it great while it lasted!" That goes for the book, too. ELAINE H. SCOTT
panache. Bass, the author or coauthor of six books, and Thompson, an investigative editor for the Washington Post, are seasoned reporters, who have long covered Thurmond. This book is significant for shedding light on Thurmond's place and time. South Carolina holds a unique spot in Southern history. It represented a distinctive society of Low Country planters with ties to the Caribbean and upcountry yeoman with the fiercely individualistic and violent ways found throughout the South's hill country. Thurmond is from Edgefield County, one of the South's most famous, and notorious, places, home of planter and U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond in the 19th century and Ben Tillman, the rabid racist who became U.S. Senator in the 20th century. "Blood ran thicker and honor ran hotter in Edgefield," Bass and Thompson write, "a county more Faulknernian than William Faulkner's and seared by a history of explosive political violence." The biography also illuminates the post-World War II South. A hero of the war, Thurmond was elected governor of South Carolina after the war as a reforming New Deal liberal, but
,
Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson
01' Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond. By Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson. Marietta, Georgia: Longstreet Press, 1998. 2 n pages. $24.00. South Carolina voters reelected Strom Thurmond to his sixth eightyear term as United States Senator in 1996, and he will be more than a hundred years old when his term expires. He is undeniably one of the South's most influential politicians in the 20th century, and this biography traces his career with wonderful
The Southern Register
An Unauthoriud Biography of STROM THUMIOND Winter 2002
he radically changed course and established himself in 1948 as the segregationist candidate of the Dixiecrat party. The Dixiecrat rebellion broke the solid South attachment to the Democratic party that had existed since the late 19th century and opened the way to the rise of the Republican party in the 1950s and after. Thurmond's legacy is a most significant one in reshaping the national Republican party, promoting a two-party South, helping elect Richard Nixon, and changing the orientation of the Supreme Court. Thurmond's racial politics are a major theme of this biography. Other than George Wallace, no politician represented resistance to civil rights more clearly than Thurmond. He filibustered against the 1957 Civil Rights Act in a marathon performance that still is a record in the Senate. When pressures forced the South to abandon segregation, Thurmond adapted to the new realities and began courting and winning African American votes. Unlike Wallace, Thurmond never recanted his earlier segregationist views and even denied they were as harsh as they were. The biography also represents the most detailed investigation of Thurmond's relationship with Essie Mae Washington, a black woman who likely was his child. Thurmond financially supported her and visited her several times each year while she was a student at South Carolina State College. The authors make good use of their understanding of historical patterns of white men with "colored offspring," in the language of the older South. They compare Thurmond's relationship with that of Faulkner's grandfather, who sired an African American child. Jack Bassnow teaches at the College of Charleston, but he formerly taught in the Southern Studies curriculum at the Center, and this book draws from his interdisciplinary understanding of
Page 19
Reading the South continued the South to place Thurmond's story is a broad perspective that will entertain and inform readers. CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
The Wind Done Gone. By Alice Randall. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 200l. 210 pages. $22.00. When Alice Randall first tried to publish The Wind Done Gone, Margaret Mitchell's heirs protested. They asserted that her novel, by turns deemed a parody, a critique, and a neo-slave narrative, borrowed too heavily from Mitchell's Gone with the Wind to be considered a literary wotk. in its own right. After a highly publicized legal battle in which the court wrangled with the definition of parody, Houghton Mifflin won the right to publish Randall's book in 2001. The legal furor surrounding the recent publication of The Wind Done Gone has not been matched by equal critical acclaim. Randall's novel takes the form of diary entries from Scarlett O'Hara's mulatto half-sister, Cynara, and inverts Old South myths celebrated in Gone with the Wind. In Randall's vision, blacks are secretly in control, determining not only the course of their own lives but also the lives of their "masters," engineering their marriages and masterminding life on the plantation. Mitchell's simple (minded) slaves Mammy, Pork, and Prissy become Mama, Garlic, and Miss Priss, controlling and subverting Lady (Miss Ellen), Planter (Gerald), Other (Scarlett), Mealy Mouth (Melanie), R. (Rhett), and Dreamy Gentleman (Ashley). Tara becomes Tata, Twelve Oaks is Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees, and Cynara usurps many of Scarlett's best scenes from Mitchell's book. Randall's prose is inconsistent, sometimes awkward, and only occasionally lyrical, so that it is difficult
Page 20
Call for Papers to consider the novel as a standalone work. In fact, the text's strengths are confined to its relationship to Gone with the Wind; a reader unfamiliar with Mitchell's text would be hard- pressed to find any merit in the novel. However, when compared to Gone with the Wind, Randall's work is interesting, if only in discerning how she will next upend Mitchell's text. Randall overturns Mitchell's Civil War saga largely through point of view. Not only is Cynara our narrator, but Randall also explores other neglected characters' secret pain: Mammy's passion for Gerald and obsession with Scarlett, Ellen's tragic affair with her cousin "Feeleepe," Belle Watling and Ashley Wilkes's homosexuality. It is for this reason that Randall has been called a literary spokeswoman for both African Americans and for homosexuals. According to Toni Morrison, Quincy Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ishmael Reed, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Randall has created a classic parody that assails racism. For Fred Goss, of the Advocate, Randall "strikes a blow for gays and lesbians" since the only two positive white characters in her novel are homosexual. It is also possible to view Randall's work as a feminist/postmodern retelling of Gone with the Wind since Cynara claims the story for herself, using only her own viewpoint as the barometer of truth, and traverses a journey to love within the complicated context of the postbellum South. Perhaps this is the vigor of Randall's vision: she acknowledges the convoluted bonds of race, gender, and class in the South. As Cynara writes, "When you can't protect a thing you love, it's'natural to come to hate that thing a little bit more each and every time it's injured." Randall's heroine comes to understand that hatred as she learns to forgive, and eventually to love, her mother, her race, and herself. KATE COCHRAN
Winter 2002
The 30th Annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference "Faulkner and the Ecology of the South" The University of Mississippi J uly 20~25, 2003 The concept
of ecology has come to have a
dual focus, referring to the systems of relations that exist both constructed
in the natural
ing to the relationships isms and their other
world and the
world. These systems, one pertainbetween natural organ-
physical
with human
environments,
well as physical environments, regarded as interdependent. has recently
are increasingly As Lawrence Buell
put it, one of the major tasks of
ecocriticism
"is to put 'green' and 'brown' land-
scapes, the landscapes alization,
the
groups and their social as
of exurbia and industri-
in conversations
with each other."
One of the aims of the 2003 conference explore
that
"conversation"
Faulkner's
fiction.
Faulkner
was attentive
Throughout
in
his career
to the communities
Jefferson and human
groupings-familial,
and country,
African
white,
is to
as it exists
of town
American,
and
to the specific settings of
Native American-and
those groups within their natural and constructed environments.
The play of setting and indi-
vidual and group dynamics human
vacillates
between
is constant,
as the
struggle against the
various forms of environment
and a desire to act
in accord with them. Here are some of the questions be addressed:
that might
How does Faulkner's
develop and change in its depiction
fiction of the eco-
logical situation?
Do ecological
moral and ethical
issues in the fiction? Is there
any kind of consistent
issues become
Yoknapatawpha
ecolo-
gy? How does the fiction treat the phenomena of weather, between
"natural"
disaster,
the relations
town and county, animal and human?
To what extent
does Falkner's
the larger Southern
fiction
reflect
ecological situation
within
which much of that fiction takes place? We are inviting 50-minute and IS-minute
papers
plenary addresses
for this conference.
Plenary papers consist of approximately
6,000
words and will be published
by the University
Press of Mississippi.
papers
approximately
Short
consist
of
2,500 words and will be deliv-
ered at panel sessions. For details, consult
the Center's
(www.olemiss.edu/depts/south) Donald Kartiganer
Web site or e-mail
(dkartiga@olemiss.edu).
The Southern Register
SFA Field Trip Announced Join the Southern Foodways Alliance for its second Field Trip, A Taste of the Texas Hill Country, to be held June 1415 in and around the city of Austin, Texas. Over the course of a day and half, we will explore the idea of where the South ends and the West begins. Scheduled to coincide with Austin's Juneteenth celebration, this Field Trip highlights, among other distinctive regional foods, barbecue. We're planning pit boss panels that take stock of the region's complimentary German, African American, and Hispanic influences. And you can be sure that there will be ample opportunities to sample the best of the pits when we head out on a tour of nearby smoke shacks, from Kreutz Market in Lockhart to Mueller's in Taylor. , Product sampling and a cooking class will take place at one of the region's most popular culinary destinations, Central Market, while accommodationsoffered at the reduced rate of $125 per night-will be provided by the venerable Driskill Hotel. Registration, priced at $135 for members and $150 for nonmembers, may be accomplished by emailing tastetexasbbq@hotmail.com.
Philosophy and Food Conference Debuts Know Thyself: Philosophy and the Human Condition, the first Philosophy and Food Conference, will be held on the campus of Mississippi State University on April 5-6. For information about events, speakers, and registration, contact Glen Kuehn at philchef@bellsouth.net.
Feast Here Tonight: A Benefit for Ronni Held February 8 in Louisville Louisville, Kentucky, restaurateurs joined with national cookbook authors for Feast Here Tonight: A Benefit for Ronni, on Friday, February 8th. Ronni Lundy, an SFA founder, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer late last year. This special benefit paired cookbook authors with Louisville area restaurants to raise funds to help offset Lundy's medical expenses. Restaurants collaborated with the cookbook authors to design special dinners featuring the author's recipes. Authors were on hand to autograph books. The benefit was sponsored in part by Brown-Forman, the Camberley Brown Hotel, FSA Group, Gourmet magazine, Hawley-Cooke Booksellers, the Seelbach Hilton, the Southern Foodways Alliance, White Lily, and Woodford Reserve. More than 15 area restaurants participated, including Asiatique, Baxter Station, Club Grotto, the English Grill, Equus, Harper's, Holly Hill Inn, Jack Fry's, Jicama, Lilly's, Lynn's Paradise CafE, Napa River Grill, the Oakroom, the Patron, Rudyard Kipling, Shariat's, Vince Staten's Barbecue, and Winston's. Featured authors were Ben and Karen Barker, Crescent Dragonwagon, Nathalie Dupree, John T. Edge, John Egerton, Roy Finamore, Damon Fowler, Sarah Fritschner, Jessica Harris, Matt and Ted Lee, Louis Osteen, and Jane Lee Rankin. Also, 100 illustrated, first editions of The Monroe Elegies, Lundy's monograph on Bill Monroe, were on sale at various locations around Louisville, including Hawley Cooke Booksellers (502-895-6789). At press time, a few copies remained.
It's How You Pick the Crab: An Oral Portrait of Eastern Shore Crab Picking This lovely paperback monograph, which focuses upon the crabbing communities of Maryland's Eastern Shore, is the culmination of three years of research on the crab picking industry's cultural and economic history. The work uses oral histories with crab pickers and packinghouse owners, and represents a collaborative effort between the pickers and folklorist Kelly Feltault. You can order the book through the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum by calling 410-745-2916 and asking for the museum store.
2002 Southern Foodways Symposium to Explore Barbecue Culture October 17..20 The dates are set for the 2002 edition of the Southern Foodways Symposium: October 17-20, here in Oxford, Mississippi. This year's theme is barbecue culture. Look for more details to come. Registration opens late in the summer.
Glory Foods Scholarship Winners Three students from three Southern states received what many chefs, food writers, and food lovers sought for months: admission to the sold-out Fourth Annual Southern Foodways Symposium held at the University of Mississippi October 25-28,2001. The winners were Kalisha Blair of Johnson and Wales University in Charleston, South Carolina, Leandris Liburd of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Lee D'andre McCarter of Culinard: The Culinary Institute of Virginia College in Birmingham, Alabama. These scholarships were sponsored by Glory Foods. The company's president, the late Bill Williams, was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and was committed to enhancing the presence of African Americans in the food industry. Scholarships covered the $325 conference cost, as well as $475 for travel and lodging expenses. The three winners submitted the best essays that explored connections between the farm and the table in the South. Blair said she has been watching cooking shows since she was eight years old. "Cooking is the only thing I could ever think of doing," said the Washington, D.C., native, who is a line cook at Edgar's Restaurant on the Wild Dunes Resort in Charleston. After school, she plans to go
SOUTHERN
FOODWAYS
to Australia on a study-abroad program to examine the country's cuisine and food development. "I have learned more about Southern food culture, the history and how it evolved," she said of her experience in Oxford. Scholarship recipient Leandris Liburd, a second-year medical anthropology graduate student, is on an educational leave from her job at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. She is studying diabetes prevention and management and its relation to obesity in African American women. Her research centers on the role eating plays in social interactions in the African American culture and the distinctions, if any, between soul food and Southern cuisine. "There's something about food and
home and the emotional attachments that people make with food," said Liburd, who hopes to teach and conduct additional research after graduation. "I really enjoyed attending the conference." McCarter, a first-year student among an inaugural class of culinary arts students at Culinard, said curiosity drove him to apply for a scholarship. Currently engaged in food research, he said he hasn't yet chosen a culinary profession, but thinks the symposium helped provide him with direction. "The sky's the limit," McCarter said. "There are so many aspects I want to stop and take a sober look at." The SFA hopes to repeat this scholarship program for 2002. For further information, contact SFA director John T Edge.
Sad News: Bill Williams of Glory Foods Passes SFA is sad to report that Bill Williams, president and co-founder of Glory Foods, died on Thursday, December 27, following complications from a heart attack. He was 57. A pioneer in Southern food product manufacturing, Williams spoke at the 2000 Southern Foodways Symposium. Family members request that memorial tributes to Williams be made in the form of contributions to the American Heart Association or the Kidney Foundation.
ALLIANCE
narne
___
company
_
address
__
city
state
telephone
fax
zip
_
Please make checks payable to the Southern Foodways Alliance Center
and mail them to the for the Study of Southern University,
_
__ 0$25
student
o $200 nonprofit
0 $50 individual institutions
0 $75 families
0 $500 corporations
Culture
MS 38677.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, VISIT US AT OUR WEB SITE, www.olem;ss.edu/depts/south/foodwaysorcallJohnT.Edge.SFAO;recror.at
662.915.5993 or v;a ema;! at johnt@olem;ss.edu
Historic Delta School Being Saved A historic schoolhouse in Drew, Mississippi, will be restored thanks to a $382,000 African American Heritage Preservation grant from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The school was built for black children in 1928 through the philanthropic efforts of Julius Rosenwald and served as the desegregated elementary school in Drew in the late 1970s. The structure, known locally as the "Little Red Schoolhouse" was abandoned in the 1980s and fell into disrepair. The Holly Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Drew purchased the building, hoping to restore it for use as a community center. In 2001, Luther Brown, from Delta State University, and Susan Glisson, from the University of Mississippi, prepared the grant application, which calls for the original structure to be refurbished and opened as a community center offering special services to the local youth and elderly people. Two adjacent structures that were added in the 1950s will be "moth-balled" to prevent vandalism and trespassing into those unsafe structures. Along with Drew community members, Brown and Glisson serve on an advisory board that will oversee the project. Last fall, Southern Studies students and members of Students Envisioning Equality through Diversity (SEED) from the University of Mississippi, students and faculty from Delta State, and members of the Sunflower County Freedom School, an after-school and summer tutoring program, gathered to help launch the project. They spent a day removing damaged furniture and refuse from the schoolhouse to prepare it for structural improvements to be paid for by the grant. Residents of Drew assisted the volunteers and provided lunch for everyone. They shared fond memories of their days at "Little Red." Since then, members of the local community have continued the cleanup of the building. Professional work will soon begin on the project, which is due to be complete within three years. PRESTON
The Southern Register
LAUTERBACH
University of Mississippi students Schoolhouse" in Drew, Mississippi.
take a break from work at the "Little
Red
Lynn & Stewart Gammill Gallery EXHIBITION
SCHEDULE
January 7 - March 15, 2002 Black Rodeo Ken Jones
August 19 - October 18, 2002 One Family Vaughn Sills
March 18 - May 31 ,2002 Yoknapawwpha 2001 : Town and Country Southern Studies Documentary Photography Students
October 21,2002 - January 31,2003 25 Years of Studying the South Center for the Study of Southern Culture Anniversary Exhibition
June 3 - August 16, 2002 Ms. Booth's Garden Jack Kotz
The Gammill Gallery, located in Barnard Observatory, is open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a,m.~5:00 p.m., except for University holidays. Telephone: 662~915~5993. Winter 2002
Page 23
Students Help Clean Old Cemetery Near Oxford The Oxford Homeschool Network has been cleaning and beautifying the Buckner-Craig-Isom Cemetery (Old Taylor Road, two miles south of Highway 6), burial site of some of the original settlers of Lafayette County. Included in this graveyard is John J. Craig, who donated part of the 50 acres of land to the Lafayette County Board of Police for a county seat, which became the town of Oxford. In addition to the 11 family graves, there are also many rock-marked graves of migrant workers, thought to be Italian or Swiss, who died in a nearby train wreck. As part of a community service and hands-on learning project, the Oxford Homeschool Network has cleared the dense overgrowth from the graves, spread mulch, repeatedly cleaned up an inordinate amount of roadside litter, and planted daffodils. They have also planted 10 mums and two flats of pansies donated by Jones Nursery and a half flat of pansies donated by the Garden Center. Anne Percy, who is currently writing a history of Oxford, spoke to the stu-
Students cleaning the Buckner-Craig-lsom (left) and Dylan Reithel.
Cemetery near Oxford are Frank Shughart
dents about the early settlers. Percy received a master's degree in Southern Studies in May 1994. The cemetery was donated to the Center for Study of Southern Culture by
the David Reese Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1990. HILARY SHUGHART
A Note to Those Interested in Traditional Country Music Nashville continued its destruction of its musical history this week (December 26-27) with the sudden and unexpected demolition of the original Country Music Hall of Fame Building. Located on 16th Avenue, at the head of Music Row, the building with its familiar barnlike facade had become at one time the single image most associated with Nashville. The building was opened with much hoopla on March 31,1967; the upstairs part contained exhibits and a gift shop; downstairs were the archives, reading room, and offices of Country Music Foundation staff. On the entranceway was the "Walkway of Stars" in which "lesser" entertainers were enshrined with a gold star and their names-for a fee of $1,000 each, most of which was raised by generous stars or fan clubs. The destruction of the old Hall of Fame was done in a manner befitting a Nazi
Page 24
blitzkrieg-very quickly, so media and fans would not have time to react and protest. And it was done during a time when many were on holiday vacations. The building was owned by BMI-can't blame Gaylord here-and there were rumors that it would be visitor's center, then an adjunct to BMI for songwriters Hall of Fame, and for a time as a possible set of songwriters offices (in the basement portion). But the final decision was-to make it a parking lot. No one knows what happened to the Walkway of Stars~whether it was simply ground up under the bulldozer's tread or somehow saved. No one knows what will become of the wonderful warren of basement offices and passages that go on for miles. Nobody knows if they even managed to get the rest of the beautiful, custom-built record cabinets to someplace safe.
Winter 2002
The black humor on the streets in Nashville is to refer to the site as "The Country Music Hole of Fame." A few friends have tried to pick up bricks as souvenirs, but BMI guards tend to run them off. In the meantime. over at the new Hall of Fame, assistant director and head of special projects and publications, Paul Kingsbury, has resigned. John Knowles, the resident computer guru, has also resigned. The Nazi strategy with the old HOF building worked-there was not a word about it on any local TV or radio station, and only an odd, lop-sided story in the Tennessean. One day it was therethe next gone. "Disappeared" is the term used by the Argentea hit squads. SoHappy New Year from Nashville, the town that used to be Music City. CHARLES WOLFE
The Southern Register
Old Alabama Town J..
Within a fewblocksof the state capitol and amid the traffic noises of downtown Montgomery,a surpriseawaits-an oasis of buildingsand gardensrepresenting"the way it was." Old Alabama Town is an open-air museum interpreting central Alabama's history, architecture, and lifestyle with authentic structures and artifactsfrom the settlement, antebellum, and postbellumerasof Alabama'shistory. Developed and administered by Landmarks Foundation for the city of Montgomery, the site has a unique collection of both high style and vernacular architecture, including 1850s Italianate and Greek Revival townhouses and cottages, a circa
1815 tavern, and an 1898 one-room schoolhouse. The latter two are in the Living Block, which also includes the Country Doctor's Office, Corner Grocery, Carriage House, Grange Hall, plus Log Cabin, Dogtrot, and Shotgun houses. In the Working Block there is a sense of productivity as guides relate the stories of cotton at the Gin, of corn at Canary Green's Grist Mill, of the work of blacksmiths, druggists, and printers. Early Alabamians engaged in spinning, weaving, and wood carving, and crafts people are frequently on hand to demonstrate. Music fills the air daily, and all acoustical players are welcome for the Second Saturday Jam Sessions. The Ordeman-Mitchell Townhouse was the first restoration and is The Southern Register
the crown jewel house museum. Preservation continues this spring as the Foundation starts restoration work on the 1850s Noble House, which will be followed by several other restorations. Landmarks sponsors a variety of programs in Old Alabama Town, including lectures and exhibitions, seminars for teachers, specialty tours, workshops, and educational programs for some 35,000 children annually. In addition, Landmarks cosponsors a number of other events such as concerts with the Alabama Jazzand Blues Federation and out-of town historic tours with Huntingdon College.
Open Monday through Saturday, Old Alabama Town offers informative and entertaining tours from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. For additional information, write Old Alabama Town, 301 Columbus Street, Montgomery, AL 36104, or inquire by telephone (888-240-1850), e-mail (oldaltown@mindspring.com), or the Web (www.oldalabamatown.com). MARY ANN NEELEY
Editor's Note: Landmarks Foundation are presently seeking applications for the position of executive director and Old Alabama Town. See announcement on this page.
Log Cabin (left) and Research in Progress
Executive Director Position Landmarks Foundation of Montgomery, Alabama, as administrator for the city of Montgomery, operates Old Alabama Town, a public, open-air museumconsisting of approximately 40 structures ranging from a one-room log cabin to doublecolumn mansions. Landmarks is a major force in the preservation and restoration of the city's historic structures and in the interpretation and presentation of central Alabama's architecture, history, and culture. Landmarks is seeking a full-time executive director. Candidates should be visionaries and have demonstrated interpersonal and leadership skills. The position consists of personnel and budget oversight, grant administration, fundraising, membership and program development. A complete job description and information about salary will be available May 1, 2002. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Request an application form from Mark Willis, City Personnel Department, P.O. Box 1111, Montgomery, AL 36111 and submit the completed form to him with a resume and a one-page narrative describing interest in the position, summarizingqualifications, and listing the names and contact information of references.
Winter 2002
Page 25
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature will meet March 14-16 at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. The theme "Southern Literature in Black and White" will be examined in numerous sessions, including a keynote address by sociologist John Shelton Reed, a panel on "Welty and Race" led by Suzanne Marrs, and the paper "AfroCreole Color Prejudice in the Stories of Eloise Bibb Thompson (1878-1928)" by Joan Wylie Hall. Other scholars scheduled to present papers are Barbara Ewell, Katie Henninger, John Lowe, Ed Piacentino, and Frank Shelton. Anne Goodwyn Jones will be on hand to discuss the impact of her pioneering book Tomorrow Is Another Day, published 20 years ago. Award-winning author Tim Gautreaux, who teaches fiction at Southeastern University, will give a reading. Registration is $60 for faculty, $30 for students. SSSL membership is.open to anyone interested in the study of Southern literature and culture. Members receive the SSSL newsletter, published twice a year in April and November, and are eligible to participate in SSSL panels and meetings. Annual dues are $10. Make registration check and/or dues payable to SSSL and mail to C. Ralph Stephens, SSSL Treasurer; Humanities & Arts, CBCC-Essex; 7201 Rossville Blvd.; Baltimore, MD 21237.
\0/ The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival will celebrate its 16th anniversary March 20-24 with a five-day program honoring the legendary playwright and the literary heritage he inspired. Roy Blount Jr., Rick Bragg, Melissa Bank, and Jonathan Coleman, among others, will conduct master classes for writers and readers. The program will include more than two dozen panel discussions, celebrity interviews, and performances of Williams's plays Sweet Bird of Youth, Suddenly Last Summer, and the one-act The Traveling Companion. Also, Manhattan Theatre Club will read excerpts from The Letters of Tennessee Williams, a new publication edited by Williams scholars. For more informa-
Page 26
\0/
TJpcaming Events of InterJst
tion, call 504-581-ll44 or e-mail info@tennesseewilliams.net.
Tennessee Williams went to New Orleans in 1938 and lived there on and off until his death in 1983. The Historic New Orleans Collection recently obtained a large and important collection of the playwright's manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia. On display through April 6, 2002, is a selection from the newly acquired materials that document the development and various productions of Sweet Bird of Youth. The exhibition, on view at the Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres Street, is free and open to the public. For more information, call 504-598- 7171.
\0/ The Holly Springs Garden Club will host its 64th annual pilgrimage April 19-21,2002. Seven historic antebellum homes will be open for tours, including Walter Place (1858-59), a blend of Gothic and Greek Revival styles, home of General and Mrs. U. S. Grant during the planning of the Vicksburg campaign; Wakefield (1858 ), a newly restored Greek Revival home with classical murals entitled Songs of Orpheus in the entrance hall; and Strawberry Plains (1851), a two-story Greek Revival home now, with its surrounding 2,000 acres, the Southeastern Headquarters of the National Audubon Society. Three antebellum churches, the Marshall county Historical Museum, the Ida B. Wells Art Gallery, and the Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery will also be open for tours. For additional information, call 662252-3260 or 662-252-4517.
Winter 2002
The Historic New Orleans Collection will sponsor the exhibition The Vast Country of Louisiana: The Founding Years, 1682-1731, through May 11, 2002. Beginning with La Salle's claim that expanded the French Empire in North America southward from the Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, the exhibition uses nearly 100 maps, books, documents, prints, drawings, and artifacts to highlight the exploration, settlement, and financial history of the colony's first 50 years. The Vast Country of Louisiana is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 533 Royal Street. For more information, call 504-5234662.
The Library of Virginia and Colonial Williamsburg recently opened the exhibitionJefferson and the Capitol of Virginia. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the 18th-century model of the building based on Jefferson's design and commissioned by him while serving as minister of France. Also on display are plans and elevations that demonstrate the evolution of Jefferson's thinking on the design of the Capitol as a public space. Jefferson and the Capitol of Virginia will continue through June 15 at the Library of Virginia, located at 800 East Broad Street in historic downtown Richmond. For details, call 804-692-3592.
\0/ The Popular Culture Association in the South/American Culture Association in the South Conference will meet in Charlotte, N.C., October 3-5,2002. Papers on all aspects of popular culture are welcome. Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2002. Awards are given annually to outstanding graduate student papers. The association publishes two journals. Direct inquiries to Elizabeth Cummins (cummins@umr.edu) or Larry Vonalt (lvonalt@umr.edu), Department of English, University of Missouri-Rolla Rolla, MO 65409-0560. Telephone: 573-341-4622. Web site: middleenglish.org/PCASACAS/.
The Southern Register
NOTES is first year M.A. student in Southern Studies who graduated from Louisiana State University with a B.A. in History. He is currently researching his thesis on the cotton picker and its historical impact on the Mississippi Delta.
WARREN
ABLES
H. BRINKMEYER JR. is professor and chair of English at the University of Arkansas. Among his publications are Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development, The Art and Visionof Flannery O'Connor, and Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South.
ROBERT
is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Mississippi. Her scholarly interests include 20th-century American literature, Southern literature, and myth & allegory. She has essays forthcoming in the New Hibernia Review and the Southern Literary Journal.
KATE COCHRAN
T. EDGE, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, writes about Southern food and travel. He is the author of A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South and Southern Belly. His articles have appeared in Food & Wine, Gourmet, and other publications.
JOHN
is a first-year Southern Studies graduate student from Houston, Texas. She received her B.F.A. in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1993 and is applying her experience as an artist and art educator to her work at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
AMY EVANS
JOAN
HALL teaches in the Department at the
WYLIE
English
The Southern Register
ON CONTRIBUTORS
University of Mississippi. She is the author of Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction and articles on Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Grace King, Frances Newman, and other authors. W. KARTIGANER holds the William Howry Chair in Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi and is director of the Faulkner Conference. He is the author of The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels.
DONALD
is a bookseller at Square Books, editor of the store's Dear Reader newsletter, and a freelance writer. He lives in Water Valley, Mississippi.
JAMIE KORNEGAY
KULLMAN is professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Among his publications are articles on Tennessee Williams and other modern dramatists, Theatre Companies of the World, and Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. He is coeditor of Studies in American Drama: 1945-Present.
Center for Arkansas UALR.
Studies
at
is the coordinator of the Oxford Homeschool Network. Born in Boston, she grew up in India, Turkey, and Indonesia. After studying in New York, at the Sorbonne, and in Virginia, she settled in Oxford with her husband and two sons, Willie and Frank.
HILARY SHUGHART
WALLACE is a second-year graduate student in Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. She received her B.A. in English from the Florida State University in 1999. She was an intern at the Southern Cultural Heritage Foundation in Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the summer of 2001.
RANA
COLBY H.
is a first-year graduate student in the Southern Studies Program at the University of Mississippi. He is a graduate of Flagler College and is pursuing his interest in documentary studies.
PRESTON LAUTERBACH
has been executive director of Old Alabama Town in Montgomery, Alabama, for more than two decades. She is the author of several publications on the history and culture of Montgomery and central Alabama.
is assistant professor and director of documentary projects at the Center, where is teaches courses in Southern Studies, fieldwork, and photography. He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade.
DAVID WHARTON
WILSON is director of the Center and professor of History and Southern Studies. Among his publications are Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause and Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis.
CHARLES REAGAN
MARY ANN NEELEY
SCOTT is former chair of the Arkansas State Board of Education and a member of the Education Commission of the States 1987-1997. She is editor of the Ledbetter Monograph Series at the
ELAINE H.
Winter 2002
WOLFE is the author of Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky, and numerous other publications. He teaches in the English Department at Middle Tennessee State University. CHARLES
Page 27
Become a The Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi has gained an international reputation for innovative education and scholarship on the American South. The Center administers B.A. and M.A. programs in Southern Studies, sponsors research and documentary projects on all aspects of Southern culture, and encourages understanding of the South through publications, media productions, lectures, performances, and exhibitions. This year the Center celebrates 25 years of excellence. By contributing annually to Friends of the Center, you ensure that this valuable work will continue to grow. Activities and Accomplishments
Leadership in Southern Studies • Developed the nation's first degree program in Southern Studies, beginning with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1979 • Added an M.A. program in Southern Studies in 1986 • Sponsored the three-year (1986-89) Ford Foundation Project, aimed at broadening the study of the South, especially encouraging the redefinition of Southern culture to incorporate the experiences of blacks, ethnic groups, and women Publications • Encyclopedia of Southern Culture • MississiPPi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth • The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature • The Blues: A Bibliographic Guide • A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South • Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin]. Dain • Lower Pearl River's Piney Woods: Its Land and People • MississiPPi Folklife: The Magazine of the MississiPPi Folklore Society (annual)
Page 28
Winter 2002
•
rlen
• Living Blues®: The Magazine of the African American Blues Tradition (bimonthly) • New projects include the MississiPPi Encyclopedia and a new edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Conferences, Symposia, and Lectures • Ninth Oxford Conference for the Book, April, 11-14,2002 • Twenty-Ninth Faulkner Conference, July 2126, 2002 • Fourth Southern Foodways Symposium, October 17-20, 2002 • Weekly Brown Bag lecture series on Southern topics during the academic year • Symposia on The Media and the Civil Rights Movement, 1987, Civil Rights and the Law, 1989, and Southern Landscapes: Past, Present, Future, 1996 Documentary and Media Projects • A cultural inventory of Vicksburg and Warren County, Mississippi • A cultural and historical documentary project at Ichauway, a 28,000-acre plantation in Georgia • An oral history of the Mississippi timber industry, concentrating on Pearl River County • First Monday, a photographic and oral history of North Mississippi's oldest ongoing trade day • Old Ways: Church and Family, an ongoing project using photographs and oral histories to document two rural churches in North Mississippi • Ongoing studies of Lafayette County • Photography Exhibitions in the Center's Lynn and Stewart Gammill Gallery • MississiPPi Portrait: The Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935-1940, a CDRom distributed to libraries and schools throughout the state
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I
enter
e
• Partnerships with the Rowan Oak Society and the Charles Overby Center for Southern Politics at the University of Mississippi and with the Southern Cultural Heritage Complex in Vicksburg, Mississippi • Web site at www.olemiss.edu/depts/south details upcoming events and offers photographs, online exhibits, and links to Southern culture
• One Hundred Years at Perthshire, online multimedia project: www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/l00 • Voices from Perthshire, video • Red Tops: A Recording Commemorating the Rosedale Courthouse Red Tops Dances, Songs of Faith: African American Shape Note Singing from the Deep South, and other CDs Educational Outreach Programs • George Washington Scholars Institute for Mississippi Teachers, June 1-8, 2002 • Summer institutes in Southern Studies for teachers • Community photography project for children in Tutwiler, Mississippi • Sponsorship of the Southern Media Archive and the Southern Foodways Alliance
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Your annual donation through our Friends program helps the Center develop and expand the excellent programming listed above. Thank you for your yearly gift to the Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture! Please see the back cover for contact information and for specific ways you can help.
Winter 2002
Page 29
Gift Ideas THE DAIN High quality
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Culture
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BLACK DIAMONDS, BLUES CITY
DANCE FOR A CHICKEN Š
Pat Mire/Al:tal~apas Productions,
1993
This award-winning film brims over with stunning images of carnival play and a rich soundtrack of hot Cajun music. Cajun filmmaker Pat Mire gives us an entertaining, inside look at the colorful and exotic rural Cajun Mardi Gras. Every year before the Lenten season begins, processions of masked and costumed revelers, often on horseback, go from house to house gathering ingredients from communal gumbos in communities across rural Louisiana. The unruly participants in this ancient tradition playas beggars, fools, and thieves as they raid farmsteads and perform in exchange for charity. This film celebrates this Louisiana folk culture, at the same time exploring its origins in medieval European traditions, and looking at why the spirit and function of the Cajun Mardi Gras is so often misunderstood and misinterpreted by outsiders 58 minutes
Winter 2002
WriHen
and Directed
by
Jim Ross
Produced by John R. Haddad, Š Tl,e Universil:v afMem~7
V3005 Friends
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For over half a century organized baseball denied African Americans a chance to earn a living playing the game. In response the Negro Leagues were created. These Negro League teams were very important community institutions, and nowhere was this more true than in the segregated city of Memphis. Black Diamonds, Blues City tells the story of the Negro Leagues and especially the Memphis Red Sox. This is the story not just of baseball, but of a community's establishment and triumph over intolerance and injustice. Featuring interviews with the original players and narrated by Samuel Jackson, this film helps flesh out a picture of African American society in the Jim Crow era South. ............................ .56 minutes
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