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"FAULKNER AND THE ECOLOGY OF THE SOUTH" Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha July 20~24, 2003 he heart of ecology is relationship: at the fullest and most complex level, the relations between human beings and the entire array of their physical and social environments. Much of our attention ro Faulkner's fiC.tion has been, not surprisingly, on the individual. His work is filled with memorable characters, many of whom are memorable precisely because of their uniqueness, often their isolation, within the community. Now, as our concern with ecology grows, our recognition that in many ways the determination of the quality of our lives lies in how we relate to each other and to the world at large, we begin to see how Faulkner's work, his Yoknapatawpha world, is about relationship: How his distinct communities, black and white, town and country, native and foreign, relate to each other. How characters necessarily encounter natural and built environments that always precede them, structuring their actions. How person and place become virtually a single, inseparable unit of being. Some of the topics of "Faulkner and the Ecology of the South" that will be taken up by nine lecturers and six panelists will be the significance of the highly varied places of Absalom, Absalom!, the representation of labor in The Hamlet, comparison of the representations of Yoknapatawpha and Lafayette County in Faulkner's novels and John McCrady's paintings, Faulkner's Native Americans and the plantation economy. In addition to the formal lectures and panel discussions, Tom Franklin will give a reading from his new novel Hell at the Breech. There will also be sessions on Teaching Faulkner, tours of North Mississippi, announcement of the winner of the 14th Faux Faulkner Contest, readings from Faulkner, and an assortment of social gatherings, including a buffet supper at historic Isom Place, a picniC at Rowan Oak, and a closing party at Square Books. For more information about the conference, contact the Office of Professional Development and Non-Credit Education, Post Office Box 879, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-0879; telephone 662-915-7283; fax 662-915-5138; e-mail noncred@olemiss.edu; www.outreach.olemiss.edu or www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/faulkner/index.htm. For information about participating in the conference through Elderhostel, call 877 -426-8056 and refer to the program number 5760, or contact Carolyn Vance Smith by telephone (601-446-1208) or e-mail (carolyn.smith@colin.edu). DONALD M. KARTlGANER
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Oxford
on the Hill, by John McCrady
illustration
for the 2003 Faulkner
poster and program
courtesy
(1911-1968),
is used as the
and Yoknapatawpha
of the City of Oxford,
Conference owner of the
painting. Flat copies of this poster and another one with a McCrady painting,
Political
Rally,
are available for $10.00
each plus $3.50
postage and handling. Mississippi residents add 7 percent sales tax. Send all orders to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with a check made payable MasterCard
to the University
of Mississippi
or with Visa or
account number and expiration date. Credit card orders
also may be made by calling 800-390-3527.
Southern Remster PublishedQuarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone 662-915-5993 Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail:cssc@olemiss.edu Internet: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south
IN
THIS
ISSUE
Spring/Summer 2003
2003 F&Y Conference 2 Director's Column 3 Southern Studies Faculty News 3 First International Conference on Race 4 Student Photography Exhibition 5 Bertolaet Exhibition 5 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule 6 2004 F&Y Call for Papers 6 Teacher Seminars 7 Brown Bag Schedule 8 History Symposium 9 Tennessee Williams Festival 10 Mississippi Traditional Music Project 12 Living Blues Symposium 13 Reading the South 19 Southern Foodways Alliance News 21 2003 Oxford Conference for the Book 23 Tennessee Williams Tribute and Tour 24 Ella King Torrey: A Remembrance 25 Regional Roundup 25 Notes on Contributors 26 Ensley Gives Meredith Photo to Center
27 Southern Culture Catalog Items 28 Address Section/Mailing List Form/ Friends Information and Form
REgISTER STAFF Editor: Ann J. Abadie Graphic Designer: Heather Chappell Design Assistant: Jill Yoe Mailing List Manager: Mary Hartwell Howorth Lithographer: RR Donnelley MagazineGroup The University complies with all applicable laws regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in all its activities and programs and does not discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, co!or,disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status as a veteran or disabled veteran.
Page 2
DIRECTOR'S
COLUMN
The spring semester ended
with a lovely graduation day ceremony, sandwiched between unusually stormy days in Mississippi. The ritual end of the academic year and the coming of spring have caused me to reflect on Center work in recent months and to look ahead to what is coming next. It was a lively semester, punctuated by several major events. The Southern Studies Faculty Forum showcased the research of our core faculty, showing the range of interests and achievement of their work. As interdisciplinary scholars, they drew from theoretical literature, diverse primary sources, and provocative ideas. It was work in progress, and those in attendance caught glimpses of future major studies. As part of the Center's 25th anniversary celebration, the Faculty Forum represented a new dialogue among our faculty, which we hope will always continue. The first "Blues Today Symposium" took place in February, a new extension of the Center's long interest in studying blues music. It brought together academics, music critics, and performers, in an altogether distinctive and stimulating forum. African American critic Stanley Crouch gave the keynote address, and one panel featured blues musicians Little Milton, Willie King, and Bobby Rush talking about the blues-this after performing a concert the night before. Commentators talk too much about the death of the blues. Anyone in Mississippi knows it is alive and well, different from the past surely, but supported by a new generation of performers and new venues in festivals and in clubs, such as Isaac Byrd's 630 Blues Cafe in Jackson and Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett's Ground Zero in Clarksdale. Living Blues magazine is now involved in efforts to bring increased appreciation of the blues through working with other parties throughout the state to promote the blues as part of cultural tourism. The Oxford Conference for the Book quietly celebrated its 10th anniversary in April, with a meeting that honored novelist, dramatist, and critic Stark Young. It also highlighted bright young novelists like Calvin Baker and Scott Morris, wild men like George Singleton (read The Half-Mammals of Dixie and you will know why he is wild), and the prolific Percival Everett. Ted Ownby moderated one of my favorite sessions, a panel on "Writing Memoirs" that included the typical diversity of three seemingly unrelated memoirists, whose commonalities and differences made for fascinating listening. The conference every year also features local talent, as this year with David Galef and students in the University's creative writing program. The Oxford Conference for the Book has become a community mainstay, and this year brought people from two dozen states to enjoy one of the South's premier literary festivals. Our next conferences will draw attention to our new initiative to study the environment in the South. The initiative is not entirely new, as we began this effort several years ago with a year-long Southern Studies Colloquium on the environment, during which we brought in Scott Slovic, director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at the University of Nevada, as consultant to think about ways to highlight our interest in the environment. This year's Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 20-24, will focus on "Faulkner and the Ecology of the South," and the theme of the Porter L. Fortune History Symposium, September 17-19, will be "The Environment and Southern History." These two meetings will bring scholars to campus to explore literary and historical dimensions on a topic with broad interdisciplinary appeal. Much of the study of the environment has been in the West, but we hope these meetings, and the Center's continued interest in the environment, will give new momentum to a field of Southern environmental studies. As part of this initiative, David Wharton, director of Documentary Studies, is working with the Audubon Society in Mississippi to launch a new documentary fieldwork project at Strawberry Plains, a major environmental preserve in Marshall County, Mississippi. Finally, we are working with Bob Haws, chair of the Department of History and the Center's foreign secretary, and Joe Urgo, chair of the Department of English, to attract international scholars to the University to take part in these environmental-focused events and other projects. We invite all the readers of the Southern Register to take part in our conferences as we pursue long interests in the blues and literature and as we build on our new interest in the Southern environment. CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
Spring/Summer 2003
The Southern Register
Southern Studies Faculty News The Center's two McMullan Professors in Southern Studies who hold joint appointments in Liberal Arts-Robbie Ethridge (anthropology) and Kathryn McKee (English)-were awarded tenure this spring. Congratulations to these two outstanding teachers and scholars!
Robbie Ethridge, McMullan assistant professor of Southern Studies and assistant professor of anthropology, is the recipient of a 2003 University of Mississippi Office of Research Faculty Research Fellowship, which will fund her research project titled "Chickasaw Slaving: Responding in a Shatter Zone." The fellowship will support two months of summer research in the Archives Nationales de France (French National Archives), examining French colonial documents for evidence of the Chickasaws' participation in the slave trade with Europeans during the 17th and 18th centuries. She will spend three weeks in Paris and the remainder of the time in Aix-en-Provence at Le Centre des Archives d'Outre Mer (Center for the Colonial Archives).
Adam Gussow, assistant professor of English and Southern Studies, has won Honorable Mention in the 2003 John G. Cawelti Book Award, sponsored by the American Culture Association, for "outstanding scholarly inquiry into American culture," for his book Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. This summer Gussow will be using a College of Liberal Arts summer research grant to support a project focusing on discourses and enactments of racial healing and racial reconciliation in the American South. On Sunday, July 13, he will be tossing aside hi~ researcher's hat to play blues harmonica (or "blow harp," to use the vernacular) with drummer Sam Carr and the Delta Jukes at a free concert in the Grove at Ole Miss. Also on the bill will be Georgia blueswoman Precious Bryant.
First International On October 1-4, 2003, the University's William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation will host a four-day conference exploring racial reconciliation in international c.ontexts. Presentations will emphasize how local actionoriented initiatives resolve conflict. The event will mark the close of the Open Doors commemorative year at the University. Begun October 1, 2002, the commemoration has recognized the courage of James Meredith and all faculty, staff, students, and alumni who have worked for inclusion and greater opportunity and access. The year concludes with the international conference on racial reconciliation and the dedication of a civil rights memorial to be placed in the green space between the Lyceum and the John Davis Williams Library, in the heart of the campus. The conference will begin with the
The Southern Register
Conference on Race: Racial Reconciliation memorial dedication on October 1, followed by a community dinner in the <::;ircle.The dinner hearkens back to the successful event in the Circle on October 1, 2002, attended by 2,500 people from diverse backgrounds. On Thursday, the conference will offer panels and workshop sessions showcasing different methods for teaching about race. Friday's events will include presentations by practitioners and academics reflecting on local methods of conflict resolution from across the globe. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has been invited to make the keynote address. HunterGault, one of the first black students at the University of Georgia, is an award-winning journalist who has covered race in the United States as well as reporting from postapartheid South Africa. HunterGault's work nationally and internationally reflects the themes of the conference.
Spring/Summer 2003
On Saturday will be additional presentations and a plenary session with Rev. James Lawson, a noted civil rights activist and proponent of reconciliation. A special highlight of the conference will be presentations by University students on the themes of the conference. "The conference helps cement the goals of the year of Open Doors," said Winter Institute director Susan M. Glisson. "The year began by noting our own unique history and will now conclude by considering our commonalities with communities around the world attempting to build inclusive, successful societies. The conference," she added, "places the University at the forefront of international dialogue on racial reconciliation. " For more information, visit www.olemiss.edu/opendoors/ and www.olemiss.edu/winterinstitute.
Page 3
Student Photographers Exhibited in Gammill Gallery During the fall semester of 2002, members of the Southern Studies Documentary Photography seminar, taught by David Wharton, traveled throughout Oxford and Lafayette County making images addressing the interrelated themes of tradition and change. There were ten students in the course: Warren Ables, Sarah Alford, Brooke Butler, Ben Cannon, Ejia East, Hunter Gates, Judy Griffin, Dianne Jackson, Kendra Myers, and Todd Parker. At the end of the semester, each student compiled a 20-print portfolio of his/her best images. As a group, the students also selected 71 of the photographs for exhibition at Barnard Observatory's Gammill Gallery. That exhibition, Yoknapatawpha 2002: Of Tradition and Change, was shown at the gallery from March through May 2003. Here are a few of the pictures. More can be seen at the "special projects" link from the Center's Web site (www.olemiss.edu/depts/south).
Child Playing, Lafayette County Courthouse, Oxford
Otha Turner, Foodways Conference, Oxford
Tombstone, Oxford
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Spring/Summer
2003
The Southern Register
BERTOLAET to Exhibit in Gammill Gallery Photographer Todd Bertolaet's Red Hills to Gulf Shores: Autographics will be on exhibit at Barnard Observatory's Gammill Gallery through August 31,2003. There will be a reception for the artist on Sunday, July 20, at 1:00 p.m. Bertolaet is professor of photography and coordinator of the photography program at Florida A&M University, where he has taught since 1986. He is the author of Crescent Rivers: Waterways of Florida's Big Bend (University Press of Florida, 1998). His photographs have been published in numerous magazines and exhibited throughout the United States in more than 100 juried, solo, and invitational exhibitions. His most recent project, Red Hills to Gulf Shores: Autographics, incorporates hand-written drawings and text with photographic imagery to create narratives of historical, environmental, and personal significance. Many of his pieces are photographic collages that juxtapose the South's once-natural landscape with images of how human activity has altered that landscape. Bertolaet's drawings and texts, hand-written in white ink on the photographs' black margins, are variously wry, poignant, and tongue-in-cheek disingenuous. The result is a body of work that is unfailingly beautiful and often funny and sad at the same time.
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EXHIBITION June 4 ' August 31, 2003 Red Hills to Gulf Shores: Autographics Todd Bertolaet September 1 ' October 31, 2003 Southern Photographs David Wharton
The Southern Register
SCHEDULE November 1 ' January 15 Thunder and Grace: Racing on American Dirt Susan Bauer Lee 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.
Spring/Summer 2003
Page 5
CALL
FOR
PAPERS
The 31st Annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha
Conference
TEACHER S~EMIN ARS
"Faulkner and Material Culture" The University of Mississippi July 25-29,2004 The aim of cultural studies is to situate the literary text within the multi varied phenomena of cultural context. It is to see the text not so much as a unique object, somehow separate from its socio/political/economic origins, but as touching every level of the cultural fabric within which it was created. As Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt have written, the task of cultural criticism is "finding the creative power that shapes literary works outside the narrow boundaries in which it had hitherto been located, as well as within those boundaries." While we often think of culture, both "high" and "low," in terms of the creations of language-from lyric poetry to locker-room limericks, the visual arts-from Old Master paintings to subway graffiti, and music-from string quartets to rap, perhaps most abundant and having the most bearing on how we live (and what we create) is the material world we often do not see in "cultural" terms, because we are so deeply embedded in it. This is the material way of our lives, our homes, our clothes, our transportation, our work, our sport, our food and drink. Each is a source of creative power and each is itself a product of such power. The world of Faulkner's fiction is a world of material abundance, intensified for readers by its relationship to the real world in which Faulkner lived and wrote and which he "translated" into "Yoknapatawpha." The 2004 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore Faulkner's material world in its fictional and historical manifestations. Consider, for example, the significance of houses in Faulkner, from the Rowan Oak estate, which he renovated and lived in for 30 years, to the homes of Surpen and McCaslin, McCallum and Bundren. Or the importance of costume for this writer, who alternately presented himself in the "dandy" garb of "Count No 'Count" and the aristocratic hunting dress of Virginia, and described meticulously the strangely contradictory clothing of Joe Christmas: trousers soiled but sharply creased, shirt soiled but white, "and he wore a tie and a stiffbrim straw hat that was quite new, cocked at an angle arrogant and baleful above his still face." What do these material concerns tell us about Faulkner and his fiction? What is the work and play of men and women in his world? What does it mean to be a planter or a sharecropper, a horse-trader or spinner of tales? How do we read the "shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick" surrounding the graves in "Pantaloon in Black," the "hog-bone with blood meat still on it" in "That Evening Sun," the "graphophone" that is the culminating prize at the end of the journey in As I Lay Dying? We are inviting both 50-minute plenary addresses and IS-minute papers for this conference. Plenary papers consist of approximately 6,000 words and will be published by the University Press of Mississippi. Conference papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be delivered at panel sessions. For plenary papers the 14th edition of the University of Chicago Manual of Style should be used as a guide in preparing manuscripts. Three copies of manuscripts must be submitted by January 15, 2004. Notification of selection will be made by March 1, 2004. Authors whose papers \Ire selected for presentation at the conference and publication will receive (I) a waiver of the conference registration fee, (2) lodging at the University Alumni House from Saturday, July 24, through Thursday, July 29, and (3) reimbursement of travel expenses, up to $500 ($.345 a mile by automobile or tourist class air fare). For short papers, three copies of two-page abstracts must be submitted by January 15, 2004. Notification will be made by March 1, 2004. Authors whose papers are selected for panel presentation will receive a waiver of the $275 conference registration fee. In addition to commercial lodging, inexpensive dormitory rooms are available. All manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to Donald Kartiganer, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677. Telephone: 662-915-5793, e-mail: dkartiga@olemiss.edu. Panel abstracts may be sent bye-mail attachment; plenary manuscripts should only be sent by conventional mail.
Page 6
Mississippi teachers-120 from throughout the state-and 50 other participants attended two seminars on George Washington this winter-one on Thursday, February 6, in at the State Historical Museum in Jackson and the other on Saturday, February 8, at the Center in Oxford. The seminar in Jackson opened with Dennis Pogue's slide lecture "George Washington: Architect and Entrepreneur." The presentation was based on the speaker's study of anthropology and his work on archaeological and architectural investigations at Mount Vernon, where he is associate director for preservation. For her presentation about Martha Washington, Mary Thompson drew on the extensive materials in the Collections Department at Mount Vernon, where she is a research specialist. Larry Earl, director of education at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, used stories and songs to illustrate slave life at Mount Vernon. William Sommerfield and Pat Jordan, of the American Historical Theatre in Philadelphia, drew on their study of history and read letters, real and fictional, to portray George and Martha Washington for the audience. The seminar in Oxford began with a presentation by Frank Grizzard, who drew on his study of history and his work as an editor of the Papers of George Washington to discuss Washington's military career. Historian and Ole Miss alumnus Jack D. Warren drew on his work as a former editor of the Papers of George Washington to discuss Washington's political career. Historians Scott Casper and Charles Wilson used slides and displayed assorted mementoes in their presentation "George Washington and Elvis Presley: Cultural Icons of the 18th and 20th Centuries." William Sommerfield used letters, assorted historical documents, newspapers, histories, and biographies to portray George Washington in the "Presidential News Conference" program. The Center and George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate sponsored the programs in collaboration with the Mississippi Department of Education and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and with financial support from the Phil Hardin Foundation and the Mississippi Humanities Council. "Our goal was to make George Washington come alive to teachers so they can help their students appreciate the fundamental role Washington played in the founding of our nation and, through his example, to discover ways in which they, too, can serve their family and community," said Lynn Crosby Gammill of Hattiesburg, who chairs Mount Vernon's Education Committee. "The seminars were especially important for teachers in Mississippi, where the study of Colonial America is often neglected or plays a minor role in a society that emphasizes the Civil War and its aftermath.
Spring/Summer 2003
The Southern Register
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Ted Ownby - Professor of History and Southern Studies
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William Sommerfield, the actor who often portrays George Washington at Mount Vernon's most import events, and actress Pat Jordan, who plays Martha Washington, participated in the February 6 seminar for Mississippi
and Southern
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17-19, 2003"
Charles Wilson - Director, Center for the Study of Southern
teachers.
Professor of History and Southern
Culture
Studies
Jack Temple Kirby - W. E. Smith Professor of History Miami University 24
"October
of Ohio
lA, 2003 - First International
Conference
on Race: Racial Reconciliation" Susan M. Glisson
- Director, Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation
OCTOBER "The Southern
Foodways Alliance at the Five- Year Mark"
John T. Edge - Director, 8
"The Mississippi
Southern
Delta Tennessee
Foodways Alliance Williams
Panny Mayfield
- Clarksdale,
Colby Kullman,
Professor of English
Festival in Clarksdale"
Mississippi
15
"Segregation through the Lens: The John E. Phay Collection" Jennifer Aronson - Curator of Visual Collections, J. D. Williams Library
22
"Mortuary Ritual at the Ole Miss Confederate Allan Lemmon Anthropology Graduate Student
29
"More Southern Photographs: An Expanded Gallery Talk" David Wharton - Director of Documentary Projects Assistant Professor of Southern Studies
Cemetery"
NOVEMBER "Local History it la Lowndes County" Russell D. James, Billups-Garth Archives and Manuscript Columbus-Lowndes Public Library Columbus, Mississippi
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Director, Freshman Mathematics Actor William Sommerfield poses with cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley during February 8 seminar during which Mississippi teachers attended a session on "George Washington and Elvis Presley: Cultural Icons of the 18th and 20th Centuries."
"Talking Dirty: A Sprint Car Driver's Story"
19
Kendra Myers - Southern
Studies Graduate Student
The Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture Series takes place each Wednesday at noon in the Barnard Observatory Lecture Hall during the regular academic year.
The Southern Register
Spring/Summer
2003
Page 7
PORTER
L. FORTUNE
HISTORY SYMPOSIUM Center director Charles Reagan Wilson is directing the 23rd Porter L. Fortune History Symposium, September 17-19, 2003, at the Yerby Center at the University of Mississippi. The topic is "The Environment and Southern History." This year's meeting draws from recent scholarship on the topic and should contribute to a growing momentum of Southern environmental studies. Historian Jack Temple Kirby, author of Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landsca/Je and Society and Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960, will give the keynote address, based in his current research on a history of the Southern environment. (See Symposium schedule, opposite page.) He will
touch on the idea of a field of Southern environmental history and tell about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the Florida writer whose understanding of the landscape of Cross Creek made her a prime literary chronicler of the Southern environment. Other presenters at the symposium include Mart Stewart, who will give an updated look at the climate and Southern history; Shepard Krech, who will look at the cultural meanings that emerge from Native Americans' relationships with birds; Margaret Humphries, who will talk about disease and Southern history; Donald Davis, who will discuss the Appalachian Mountains; Tlmothy Silver, who will sketch
ideas on the Civil War and its impact on the environment; and Paul Sutter, who will give a case study of conservation and its ironic meanings in the case of one Georgia state park. Ted Steinberg, historian at Case Western Reserve University, will give a final commentary at the symposium. The author of Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History and Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, Steinberg promises to put the South's story in national perspective. For more information, e-mail Charles Reagan Wilson at crwilson@olemiss.edu or visit the history symposium website at www.olemiss.edu/depts/history/symposium.
Tennessee Williams Tribute & Tour of Victorian Homes
September 11-14,2003 Columbus, Mississippi
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Birthplace of poet, author, and playwright Tennessee Williams plays • parties book signings & scholarly papers • photo exhibits & mOVi~
For more information, call
Spring/Summer 2003
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Streetcar Productions 662-240-1832 Tennessee Williams Welcome Center 662-328-0222 or Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau 1-800-327-2686 www.columbus-ms.org
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The Southern Register
PORTER L. FORTUNE JR. HISTORY SYMPOSIUM
THE ENVIRONMENT
AND SOUTHERN HISTORY SEPTEMBER 17~19, 2003 Wednesday Evening, September 17 Keynote Jack Temple Kirby, Miami of Ohio
Thursday, September 18 A New Look at the Southern Climate Mart Stewart, Western Washington University American Indians and Birds in the South: An Environmental History Shepard Krech, Brown University An Environmental History of the Appalachians Donald Davis, Dalton State College Disease and Environment in Southern History Margaret Humphries, Duke University
Friday, September 19 The Civil War and the Southern Environment Timothy Silver, Appalachian State University 'Georgia's Little Grand Canyon Paul Sutter, University of Georgia Commentary Ted Steinberg, Case Western Reserve University
The Southern Register
Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival The 11 th annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival, set for October 9-11, 2003 in Clarksdale, continues the celebration of America's great playwright in his childhood home. The focus of this year's program will be two of Williams's one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Unsatisfactory Dinner, and the film Baby Doll. The festival will feature performances and readings by Blue Roses Productions of New York City, a screening of the movie Baby Doll, presentations by Williams authorities and friends, a session with papers by scholars, porch plays, and gourmet dinners in the historic Williams neighborhood and Uncle Henry's Place on Moon Lake. Also scheduled in conjunction with the festival are workshops for teachers and for student actors and a drama competition, with prizes totaling $4,000 for the winners. Actress Carroll Baker, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as Baby Doll, has been invited to share her reminiscences, and Delta blues musicians will be performing the playwright's songs, Blue Mountain Ballads. Opening the festival in the renovated downtown passenger depot, Clarksdale Station, will be Kenneth Holditch of New Orleans with "Tennessee Delta: Cotton, Rising Tides, and Blues." Following this presentation will be an optional field trip down U.S. 1, the famous River Road, through Sherard, Gunnison, Perthshire, and Rosedale, to the Burris Mansion in Benoit where Baby Doll was filmed. Speakers will be introduced at a reception and dinner Thursday night at the vintage Belle Clark Mansion, restored antebellum home of Clarksdale founder John Clark. Among the speakers and panelists are theatre directors and drama professionals Robert C~non of Sardis, Erma Duricko with her company from New York, Jay Jensen of Miami and scholars Colby Kullman of the University of Mississippi, Henry Outlaw and William Spencer of Delta State University, and Ralph F. Voss of the University of Alabama. Actress and director Erma Duricko will perform. She and drama coach Jay Jensen also will conduct an acting workshop for high school students. Williams's brother, Dakin, will give his annual poetry reading and commentary. Scholars are invited to submit papers for possible presentation at the festival. Papers on any topic related to Williams
Spring/Summer 2003
and his work are eligible for consideration. Presentations should be 20 minutes maximum. Authors whose papers are selected for presentation will receive free lodging during the festival and a waiver of the registration fee. The deadline for submissions is August 30, 2003. To enter, send a completed paper (7-8 pages) or an abstract (250 words) to Colby H. Kullman, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677. The Tennessee Williams Festival Acting Competition, hosted by Coahoma Community College, is open to high school students in Mississippi. The competition includes two acting categories, monologues and scenes. All material must be drawn from the plays of Tennessee Williams. Each monologue is to be two minutes or less,and each scene is to be between five and ten minutes and involve any number of characters. Cash prizes are given for winning monologues and scenes, which will be performed for the festival audience. Prize money will go to schools of the winners for use with drama activities or library books related to theater and literature. Students, with their teacher-sponsors, will be given the opportunity to decide how the prize money will be spent. For information on the 2003 festival and drama competition, write Tennessee Williams Festival, Clarksdale/Coahoma County Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 1565, Clarksdale, MS 38614-1565; telephone 662-627-7337.
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Northeast Mississippi Wiley Prewitt, director of the Northeast Mississippi Traditional Music Project, teUs about his work documenting music traditions in an often-overlooked part of the state. The Center and the MississiPPi Arts Commission collaborated on the project, which was supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts' Folk and Traditional Arts Initiative program. For a fun report, visit www.arts.state.ms.us/. Although Mississippi was the nursery of Elvis, music scholars and collectors have paid little attention to northeast portion of the state. Blues enthusiasts tend to focus on the Mississippi Delta. Those in search of country music examine Tennessee and other parts of the Upper South. The Traditional Music Project aimed to help rectify the neglect of the area and identify and document some of the musical traditions found in that corner of Mississippi bordered on the west by Oxford and to the south by Aberdeen. One result will be to make a database of artists, venues, and promoters accessible to those interested in the music of the area. The project also produced a series of music and narrative programs at the Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library, after which several of the musicians appeared on Thacker Mountain Radio, broadcast live from Off Square Books near the town square. The university community, which was our main audience, and the performers who came to town, perhaps not surprisingly, know very little of each other. The exposure was beneficial for both groups. Early on, I feared that what Alan Lomax called "cultural grey out" had diminished the differences among music types and performers. But I am happy to report that any musical homogeneity I sensed was only because I wasn't getting out and listening. If one considers traditional music something that connects generations within and among families and unites communities through the expression of distinct tastes and local talents, then I can say that traditional music is doing fairly well in Northeast Mississippi. The project identified a number of traditions that indicate the vitality of musical activity in the area. In the services of the charismatic Church of the Living God, musicians employ a pedal steel, once known as a Hawaiian guitar, for a unique sound. The pedal steel is a familiar instrument to white country music fans, although the Church of the Living God is majority African American. Live broadcasts on radio and television, once a mainstay of country and gospel music, still have an important place in the region. Groups like Oxford's Mighty Stars of Harmony, Winona's Forrest Brothers, Tupelo's Spiritual Truelights, to only name three, enjoy wide followings among African American gospel listeners. The Hatchie Bottom Boys of Corinth are immediately recognizable to bluegrass fans in the area, and live radio shows and dozens of personal appearances make Bud and Hazel Huddleston celebrated figures in the country north of Tupelo. And most Mississippians recognize Tupelo's Kay Bain, who hosts a steady stream of old bands and young hopefuls in the music segment of WTV A's morning show. Northeast Mississippi also supports small music halls and oprys that feature local musicians playing country or gospel. The music halls bring live music typically in an alcohol-free, "family" atmosphere to small but loyal crowds. The white and African American communities support a large number of gospel groups that perform in churches, community centers, and other public venues through the area. Local music festivals often include gospel, bluegrass, country, or a combination, and most of the towns support some type of annual event. The growing Hispanic community has brought new musical traditions that are just beginning to appear at parties and clubs in the area.
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2003
The Southern Register
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I
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Traditional Music Project photos by Wiley Prewitt
The Southern Register
Spring/Summer 2003
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Living Blues Hosts First Blues Symposium Blues enthusiasts from around the globe gathered at the University of Mississippi, home of Living Blues, on February 21-22 to take part in "The Blues Today: A Living Blues Symposium." The symposium incorporated a number of special events, each of which offered unique perspectives on the genre and attested to the depth and breadth of blues and its extraordinary influences on American culture. Noted author, jazz scholar, and critic Stanley Crouch delivered the Early Wright memorial keynote address. The most emphatic declaration of the blues' vitality was made on stage by three of the genre's essential contemporary performers: Bobby Rush, Little Milton, and Willie King. Each played a set at an Oxford club-Little Milton's was his first performance in the city since he played at an all-white Ole Miss fraternity house before the University's integration 40 years ago. Jackson, Mississippi, attorney, club-owner, and patron of the blues, Isaac K. Byrd Jr., sponsored the concert. A panel discussion the following day devoted to "Blues Music Today," moderated by Living Blues cofounder Jim O'Neal, covered the range of musical perspectives from Little Milton, to King's downhome "struggling blues," and the glamorous soul blues of Bobby Rush. Also participating was Memphis-based blues retailer Malcolm Anthony and blues scholar Lea Gilmore. (Gilmore's 2002 Keeping the Blues Alive Award-winning Web site devoted to women in blues history can be viewed at: www.p-dub.com/thang.) Discussion centered on a number of important topics on the current blues scene, such as the negative connotations blues stirs in some minds and the epidemic of bootleg recordings. One such subject is the definition of blues, particularly as it influences the perspective of the audience and the repertoire of the performer. Bobby Rush recalled that he was "booed in Amsterdam. They were told I was a black guy who sang blues, so they expect me to sound like Muddy Waters," he said. Little Milton concurred: "To play blues doesn't mean you have to be illiterate, or drunk, or heartbroken all of the time," he said. Malcolm Anthony added that misconceptions about blues result from the fact that "blues has always been the music of the black community. Today's black audience listens to soul blues but is accused of not supporting blues, because some people don't think that soul blues is authentic or traditional. Some people want to think blues is just some old guy strumming on a porch, but it's evolved from that, and soul blues is that evolution of blues in the black community," he said. The significant role of blues in American literature was explored in the panel "Blues Aesthetics in American Culture," moderated by Adam Gussow, professor of English and Southern Studies at Ole Miss and the harmonica playing half of the duo Satan and Adam. ~ University of Alabama professor Anthony Bolden, Ursinus College ;, professor Patricia Schroeder, University of Wisconsin professor Craig
,. ~
continued on page ~
Readin the South Louisiana: An Illustrated History. By C. E. Richard. Baton Rouge: Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Broadcasting, 2003. 224 pages, 300 illustrations. cloth.
Public $45.00
unsavory episodes, its often eccentric and sometimes bizarre politics and politicians, and gives full treatment to the rich cultural mixture that characterizes Louisiana. However, the book's most notable achievement is found in its stunningly beautiful illustrations, many in color, drawn from artwork, photographs, and various historical documents. As such, it is a valuable collector's item for those with an appreciation for the history of Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley, and, indeed, the United States.
A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years Jewish Life. Edited by Theodore Rosengarten
of Sauthem
and Dale Rosengarten. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 288 pages, 86 color plates, 74 halftones. $34.95 cloth.
./'
When Napoleon Bonaparte, having concluded that Louisiana as the center of a French Empire in the Americas was untenable, decided to sell his vast territory to the United States, the resulting Louisiana Purchase produced a profound and dramatic change in the development of the young republic. The Purchase gave the U.S. possession and control of the Mississippi River and doubled the land area of the nation, adding territory that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and westward to the Rocky Mountains, a huge area that included what was to become all or part of 13 states, including Louisiana, which gained statehood in 1812. To celebrate the bicentennial observance of the Louisiana Purchase, the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting has published Louisiana: An Illustrated History, an extraordinarily handsome volume written by C. E. Richard, author of screenplays and other works on the state's history and culture. The book is intended as a companion piece to Louisiana: A History, a six-hour documentary to be presented in September of this year. The book traces the history of Louisiana from its founding and earliest settlements as first a French, then Spanish, colony to its acquisition by the U.S. as part of the Purchase, and to its most recent past, a period of just over 300 years. The text provides informative and enjoyable reading, confronts boldly the state's
Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students,
and Friends of the Center for
the Study
of Southern
Culture
In this monumental effort, Dale and Theodore Rosengarten have created a beautiful companion book in concert with the exhibition at the McKissickMuseum housed at the University of South Carolina. Independently, this book is a muchneeded addition to the scholarship on American Jews and particularly Jews in the South. Though the exhibition emphasizes 300 years of Southern Jewish life specifically in South Carolina, heirlooms, artifacts, paintings, ephemera, and photographs are, as Eli Evans proclaims in the preface, "a public celebration of southern Jewish history, with bold assertions of the vital role played by Jews" (xvi). Through a series of brief, informative chapters accompanied by photographs of artifacts, the Rosengartens introduce readers to the broad scope of Jewish experience in the South. Topics include the immigration experience, home and family life, the working lives of men and women, courting and marital rituals, the rise of communities, Jewish men and women's involvement in the Civil War, their participation in World War I, and the post-Holocaust Southern Jewish experience. Allowing material culture to reveal historical experience, the collection of artifacts that Dale Rosengarten and others have uncovered beautifully underscores the rich complexity of the South Carolina Jewish experience. Creating a companion to such a broad exhibit would have been plenty, yet the Rosengartens include a marvelous photo
Pa<the" and othÂŤ boob call 800-648-4001 a<fox 601-214-9630. 160 Courthouse
Square.
Oxford, Mississippi 38655
~~I 8'3
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Reading the South
continued
essay by Bill Aron that surveys contemporary Southern and Jewish identities. Included are images that are both familiar and remarkable. Pictures of three generations of Southern Jewish hunters, a Jewish-owned pigeon plant, and African American Jews are fascinating (though not surprising, as they testify to successful Jewish and Southern acculturation). Other of Aron's photographs show synagogues, cemeteries, holiday meal preparation, prayer, a Mahjongg game, and family activities. In addition to the photo essay, the Rosengartens include essays by prominent Jewish scholars that further illuminate the Southern Jewish experience. In his preface, Eli Evans provides a brief history of Jews in South Carolina, while Theodore Rosengarten confronts the difficult and complex relationship of Jews and enslaved African Americans, agreeing with scholar Bertram Wallace Korn that Jews observed the "dominant morality of the time"( 4). The remaining essays, by Deborah Dash Moore, Jenna Weissman Joselit, and Jack Bass, focus on the theme of freedom. Deborah Dash Moore's essay explores the Americanization of Orthodox J~daism-specifically how Southern Jews revamped their Judaism in response to reigning political, social, and economic systems and ideologies. Moore situates changes in American Judaism squarely within the events of the time and, in particular, within Denmark Vesey's slave rebellion. In the midst of growing chaos, Jews saw their place in Southern society as increasingly unstable and therefore shaped Reform Judaism to mirror acceptable Christian customs to secure their own place and freedom in Southern society. Jenna Weisman Joselit's essay addresses the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe, concentrating on their reasons for choosing a virtual frontier over the established cities of the northeast. The essay shows that Eastern European immigrants had different experiences from their predecessors, working as peddlers, shopkeepers, and scrap-metal dealers instead of inserting themselves into the plantation economy. Joselit also demonstrates the splits that developed between earlier and later Jewish migrations and how they impacted South Carolina Jewry. Jack Bass, a native South Carolinian, explores Jewish participation in civic life throughout the state's history, noting that
Jews had been prominently involved in public and private organizations from the colony's inception. Bass juxtaposes Jewish participation in public life with existent anti-Semitism in the state and reveals that in their response to civil rights Southern Jews both accommodated and subverted Jim Crow in public and private acts. Theodore Rosengarten claims that the exhibition and the accompanying book are to dispel myths about Southern Jews. As editors, Dale and Theodore Rosengarten have accomplished much more. They have introduced Jews and non-Jews alike to a vibrant Southern Jewish culture. Topics, issues, and the Jewish histories and identities uncovered and addressed by scholars and amassed material artifacts are by no means comprehensive nor are they meant to be. This book introduces readers and exhibition viewers to Southern Jewish history, illuminates the Southern Jewish experience, and inspires further investigation. JENNIFER A. STOLLMAN
Mordecai: An Early American Family. By Emily Bingham. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. 346 pages. $26.00 cloth. Lately, the field of American Southern Jewish history has experienced a renaissance. Beginning in the seventies, scholars researched the history, demographics, religiosity, immigration, and acculturation experiences of Jews from all over the South. Despite an intense initial investigation, Southern Jewish historical studies stagnated over the next two decades. A resurgence in the interest of ethnic studies within the South, a desire to broaden the black/white paradigm that has framed much of the scholarship on the region, and a discovery of new sources have encouraged a renewed interest in Southern Jewry. Most students of Southern Jewry, like their Northern counterparts, have framed their investigations around anti-Semitism and assimilation. While this is a good way to uncover the Jewish experience in the South, recent scholars have discovered that, at times, this approach tends to marginalize Southern Jews from other Southerners. Perhaps a statement on increased American tolerance, Emily Bingham's Mordecai: An Early American Family is not burdened with the politicized discourses
often found in American Jewish historical narratives. Unlike earlier scholars, Bingham does not feel obligated to provide a litany of the worthy contributions the Mordecai family made to Southern society. Nor does she actively create a triumphalist narrative, in which the Mordecais overcame opposition, anti-Semitism, and marginalization to gain acceptance by white Protestant Southerners. In fact, Bingham's work assumes a priori that the Mordecais were Southerners and supports recent conclusions that a single American Southern Jewish experience does not exist. Bingham trusts her sources, and her balanced story effectively chronicles the public and private lives of a Southern Jewish family affected by the changing events and ideologies of the Revolutionary, early Republic, and Civil War eras. To tie the members of the Mordecai clan together, Bingham invents the secular and religious framework of "enlightened domesticity" in which the family "seized upon a protective covenant fusing bourgeois domesticity, intellectual cultivation, and religious liberalism" (5). According to Bingham, this philosophy shaped individual family members' world views, personal decisions, and approaches to religion and education. Fulfilling the project of enlightened domesticity proved to be a difficult task during the first half of the 19th century. In many ways, its concerted emphasis on reason encouraged the questioning of traditional family values. Additionally, increased focus on education, Christianity, gender norms, sentimental love, notions of Southern white middle-class respectability, individualism, and appropriate sexuality created conflicts between notions of respectability among the generations. Consequently, many Mordecais chafed at fulfilling family expectations of domestic enlightenment while carving lives that were personally and publicly satisfying. Most of the Mordecai family members had few problems as children fulfilling the precepts of enlightened domesticity, but as they approached adulthood, most rejected their father's and grandfather's notions of respectability. Most of the Mordecai men favored newly developed forms of individualism and pursued their public and private goals while barely consulting their fathers and rarely considering the family. Many were successful in trade, law, medicine, and the military. Most did not marry Jews. Because of coverture laws and
reigning gender philosophies of the day, the Mordecai women had less freedom to make their choices, but they still exercised their own agency. For example, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, always the dutiful daughter, assisted her father in the academy he founded and helped school several family members, yet converted to Christianity on her deathbed after years of wrestling with her faith. Ellen Mordecai, paled in Rachel's shadow, also assisted with the domestic upkeep of family homes, farm, and schools, yet converted and maintained a rather successful living by publishing her conversion experiences. Caroline Mordecai Plunkett fell into a deep depression abiding by her father's refusal to accept a suitor, yet ultimately married Achilles Plunkett, a non-Jew. Only one daughter, Emma, remained faithful to Judaism. The third generation proved to be even more interesting. Rachel Mordecai Lazarus's son, Marx Edgeworth Mordecai, led a rather unorthodox life as he actively promoted the free love movement. His sister, Ellen Lazarus, became a radicalized feminist and was intent on becoming a physician of alternative therapies. Emily Bingham has accomplished something truly amazing. To create such a descriptive composite of the Mordecai family, she examined thousands of 18thand 19th-century diaries, letters, journals, business logs, and other ephemera. This research was difficult, time-consuming, and laboriou路s. Employing an evocative writing style, Bingham created a work that represents the best of family biography, one in which readers may access the connections between the generations to gain a clearer understanding of the early 19th-century Southern experience. Problems within Bingham's work reflect the genre's shortcomings and are not the fault of the author. While framing an entire history around anti-Semitism is limiting, the sources Bingham used suggest that anti-Semitism was virtually nonexistent. Elsewhere, scholars of Southern Jewry have argued that antiSemitism existed in the 19th-century South in social relations and discourse, trading practices, and politics. Bingham's sources hint at the existence of anti-Semitism but fail to fully flesh out or respond to this anti-Semitism. Enlightened domesticity emphasizes retreat into the home, domestic Judaism, and overcoming perceived shortcomings of the family. The question begs, "What is the family steeling themselves against?"
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Additionally, biography privileges historical voices and sacrifices overarching context. Contextualizing the Mordecais' experiences within larger 19th-century social, economic, and political systems would facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the Mordecais as Southerners and Jews. Bingham seemingly anticipates this though, as she provides an extensive bibliographic essay at the end of the book. The essay is divided by topics, making it easy for interested readers to consult suggested readings. The shortcomings mentioned are minor, and Mordecai: An Early American Family is a compelling read to all scholars and those interested in a wide range of 19th-century topics, beyond just Southern Jewry. Those less interested in things academic will also enjoy the biography as a first-rate family saga that details the trials and tribulations of one American Southern family. JENNIFER
A.
STOLLMAN
The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 223 pages. $32.95 paper.
EDITED
BY
PHIUP
C.
KOLIN
The
Undiscovered Tlm
LATER PLAy~ount1)1
Of!'ThNNESSEEWILLIAMS
With unnerving dialogue, exaggerated make-up, and stylized gestures, actors from the University of Mississippi staged Tennessee Williams's The Gnadiges Fraulein at the 2002 Oxford Conference for the Book. Viewers who came expecting another Glass Menagerie-or even another Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Streetcar Named Desire-quickly learned why Williams's
Spring/Summer
2003
alternative title was not "gracious young lady" (as he translated the German phrase) but rather Slapstick Tragedy. Amused and confused by the blend of vaudeville with Sophoclean drama, the audience appreciated the rare opportunity offered by director Michele Cuomo and the University's Theatre Arts students. The playwright died in 1983; but, as the well-known Williams scholar Philip C. Kolin emphasizes at the start of his new essay collection: "The post-Night of the Iguana (1961) canon still remains largely undiscovered country, elusively difficult to edit, classify, and interpret" (1). Until very recently, critics and producers alike have avoided these unconventional works. And in "The Gnadiges Fraulein: Tennessee Williams's Clown Show," Allean Hale observes that this play is "perhaps the most unusual and most difficult" of Williams's many later dramas (40). A striking pair of illustrations accompanies Hale's essay: a photo of the bloodied, blinded title character in a University of Illinois production, juxtaposed with a painting by Williams titled Self-portrait as Clown. Both figures have wild wigs, bold lips, and painted tears. In the sacred clown tradition familiar to Williams, says Hale, white makeup is a death symbol. She concludes that the play is not absurdist (as critics have suggested) but existentialist: "It reminds us of Brecht's Mother Courage, eternally pulling her wagon, or Camus's Sisyphus, daily pushing his rock up the hill even though he knows it will roll down again. 'En avant!' was Williams' battle cry" (52). "En avant!" could be the cry of the 15 contributors who explore the undiscovered country in Kolin's volume. These essays are original in both senses: never before published, and highly imaginative as well. Illuminating Williams's obscurity, essayists develop many contexts for the plays, including theology (Kolin on Small Craft Warnings); the Gnostic politics of space (Robert F. Gross on The Red Devil Battery Sign); Japanese No theatre (Michael Paller on The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore); and a postmodern "resurgent romanticism" (Norma Jenckes on Camino Real and Clothes for a Summer Hotel). Una Chaudhuri takes a particularly unusual approach in '''AWK!': Extremity, Animality, and the Aesthetic of Awkwardness in Tennessee Williams's The Gnadiges Fraulein." Alert to the cries of
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UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI A member of the Association of American
press@ihl.state.ms.us
University Presses
By SHELBY LEE ADAMS
Some Notes on River Country
INTRODUCTION BY VICKI GOLDBERG
By EUDORA WELTY
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Faulkner and War EDITED BY NOEL POLK AND
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The Cajuns Americanization of a People By SHANE K. BERNARD Sixty years of Cajun history showing how the Cajuns have become much like other Americans while maintaining their strikingly distinct identity S48 unjacketed hardcover, S18 softcover
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Williams's grotesque cocaloony bird, Chaudhuri proposes that the theory of "the animalizing imagination" is "one of the more progressive and promising resources of postmodernism" (60). The difficulty of Chaudhuri's critical language (though often playful) mirrors the playful difficulty of the drama itself; but her conclusion is straightforward and much like Allean Hale's. "The slapstick tragedy," says Chaudhuri, "ends not with death or defeat but with perseverance. Though blood-soaked and blinded, the Fraulein keeps flapping her skinny arms like wings, awkwardly perfonning the awkwardness of survival on 'this risky planet'" (65). The Gniidiges Friiulein is also a central text for Annette J. Saddik in "'The Inexpressible Regret of All Her Regrets': Tennessee Williams's Later Plays as Artaudian Theater of Cruelty." Author of The Politics of Reputation: The Critical
Reception of Tennessee Williams's Late Plays (1999), Saddik compares the play to Kingdom of Earth, Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, and This Is the Peaceable Kingdom-all of which reflect Antonin Artaud's stress on "ideological elements of the presentation of ritualistic spectacle, a moral reversal in the primacy of nature over culture, and a revelation of inevitable metaphysical cruelty" (22-23). Gene D. Phillips, S.J., discusses one of these plays, Kingdom of Earth, in "Tennessee Williams's Forgotten Film: The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots as a Screen Version of The Seven Descents of Myrtle." Broadway producer David Merrick convinced Williams to change the title Kingdom of Earth to Seven Descents of Myrtle, a work that is not "front rank," according to Phillips, yet nonetheless deserving of study, as is the movie version. Phillips spoke with Williams at the 1976 Cannes International Film Festival, and he records the playwright's insistence that the drama is a comedy, a fact that is not always stressed in productions. In lively detail, the essayis路t demonstrates that Sidney Lumet's screen version had its own set of problems, including British actress Lynn Redgrave's struggle with Southern intonation. Like Phillips, several other contributors to The Undiscovered Country make excellent use of biographical material, offsetting the "antagonistic biographical criticism" that Kolin outlines in his introduction 0-2). Especially intriguing is Terri Smith Ruckel's exploration of the "painterly texture" of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel in light of Williams's dozens of
artworks (his oil painting Many Moons Ago is reproduced in the essay). James Fisher presents Something Cloudy, Something Clear as "both a triumph of autobiographical confession and a culmination of prevalent themes in Williams's plays" (194). In an outstanding study of A House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic Comedy, Thomas Keith compares this 1982 drama to other late works that reveal "the rigors and fears Williams faced-physical, mental, and emotionalduring the last ten years of his life and career" (207). Similarly, Felicia Hardison Londre relates the themes of The TwoCharacter Play and Out Cry to Williams's fear of confinement (bodily and artistic confinement, but also the dread of being trapped in any single role or identity). Robert Bray suggests that, in Vieux Carre-despite Williams's "genius for experimentation" (142 )-the playwright did not fully escape the trap of his own early successes. Theatre critics at the 1977 premiere accused him of recycling character types and places for which he had become famous, and Bray acknowledges that Williams set dozens of works in New Orleans. "None, however," the critic emphasizes, "is more atmospherically charged with French Quarter charm and decadence than the play that bears its name" (147). Moreover, the city's uniqueness "provided Williams with an entirely new sense of 'local color'" (148). Like Bray, Verna Foster and George W. Crandell carefully distinguish apparent repetition from new developments in the late works. Quoting Williams's comment that A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is "almost a different genre," Foster sums up the difference as a blend of the early "psychological realism" with the late "grotesque style" (155). Comparing the 1978 play with a version from the late 1950s, she sees definite advances in Williams's dramaturgy and characterization. Crandell examines Williams's changing treatment of time and memory, with special attention to Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a little-known play with wellknown characters: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. "More than its later counterparts," says Crandell, this Dantesque work "dramatizes something unique in the Williams canon: a lack of faith in the future to transform the present" (170). In Zelda's asylum setting, "performance" is the single therapy that might "mitigate the effects of exile from
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wholeness" (177); and, whether in life or in drama, Crandell concludes, performance is also "the only stay against the 'enemy' time" (178). The tragic vision of Clothes for a Summer Hotel is far from the slapstick tragedy of The Gnadiges Fraulein or the lusty humor of The Seven Descents of Myrtle. As Philip Kolin suggests in his introduction to The Undiscovered Country, "Not even the convoluted classification system of Polonius-'pastoral, comical, historical pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical- historical-pastoral'-can do justice to the highly experimental plays of Williams's last three decades" (3). For Hamlet, who killed the foolish Polonius, death itself was "the undiscovered country," from which no traveler returns. In his final years, however, Tennessee Williams was able to work that miracle. " Ghosts, in one form or another, are a recurring element in five of Williams's later plays" (211), notes Thomas Keith. Williams never stayed in one place for long. JOAN WYLIE HALL
Sodom Laurel Album.
Photographs, oral histories, and text by Rob Amberg. 167 pages, 136 photographs, audio CD. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (in association with the Center for Documentary Studies), 2002. $45.00 cloth.
Rob Amberg came to the North Carolina mountains in 1973, a 26-yearold refugee from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. By his own admission, he arrived with stars in his eyes, afflicted by nostalgia for a past he'd never had and a place he'd never known. He worked at
Spring/Summer 2003
various jobs in the area for a couple of years, then found a position as a part-time photography instructor and archivist at Mars Hill College, not far from Asheville. One afternoon, a student took him to meet her 77-year-old great-aunt, Dellie Norton, a traditional Appalachian singer who had gained a modest degree of recognition during the folk revival of the 1960s and owner of a small mountain farm near the tiny community of Sodom Laurel. Ms. Norton and Amberg got along well, and before long he was staying in her spare bedroom and helping with the farm chores. He was also making a lot of pictures. Though he didn't know it at the time, he had started on a project that would take 27 years to complete. Sodom Laurel Album is a good book. It succeeds quite nicely at much of what documentary photography does well. Amberg's photographs tell us a lot, most of it well worth knowing, about people whose lives are unlike our own. His pictures make us privy to many of the facts of life in Sodom Laurel-the difficult topography its residents contend with every day, the houses they live in, the work they do, and the relationships they form-in ways that neither threaten, belittle, nor stereotype those facts. That's no small accomplishment. Nor is there reason to doubt Amberg's sensitivity and sincerity. He became deeply involved with the Sodom Laurel community over the years, living and working there for various periods of time, and this involvement shows in the easy familiarity of his pictures. None of the images seems intrusive or stolen, and even though some of the photographs are posed (portraits for the most part), none feels artificial. It's evident in his pictures that he has a deep and abiding regard for many of the people he came to know in Sodom Laurel. Amberg's photographs didn't come by this relaxed, open quality easily. In the preface to Sodom Laurel Album, he shows that he's thought long and hard enough about documentary photography to understand some of its shortcomings, especially the dangers posed by stereotypes-both building upon alreadyexisting stereotypes and helping to create new ones-and photography's inherent superficiality. The way in which the book's pictures and texts (some of the words are Amberg's, others are passages from recorded oral histories he conducted with continued on page 18
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Reading the South continued Sodom Laurel residents) supplement one another is proof of intelligent engagement with these issues. Sodom Laurel Album avoids stereotypes by sometimes surprising us and occasionally even allowing image and text to contradict one another, and it achieves greater depth than many photographic documentaries by allowing words and pictures to work together in partnership rather than having one or the other dominate. Amberg also writes about how his understanding of the project grew over the years, making a slow evolution from "objective" documentary study to more subjective personal narrative. Here, too, Sodom Laurel Album provides more food for thought than many documentaries. All these nice things said (and meant), there's still something that bothers me about Sodom Laurel Album. I had hoped to dismiss it as a mere quibble, but it seems to be demanding more attention than that. Essentially, my complaint is that the book seems all too much like what it says it is-an album. We learn a lot about various aspects of life in and around Sodom Laurel, but not much about the community's center-whatever it is that holds the place and its people together. It's difficult to say, in any specific sense, what the book's about. Parts of it are devoted to the life of Dellie Norton, her extended family, and her small mountain farm. Other segments focus on her adopted disabled son Junior (actually a much younger cousin whose parents "gave" him to Dellie when he was small); area musicians and their travels to festivals in "foreign" places (the price of purchase includes an audio CD made by musicians with ties to the community); Sodom Laurel's younger generation(s); public social events (family reunions, cemetery clean-ups, and the like); and tobacco agriculture. This last seems only tangentially related to Sodom Laurel. Although a few of the tobacco pictures are from Dellie Norton's farm (taken in the mid-I970s, early on in Amberg's project), most come from different times and places, some of them, apparently, not all that close to Sodom Laurel. My complaint is not, however, that Amberg casts his net too wide; instead, it's that he hasn't made (or allowed) these disparate groups of very fine pictures to hang together, to cohere, as well as they should (and surely could). Perhaps the fact that the photographs were all made by the same person in more or less the same
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place is focal point enough, but that places the center of attention on Amberg and his pictures rather than on their subjects. Judging from the self-effacing way he's photographed and written about the people of Sodom Laurel, I don't think that's where he would want the focus to be. In the final analysis, though, it's still a very nice book. Anyone interested in rural America, especially the interplay between traditional lifestyles and encroaching modernity, should be sure not to miss it. DAVID WHARTON
Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question. By Don H. Doyle. Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Series Number 10. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. 130 pages. $24.95 cloth. The Southern Question in this intriguing work of comparative history concerns the relationship the nations of Italy and the United States had with their southern regions. Author of works on small places like Lafayette County, Mississippi, and Jacksonville, Illinois, and cities such as Nashville, Don H. Doyle in this book expands his vision to consider two questions: what forces have helped hold together the nations of Italy and the United States, and how has the Southern Question been important in the process of nationhood? This short book, which began as a series of lectures at Georgia Southern University, asks big questions about why these southern regions matter so much in discussions of national identity. Doyle writes against a tendency among many current scholars who view nationalism as a fiction imposed by elites to try to keep together people who would otherwise be in conflict. Frequently, according to Doyle, elites' efforts to create national unity by appealing to an old, shared history fail. Instead, this book concentrates on people's often changing everyday understandings of national identity in topics such as religion, language, education, holidays, and, significantly, war. The United States emerged without old calls for primordial ties among people with shared identities based on common
Spring/Summer 2003
history. Instead, it emerged as a new nation founded on hope for a future based on representati ve government. Italian nationalism came later, through a complicated series of military, diplomatic, and political events that did not create today's understanding of Italy until 1870. Calls for Italian nationalism came from various sources, some emphasizing past greatness in the Roman Empire or the Renaissance, others stressing hopes for a liberal republic, some hoping for some combination of the two. The Southern Question has differed in the United States and Italy. In the United States, of course, the South tried to form its own nation. In recent years in Italy, it has been the Northern League that called for secession from what its members see as the economically parasitic southern regions of Sicily and Naples. But there are strong similarities as well. Both Souths seem, in the consciousness of their nations, poor, slow, and strange in both customs and political organization. As Doyle writes of 19th-century Italy, "The idea of a civilized North and a barbaric South took on important meaning for the way in which the former would govern the latter" (71). In the U.S., issues concerning slavery and free labor became central to broad demands for American unity based on political rights. The intriguing issue, in both cases, was how Americans and Italians could unify politically with people they considered different in significant ways and whose difference, in fact; helped sustain some understandings of national unity. This book does not answer all of the big questions it raises. No volume of about 100 pages could do so. But by tracing the parallel stories of the American and Italian Southern Problem, Doyle's volume encourages broad thinking about regional questions in our global age. He ends with a brief conclusion that contrasts the bitter and violent divisions of contemporary Europe with the difficulties but also the promise of the American Civil War: separatism fails, often with bloody results, but inclusive visions of nationalism, no matter how sloppy, how pragmatic, how intellectually vague in definition, continue to offer great potential. As Doyle begins his final paragraph, "The American Union that Lincoln struggled to preserve offered a model of how peoples of remarkable diversity might learn to live together peacefully" (95). TED OWNBY
The Southern Register
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SFA Field Trip and Symposuim Explore Applachian Food The rich tradition of Appalachian food is the theme of the third annual Southern Foodways Alliance Field Trip, August 1-3, 2003, hosted by the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, North Carolina. The itinerary includes a behind-the-scenes tour of Biltmore Estate's agricultural programs, its vineyards and winery operations, and its kitchens; a discussion of Southern wines and wineries with a tasting; and tours of local farms and markets. And of course, there's food: a game
dinner at Biltmore, an Appalachian Iron Skillet competition sponsored by the North Carolina SweetPotato Council and Lodge Manufacturing, and one of White Lily's famous breakfasts. Along the way, you might even learn to clog. SFA's Field Trips always sell out early. To register, e-mail Manda Palomares at sfa2003@biltmore.com or phone 828-231-9092. Registration is $245 for SFA members and $275 for others. A special rate of $13 5 per night has
been arranged at the Inn on the Biltmore Estate. For information and reservations, call 828-231-9092. Programming for the 2003 Southern Foodways Symposium will also highlight Appalachia. Speakers confirmed at press time include food writer Ronni Lundy, journalist Rick Bragg, and novelist Lee Smith. Dates are October 2-5, and registration will open in July. Check our Web site for program details: www.southernfoodways.com.
The Great PC Competition The Southern Foodways Alliance, the Southeast Dairy Association, and the Web site www.ilovecheese.com are seeking pimento cheese recipes and recollections. Tell us about how your mother always hand-grated her cheese. Let the world know about how your father's homemade mayonnaise made all the difference. Tell us a story of 100 or so words about what pimento cheese has meant to you and your people. Include a recipe and please detail the recipe's provenance. E-mail submissions to sfamail@olemiss.edu. Deadline for entries is July 31. Three finalists will be announced August 31. The winner will receive a free trip to the Southern Foodways Symposium, to be held October 2-5 in Oxford, Mississippi. But wait, there's more: In addition to receiving a monster jar of pimentos and a -...". wheel of delicious sharp cheddar cheese, the winner can take pride in knowing that chef Louis Osteen will feature his or her recipe on the menu at Louis's at Pawley's for the month of November. Questions should be directed to the Southern Foodways Alliance at 662-915-5993.
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P'minnuh Cheese: The Pate of the South Pimento cheese, or "P.C.," was born in the South. It's been fundamental to our bridge luncheons, picnic baskets, kids' lunchboxes, afternoon teas, lunch counter menus, and light suppers since at least 1915. You might meet a Southerner who doesn't care for it, but you'll never meet one who doesn't know what it is. The most popular sandwich consumed at the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, available for a mere $1.25? Of course-pimento cheese on white bread, wrapped, naturally, in green waxed paper. How did this simple spread made of grated cheese and little red things, usually bound with mayonnaise and perhaps
sparked with an extra spice or two, come to mean so much to so many Southerners? Let's start with the little red things. The pimiento pepper is red, sweet, and heart-shaped. We know pimientos as olive-stuffers, studders of meat-product loaf, and of course for their partnership with cheese, but it should be noted that the pimiento is also often used to make paprika. "Pimiento," Spanish for "pepper," became Americanized to "pimento," which is now the most common spelling. Georgia leads the United States in growth and production of the pepper. continued on page 20
P'minnuh Cheese: The Pate of the South continued from page 19 The moment of harmonious convergence of the humble pimento and sharp cheese remains a mystery, but we do know that already-prepared spread was featured in Southern grocery stores as early as 1915. Pomona Products Company founder George Reigel of Griffin, Georgia, began canning Sunshine Pimentos in 1916, making it even easier for home cooks to produce their own versions of it. Some food historians suggest that pimento cheese was a special treat for families at the turn of the 20th century, since sharp cheddar cheese was store-bought and not made at home. During the 1920s and 1930s, the economical food became even more of a staple in the South. P.C. is woven into the fabric of many Southern memories. Most aficionados agree that only sharp cheese will do, but the glue for the spread varies. Recipes call for mayonnaise or milk or buttermilk or eggs or cottage cheese. Some say not to drain your pimientos and to use that juice. Others use lemon or sweet pickle juice. Some really experimental folks use cream cheese. But that sounds a little Yankeefied. People put cream cheese on bagels, for God's sake.
Even the coming together of the P.e. is up for debate. Versions call for using a blender, a whisk, a hand mixer, a fork, or your hands. Some add Tabasco, onions, or jalapeno peppers. Elvis's favorite recipe purportedly calls for Worcestershire sauce, and native North Carolinian author Reynolds Price adds garlic to the concoction that was the "peanut butter of [his] childhood." Why do we love it so? Well, it's easy to make, it's cheap, and it tastes great. It doesn't make soft white bread go soggy, and it keeps well. It's good between two slices of bread, lining a rib of celery, packed into a cherry tomato, or perched on a cracker. It's heaven on a hamburger or a hot dog. Or eaten with a spoon right out of the crock. e. D. Wright summed up our relationship with pimento cheese in her poem "Personals": "Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace." That's what pimento cheese can mean, however your grandmother made it: a little comfort, a little memory, a lot of peace. Dig in. KENDRA MYERS
Arkansas Wine: Making Do and Doing Well In the well-established hierarchy of wine, there are countries and regions, like Burgundy, Bordeaux, Napa and Sonoma, that are famous throughout the world. Their wine is made from grapes that are equally famous-varieties of vitis vinifera, the family that includes Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, and other well-known varieties. So where does a winery in Arkansas that uses native American and hybrid grapes fit into things? Quite nicely, thank you. "When the climate or the soil isn't conducive or you have to worry about disease resistance, then you have to make do with what you have," says Paul Post, one of eight brothers and sisters who run the Post Familie Vineyards in Altus, in the Arkansas River Valley in northwestern part of the state. The winery's origins precede the 20th century, and its current incarnation dates from 1951 and Matthew Post, Paul's father and the fourth generation of Posts in the area. . Much of Post's wine is made from native grapes like the Norton and Concord, grape like fruit such as the muscadine, and hybrid grapes (so called because they're crosses between native grapes and vinifera) like the Vidal and the Seyval Blanc. Natives and hybrids are much more difficult grapes to work with, and too many wineries pile on sugar to cover up a wild, almost foxy kind of flavor. But when they're done well,
a Norton or Seyval Blanc can wax just as poetic as a Cabernet. And the Posts have had that kind of success. One of the most recent highlights came at the prestigious Dallas Morning News Wine Competition this spring, when a $6 Post Vidal Blanc (an off-dry white that fits somewhere between a Riesling and a Sauvignon Blanc) won a bronze medal. In this, they are part of a large and almost unknown regional wine industry throughout the South (and the U.S.). Wine is produced in as many as 49 states; not only does it not all taste like California Chardonnay, it's not supposed to. There are intriguing and very wellmade wines from states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri that, unfortunately, antiquated liquor laws make almost impossible to find outside of the home states. Yet none of this seems to bother the Posts too much. "Part of the reason we keep doing it is the family tradition," says Paul, whose family's winery produces 50,000 cases a year-not much by Beringer standards, but the most in Arkansas. "It's deep in our roots. We grew up planting and picking grapes. Yes, it is hard work, but it also taught us a lot of things, and we've learned to appreciate it." JEFF SIEGEL
SFA Contributors KENDRA
MYERS, of Atlanta, Georgia, is a playwright, presently enrolled as a graduate student in Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.
JEFF SIEGEL, a graduate of the Medill Scholl of Journalism at Northwestern University, has authored six books, and his writing has appeared in
Sports
Illustrated, Gourmet, and Travel & Leisure. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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The weather could not have been more perfect, nor the spirits higher, at the 10th Oxford Conference for the Book, held on the campus of the University of Mississippi and at various locations in the town of Oxford April
10-14,2003.
r
As part of a recent tradition, the conference got under way at the Thacker Mountain Radio Show (www.thackermountain.com) , broadcast live from Off Square Books on Thursday, April 10. Conference authors Percival Everett and Robert Stone read from their most recent novels, Erasure and Bay of Souls respectively. The featured music guest for the show was Ben Mize of Athens, Georgia, and ace North Mississippi blues guitarist Kenny Brown was a featured guest with the Thacker house band. The official kick-off took place Friday morning on the campus at Johnson Commons, as Oxford's mayor, and conference cofounder, Richard Howorth welcomed the crowd. Local favorite Barry Hannah took over, moderating two panels on writing and publishing, both chock full of writers-including locals Shay Youngblood, Jere Hoar, and Scott Morris, newcomers George Singleton, Calvin Baker, Crystal Wilkinson, and the aforementioned Everett and Stone-and book industry experts such as Algonquin editor Kathy Pories, outspoken Context Books publisher Beau Friedlander, Beacon Books publisher Helene Atwan, and Jackson, Mississippi, bookseller John Evans of Lemuria Bookstore. After an afternoon welcome by Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat, Friday's sessions continued with a presentation by noted Southern publishing house Algonquin Books, featuring esteemed editor Shannon Ravenel and her protege Kathy Pories, plus three excellent . readings by house writers George Singleton (The Half-Mammals of Dixie), Scott Morris (Waiting for April), and Marshall Boswell (Trouble with Girls). Another highlight was the mid-afternoon panel on race and publishing, moderated by Helene Atwan, who did a great job soliciting input from the audience as well as the panel's
participants, Percival Everett and Calvin Baker, who shared many thought-provoking points on the topic. The day's events concluded with readings by current and former John and Renee Grisham Southern Writers in Residence Shay Youngblood and Tom Franklin, who premiered a new story and previewed a portion of his forthcoming novel Hell at the Breech. For those who forged on, the night's activities offered a cocktail party fund raiser for the conference at Off Square Books and a panel on writing workshops by the University's creative writing M.F.A. coordinator David Galef. Saturday's sessions began with "The Endangered Species: Readers Today and Tomorrow," an annual panel moderated by Elaine Scott and featuring local literacy advocate Claiborne Barksdale, children's author George Ella Lyon, and Priscilla Handy, vice president of the Lafayette County Literary Council. A discussion of personal memoirs led by Ted Ownby featured insightful comments and heartfelt readings by Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God; Mississippi native Clifton Taulbert; and Michael Mewshaw, author of the literary memoir Do lOwe You Something? The conference's ode to Stark Young filled a large portion of the day, with a program by the North Mississippi Storytellers Guild at the University Museums, a presentation by University professor emeritus John Pilkington, and performances by local theatre troupes. Saturday's formal events culminated with a panel on novels set in volatile third-world locales, moderated by the Boston Globe's former Middle East correspondent Curtis Wilkie, no stranger to the world's hotspots, and featured readings and remarks by Robert Stone, whose Bay of Souls is set in Haiti, and Michael Mewshaw, author of the Central Asian thriller Shelter from the Storm. The evening offered a book signing with all conference authors at Off Square Books and an openmike poetry jam, moderated by M.F.A. student Lacey Galbraith. The final day, Sunday, ran its full course, beginning with a panel on Appalachian writers, moderated by Kathryn McKee and featuring remarks and readings by children's author, poet, and novelist George Ella Lyon; Ron Rash, author of the acclaimed new novel One Foot in Eden; and Crystal Wilkinson of Kentucky, author of' the novel Water Street and a story collection, Blackberries,
Blackberries. Two local authors with suspenseful new novels took the stage for mid-morning readings-Ace Atkins, author of Dark End of the Street, and Jere Hoar, whose novel The Hit was one of the conference's most popular discoveries. University English professor Ethel Young-Minor led a discussion on books on the civil rights movement, featuring two timely works-Sons of Mississippi, an examination of the legacy of intolerance in the wake of the Meredith riots at Ole Miss, by Paul Hendrickson, and
MississiPPi Harmony, the memoirs of freedom fighter Winson Hudson, as told to Constance Curry. The popular poetry panel, moderated by Blair Hobbs, was charged by readings from Beth Ann Fennelly, newly added poetry professor at Ole Miss; Jamaican-born poet Shara McCallum, author of Song of Thieves; and Ron Rash. And the final panel of the day featured readings and remarks by newcomers Calvin Baker, author of the novel Once Two Heroes; Emily Bingham, whose nonfiction work Mordecai explores a prominent Jewish family from the South; and Lewis Robinson, author of the acclaimed story collection Officer Friendly and Other Stories. The conference culminated with a laid-back country dinner at Taylor Grocery in Lafayette County. The 11th Oxford Conference for the Book, which is already in the"planning stages and promises to feature another great line-up, will be held April 1-3, 2004. JAMIE KORNEGAY
Tennessee
Williams Tribute and Tour of Victorian Homes Columbus, Mississippi ~September 11~14, 2003
Columbus, Mississippi, birthplace of Tennessee Williams, will honor the playwright with lectures and performances during a weekend that will also offer tours of the town's Victorian homes. The program will begin on Thursday, September 11, with a production of Truth in the Guise of Illusion at 7:00 p.m. Friday's event will include talks on Williams by literary scholars Clyde Williams, of Mississippi State University, and Jane Hinton, of Mississippi University for Women, as well as book signings, exhibitions,
The Southern Register
and a "Moon Lake Party" at Lake Norris. Literary scholars Pearl McHaney, of Georgia State University, and W. Kenneth Holditch, professor emeritus, University of New Orleans, will give presentations on Saturday morning. Colby Kullman, of the University of Mississippi, will lecture on Night of the Iguana before the film version of the play is screened that afternoon. The Columbus Community Theatre will present an evening performance of This Property Is
Condemned.
at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where the Reverend Walter E. Dakin was rector when the playwright, his grandson, was born, will be followed by lunch at noon and tours of Victorian homes in the afternoon. There is no charge for lectures and the film. Play and tour tickets are $10 each. Tickets for lunch on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are $15 each, and the Moon Lake Party is $50 per person. For more information, call 662-240-1832 or e-mail spatkaye@ebicom.net.
On Sunday, worship services
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Living Blues Symposium
(continued)
Hansen Werner, and Syracuse University professor Arthur Flowers explored the depth of blues' influence in the work of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and the presence of the blues ethos of individuality in present-day hip-hop culture. Longtime Living Blues contributor David Whiteis moderated a discussion of "Documenting the Blues: Journalism, Biography, and Autobiography," featuring Elvis Presley biographer Peter Guralnick, Muddy Waters biographer Robert Gordon, Billie Holiday biographer Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Mississippi-born blues poet Sterling Plumpp.
To close the symposium, Peter Guralnick hosted a conversation with Dick Waterman, who shared his photographs and stories of Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and others, from his long career as a blues photographer, promoter, and ombudsman. The symposium was organized by the Center and was sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, the Mississippi Development Authority, and Isaac K. Byrd Jr. Living Blues plans for the symposium to become a yearly event and will announce next year's schedule and list of participants in a future issue. PRESTON LAUTERBACH
Ella King Torrey: A Remembrance Ella King Torrey, a long-time friend of many Center faculty and staff, died on April 30, 2003, in San Francisco, where until last year she had served as president of the San Francisco Art Institute. Torrey was at the Center from 1981 to 1984, working on research projects and her master of arts thesis in Southern folk art. I came to the Center in September of 1981, and Ella had arrived here a few months earlier. She became one of my best friends and a bright and Ii vel y presence on the Oxford scene. She had graduated cum laude from Yale in 1980, having completed her senior thesis on the meanings of the Barbie Doll in popular culture, and she came to Mississippi to find out more about folk art. She and I discovered many common interests, including a sometimes off-beat aesthetic that made room for the downto-earth pleasures of pop culture and folk culture. While Ella King was in Oxford, our Wal-Mart opened, and she made countless pilgrimages there, always finding the perfect little knickknack for presents for friends. She was a believer in what Elvis called "happies," thoughtful little gifts, and had a sense of wonder about life, even down to the fun that could be had at Wal-Mart. Oxford in those days had more ties to the Southern past than it does now, and like many people new to the place Ella King and I were out and about sampling the local culture. We had a plate lunch at the Auction Barn in Lafayette County and looked at the livestock. We went to Saturday night auctions on North Lamar where we purchased everything from wooden hampers to use as coffee tables, to oil lanterns for lighting, to vintage clothing. She ate enough catfish while
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here to mark her forever as an adopted Mississippian. We should have had honorary plaques at the Holiday Inn bar, because we would regularly meet there at the end of the day to relax and swap stories. It was one of the few bars in Oxford then with a mostly adult crowd, including writer Willie Morris, who moved to Oxford about the same time as we had arrived and often regaled us with his own stories. Ella King's little house on Fudgetown Road quickly became a party center, as we all hovered around the wood-burning stove in the winter, the only source of heat for the place. My favorite ritual with Ella King was Saturday morning breakfast at Smitty's, the classic Southern town square, biscuits-and-gravy eatery. It had a warm atmosphere and downhome waitresses that knew us well. We ate many a steamy bowl of grits and homemade biscuits slathered with Louise Smith's own scrumptious pear preserves. Ella King had a desk at Barnard Observatory, from which she worked with Maude Wahlman on an exhibition and catalogue, Ten African American QuiLters. We all learned much from her about material culture and about new Southern culture heroines with names like Sarah Mary Taylor, Pecolia Warner, and Pearl ie Posey. She wrote her master's thesis on the religious art of Theora Hamblett, a north Mississippi folk artist who documented rural life and drew from the religious culture around her. Ella King could be a demon for hard work, including the immense research she did on the quilting project and on Hamblett and on other religious folk artists that put her work in context. All of which is to say that Ella King
Spring/Summer 2003
made herself a part of Oxford while she was here, contributing to the Center's early accomplishments in the study of folk culture and generating friendships that long endured. She came back to Oxford the last time for Memorial Day weekend in 2000, and it was like old times. Her beloved cat, born on Fudgetown Road, died in San Francisco shortly before her trip back, and she decided to bring its ashes to Oxford to scatter them in the Mississippi dust. Our friend Lisa Howorth went with us out to the country, to the house on Fudgetown Road, where we were greeted by a bevy of large dogs and a young man with a long and unruly beard that made him look like the last mountain man-and one not looking for company. In typical fashion, Ella King got out of the car and began confidently striding toward the somewhat unfriendly welcoming party. Lisa and I looked at each other and hopped out, too, thinking we couldn't sit in the car and observe whatever was going to happen. When the young man found out our purpose, he was quite friendly, observing that if his dogs died, he too would want them a part of a place he had known. We scattered the ashes, said some words, and returned to Oxford, sending Ella King on her way for the last time away from Mississippi. Ella King Torrey lived a life of high achievement, serving for a decade at the Pew Charitable Trusts and then leading the San Francisco Art Institute into a dynamic new period. Ella King left a piece of herself here in Oxford, and her friends will always remember her. She was one of the most vibrant people I have ever known, and her joyous spirit will be missed. CHARLES
REAGAN
WILSON
The Southern Register
o-egion~
s:-pcoming Events
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
of Intetist JOHN T. EDGE, director
writes about Southern
Louisiana:
A History, a six-hour documentary commemorating the Louisiana Purchase, will be aired on Louisiana Public Broadcasting September 14-19, 2003. The television series begins with prehistory and explores the major events, movements, and personalities that have shaped Louisiana down to the modern era. It features historical renderings, rarely seen photographs, and historical documents. For details, visit www.louisianahistory.org.
The Southern Women Writers Conference, to be held October 16-18, 2003, at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, will examine the theme "Self Locations/Dislocations." Among the featured speakers will be Dorothy Allison, Mairlou Awiakta, Rosemary Daniell, Lorraine Lopez, Janisse Ray, and Natasha Tretheway. For more information, call 706368-5625 or visit the conference Web site (www.berry.edu/academics/humanities/english/swwc2003 ).
~ The Mint Museum of Art salutes one of North Carolina's pottery legends in the exhibition Burlon Craig and His Legacy through October 19 in the Bridges Gallery of North Carolina Pottery. Craig, who died last year at age 88, was considered one of America's great folk potters. He was honored with the National Folk Heritage Award by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984. Featured will be utilitarian churns, milk crocks, birdhouses, and monkey jugs as well as the face jugs and snake jugs that helped make him famous. For details, write Mint Museum of Art, 2730 Randolph Road, Charlotte, NC 28207, call 704-337-2000, or visit the Web site (www. mintmuseum.org).
The Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University and the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center at Northwestern State University, through the Creole Studies Consortium, will sponsor a conference on the topic "Creole Legacies: The Current and Future Prospects of Creole Studies Research," October 23-25, in New Orleans. The first international conference to explore past, present, and future studies of Creole culture, "Creole Legacies" aims to bring together scholars and members of the general public from throughout the United States and beyond to share their research findings and family histories. To learn more, visit www.deepsouth.tulane. edu/programs/creole.hnul.
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of the Southern Foodways Alliance, 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. JOAN WYLIE HALL teaches in the English Department
at the 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. DONALD M. 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. JAMIE KORNEGAY is a bookseller at Square Books, editor of the
store's Dear Reader newsletter, and a freelance writer. He lives in Water Valley, Mississippi. is a graduate of the M.A. program in Southern Studies at Ole Miss and a member of the editorial staff at Living Blues magazine. PRESTON LAUTERBACH
TED OWNBY holds a joint appointment
in Southern Studies of Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 and American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998. and history.
He is the author
PREWITT is director of the Northeast Mississippi Traditional Music Project sponsored by the Center and the Mississippi Arts Commission. He has extensive experience documenting traditional culture throughout the state, including work on projects for the Center (First Monday Trade Days), the Pine Hills Culture Program at the University of Southern Mississippi, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. WILEY
JENNIFER A. STOLLMAN is acting assistant professor of history
and Southern Studies. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, a master's degree from Wayne State, and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Her research interests include studies in ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. WHARTON is assistant professor and director of documentary projects at the Center, where he teaches courses in Southern Studies, fieldwork, and photography. He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, DAVID
Memories, and History from McDade. REAGAN 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 CHARLES
to
Spring/Summer
Elvis.
2003
Page 25
lOtl1 Oxford Conference for the Bool. AUDIO TAPES(A) are $10 per program, DVDs (D) are $30 per program, and VIDEOTAPES(V) are $20 per program.
o B(03001A Welcome o B(03001 D Richard Howorth, Mayor o B(03001V SubmiMing Manuscripts/Working
One's Way into Print Barry Hannah, moderator Jere Hoar, Beau Friedlander, ScoM M. Morris, Kathy Pories, George Singleton, Shay Youngblood
o B(03002A
o B(03002D o B(03002V
Finding 0 Voice/Reaching on Audience Barry Hannah, moderator Helene Atwan, Colvin Boker, John Evons, Percival EvereM, Marly Rusaff, Robert Stone, Crystal Wilkinson
o B(03003A
Welcome Robert C Khayat, Chancellor o B(03003V Algonquin Books: Discussion Kathy Pories, Shannon Ravenel Algonquin Authors: Readings Marshall Boswell, Scott M. Morris, George Singleton
o B(03003D
o B(03004A
o B(03004D
o B(03004V
Race and Publishing in America Helene Atwan, moderator Colvin Boker, Percival EvereM
o B(03005A
Readings/Remarks Joseph Urgo, moderator o B(03005V Tom Franklin, Shay Youngblood
o B(03005D
ENSLEY GIVES MEREDITH PHOTOGRAPH
TO THE CENTER
Dr. Philip K. Ensley, veterinarian at the Wild Animal Park in San Diego, California, came the Center in 2001 while in Mississippi visiting the Strawberry Plains Audubon Center in Holly Springs. Seeing the article "40 Years after Infamy, Ole Miss Looks to Reflect and Heal," in the New York Times last September, Ensley sent Wilson the photograph printed here with excerpts of the accompanying letter.
B
ecause of that news article I went through some files and found this photograph of James Meredith and his son I thought you might like to have for your files. I took this photo at a book signing a few years ago here in San Diego. He did not recognize me as the young college sophomore who met him nearly 40 years earlier. I reminded him about the circumstances of the meeting that took place at the Jackson, Mississippi residence of Constance Motley in June 1962. He sat to my left, holding a narrow walking cane looking a bit like a graduate student attending an Ivy League college. He sat up erect listening quietly to the discussion of the lawyers present nodding occasionally with approval on issues concerning strategy to gain admission to the University of Mississippi. The meeting atmosphere was very serious. I made no contribution to the conversation, as most of the legalese was above my head anyway. I liad attended the meeting with William L. Higgs, the lawyer James Meredith first turned to for assistance when he sought legal advice on entering Ole Miss. For this photograph Mr. Meredith obliged me and held up a 1962 copy of the Mississippi Free Press that I had saved from that summer. On the front page was a photograph of James and his mother. In addition there was an article detailing the arrest of Bill Higgs in Clarksdale. I was also involved in that arrest. In February of 1963 I was subpoenaed to testify in front of a Federal Grand Jury in Oxford. I spent the evening prior to testifying on campus at the residence of James Silver. He described the events on the night of September 30th as they appeared through his front window. He was a good friend of Bill Higgs. This was the same Bill Higgs who graduated first in his class at Ole Miss, went on to Harvard Law School and was ultimately disbarred in Mississippi. This is the same Bill Higgs I have petitioned Governor Musgtove to pardon posthumously .... I hope things are going well for you and the Center. I always look forward to receiving the Southern Register.
o B(03006A.
How to Get the Most from a Creative Writing Workshop David Galef, moderator o B(03006V D. Allan Mitchell, Joy Wilson
o B(03006D
o B(03007A o B(03007D
The Endangered Species: Readers Today and Tomorrow Elaine H. ScoM, moderator o B(03007V Claiborne Barksdale, George Ella lyon
o B(03008A o B(03008D o B(03008V
Writing Memoirs Ted Ownby, moderator Michael Mewshaw, Clifton Taulbert, lauren F. Winner
o B(03009A o B(03009D o B(03009V
Stark Young: A Southerner in the Arts John Pilkington
o B(0301 OA Readings from Stark o B(0301 ODTheatre Oxford o B(03010V
Young's Works
o B(030 II A Third World Thrillers o B(03011 D Curtis Wilkie, maderatar o B(03011V Robert Stone, Michael Mewshaw o B(03012A o B(03012D o B(03012V
Open Mike - Poetry & Fiction Jam lacey Galbraith, moderator
o B(03013A
Appalachian Voices Katie McKee, moderator o B(03013V George Ella lyon, Ron Rosh, Crystal Wilkinson
o B(03013D
o B(03014A Readings/Remarks o B(030 14D Ace Atkins, Jere Hoar o B(03014V o B(030 I SA Books on the Civil Rights Movement o B(030 I 5D Ethel Young-Minor, moderator o B(0301 5V Constance Curry, Paul Hendrickson, Winson Hudson, Charles Marsh
o B(03016A
Poetry: Readings and Remarks Celebration of Notional Poetry Month o B(03016V Blair Hobbs, moderator Beth Ann Fennelly, Shara McCollum, Ron Rosh
o B(03016D o B(030 o B(030
17A Readings/Remarks 17D Jamie Kornegay, moderator o B(0301lV Colvin Boker, Emily Bingham, lewis Robinson
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