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  By Way of Remembrance: Rural Cemeteries of North Mississippi

  David Wharton

  "My habit was to drive back roads, explore, and not worry about getting anywhere quickly or about getting lost. With my wife, Marianne, often accompanying me, we would stick to county roads, always on the lookout for places of visual interest. Among the places we frequently stopped were small towns—in both business and residential areas—and, especially, rural churches and cemeteries. Many of the churches, whether still active or not, had burial grounds close by, and even long-abandoned churches sometimes had cemeteries that showed signs of recent use. A few cemeteries were off by themselves, however, apparently forgotten by any church that might once have been nearby. Some of these more isolated sites were family plots, not necessarily attached to a church. ... the cemeteries often seemed places of beauty, sadness, and religious faith, evoking not only a local past but also a rural culture that while still alive in the present moment was gradually, inexorably fading away. In short, the cemeteries provided a record of a society in the process of becoming a remnant of its past self."

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  The South in Review

  Adam Gussow, Peter Lurie, and David Wharton

  The following books are reviewed in this issue:

  • I Am a Man: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970 / William R. Ferris and Lonnie G. Burch, III. University Press of Mississippi. Reviewed by David Wharton
  • William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity / Jay Watson. University Press of Mississippi. Reviewed by Peter Lurie.
  • New York City Blues: Postwar Portraits from Harlem to the Village and Beyond / Edited by Larry Simon and John Broven. Photos by Robert Schaffer. Reviewed by Adam Gussow.
  • Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial / Jessica Ingram. University of North Carolina Press. Reviewed by David Wharton

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  What Has Been Will Be Again: Photographic Meditations on Social Isolation in Alabama

  Jared Ragland and Catherine Wilkins

  "Social isolation is both a phrase and an experience that has defined the past year in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Jared Ragland’s ongoing photographic travelogue, What Has Been Will Be Again: Photographic Meditations on Social Isolation in Alabama, expressly evokes the loneliness that has characterized this period; solitary subjects inhabit these frames, and many images in the series are devoid of people altogether. One can imagine the photographer, alone, navigating deserted landscapes with only a camera as his companion, documenting the recent ravaging of the public sphere. Yet, while the theme is certainly au courant, What Has Been features subjects for whom social isolation is nothing new. This body of work, instead, makes a case for a long history of isolation and alienation in the artist’s home state—one that has exacted a costly human toll."

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  The Neon Bible, From Page to Screen: John Kennedy Toole’s Portrait of Small-Town Southern Life

  Heather Duerre Humann

  Louisiana-born writer John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969) represents the South in such a way that stereotypes about the region are brought to bear, he also uses his novels -- his short novel, The Neon Bible (1989), and in his better-known tragicomic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) -- to question the culture of the South. In this manner, Toole offers a multifaceted portrait of the region while also raising questions about the nature of representation.

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  Health Landscapes in the South: Rurality, Racism, and a Path Forward

  Anne Cafer, Meagen Rosenthal, Brookshield Laurent, Jennifer Conner, and Raeda Anderson

  This conversation about health disparities in the South, with questions composed by the authors, incorporates the medical expertise of Brookshield Laurent and Jennifer Conner from the New York Institute of Technology’s Delta Population Health Institute at Arkansas State University, with the social science expertise of Raeda Anderson from the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and Meagan Rosenthal and Anne Cafer from the University of Mississippi.

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  Vanishing Acts: Civil Rights Reform and Dramatic Inversion in Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence

  GerShun Avilez

  Dramatist Douglas Turner Ward's innovative play Day of Absence first premiered in November 1965 in New York City and has seen a recent national revival, having been staged by theatre companies in Berkeley, New York, Washington, D. C., Omaha, and Chicago, as well as the Maitisong Festival in Gaborone, Botswana. It stands as a creative response to the African American civil rights situation after the 1964 act. Ward explores questions of Black labor and mobility and, in doing so, creates opportunities to invert the dynamics that have historically characterized U. S. society.

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  Toward Freedom: A Reading of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

  Margaret Pless

  The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama in 2018 to commemorate the black victims of lynching in the United States. The memorial’s monuments are unique because they resist the static, status quo understandings of history that so many of our monuments perpetuate. The memorial invites visitors to face disturbing truths in the hope of fostering reconciliation. Will it help us remember and reconcile as a nation? Montgomery is home to other monuments that undermine the history the memorial presents.

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  More Pricks Than Kicks: The Southern Economy in the Long Twentieth Century

  Peter A. Coclanis

  Most scholars and journalists working on the South would likely agree that over the past fifty or sixty years southern states on balance benefitted from a diverse, but generally reasonable and reasonably successful portfolio of policies and programs in the “economic development” space. The fact that the region is still the poorest, the unhealthiest, and the least educated in the United States, a half century or more after the beginning of the “Sunbelt boom” says a lot about the difficulty of extricating a region once it is headed down a pernicious economic path.

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  All Are Welcome? Southern Hospitality and the Politics of Belonging

  Betsie Garner and Andrew Harvard

  The elective affinity between southern hospitality and Christian hospitality functions as a moral framework for negotiating change and debating identity politics. An ethnographic community study conducted in Rockdale County, Georgia between 2014 and 2017 focused on the discourse and practice of southern hospitality.

  Illustrations by Andrew Harvard.

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  Through the Words of Those Who Have Experienced It: Reading the Whitney Plantation Along Neoslave Narratives

  Sarah Payne

  Recent representations of slavery, however well intentioned, have provoked discussions about who should represent black pain and oppression and what purpose such representations serve. Also evoking such questions are contemporary plantation tours, most of which are white-centered, “moonlight and magnolia” recreations. There have been efforts to represent slavery more accurately at plantations such as Oak Alley, and most notably, the Whitney Plantation, which opened in 2014 in Wallace, Louisiana.

  This essay asks how our understanding of the Whitney Plantation, as a representation of slavery, a public history project, and an example of dark tourism, might be affected by reading the plantation in connection to both historical and fictional accounts of slavery. Using examples from well-known novels such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), I demonstrate how the Whitney, like textual narratives of slavery, employs bodily epistemology, sentimentalism, a white authenticating presence, and a focus on authenticity, making neoslave narratives useful lenses through which to read the immersive experience of the Whitney. In what follows, I historicize the Whitney’s narrative of slavery within the broader genre of slave narratives in order to highlight the tradition of narrating slavery in which the Whitney participates.

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  Mississippi's War Against the War on Poverty: Food Power, Hunger, and White Supremacy

  Bobby J. Smith II

  To ensure that the “militant agitators” did not take control of “industry, agriculture, and even labor,” a group of three powerful Mississippi congressmen—Jamie Whitten, Sen. John Stennis, and Sen. James Eastland—ignited a war against the War on Poverty. As part of President Johnson’s Great Society campaign of 1964, the War on Poverty promised to address and eradicate hunger throughout the nation by making it the “urgent business of all men and women of every race and every religion and every region.” However, in a place like Mississippi, specifically the Delta and plantation counties, the eradication of hunger through antipoverty programs threatened the politics of white supremacy. Local, state, and national actors in Mississippi used “food power”—the use of food as a weapon or an element of power—to maintain white supremacy and undermine the civil rights movement.

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  The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980

  Zachary J. Lechner, Darren Grem, and Margaret T. McGehee

  A roundtable discussion among Zachary J. Lechner, Darren Grem, and Margaret T. McGehee about Lechner's book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980 (U of Georgia Press, 2018).

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  Shame of the Southland: Violence and the Selling of the Visceral South

  Sarah E. Gardner

  The story of Violence—a novel that failed—tells us as much about the literary marketplace as the stories of those more familiar novels that came to dominate the national discourse about the problem South during the late-1920s and 1930s. It tells us about a crusading writing team -- socialist Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, son of Russian-Jewish émigrés, and his wife, Marcet, the niece of social reformer Jane Addams and herself a feminist -- that imagined it could reform the South through print; it tells us about a publisher’s fantasies of a region that had been exoticized for much of its history; and it tells us about the limits of a narrative strategy that sought to combine a reformist impulse with outlandish sensationalized content. Perhaps most importantly, Violence reminds us that a literary canon represents a small percentage of titles that were actually published. It thus encourages us to ask what we might find if we shift our gaze away from those works that command our attention to those titles that lived short and inconspicuous lives.

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  South Beach, 1977-1986: Photographs.

  Gary Monroe

  From 1977 to 1986, a then-twentysomething Gary Monroe -- back home in South Beach Miami, Florida after attending graduate school in Boulder, Colorado -- set out to document the "Jews of the Greatest Generation". Though he expected the project to last ten years, it ended after eight due to the attrition of the subjects. "The lifestyle vanished like it had never happened."

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  Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos

  Adam Gussow

  At the University of Mississippi, Adam Gussow teaches a survey course of the blues literary tradition, offering students relevant writings by Steven C. Tracy, Kalamu ya Salaam, Barry Lee Pearson, and W. C. Handy, in addition to his own writings about the blues.

  "Blues songs often state a problem, let it simmer and intensify, then pose a provisional solution. What generates the solution, as often as not, is the blues ethos: the blues philosophy of life. The blues ethos, as a concept, is multipronged, not unitary. It is a handful of attitudes and strategies for coping gracefully with the worst that life can throw at you."

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  Revisiting Deliverance: The Sunbelt South, the 1970s Masculinity Crisis, and the Emergence of the Redneck Nightmare Genre

  Isabel Machado

  Is Deliverance a story about survivalism? An ecological cautionary tale? An allegory of the rise of the Sunbelt? A thinly veiled homoerotic fantasy? Since its release, the film has provoked passionate critiques, inspired different analyses, and has become a cult phenomenon. The imagery, stereotypes, and symbols produced by the film still inform popular perceptions of the US South, even by those who have never actually watched it. Readings of Deliverance have tended to privilege one particular interpretation, failing to fully grasp its relevance. The movie is a rich cultural text that provides historians with multiple ways to analyze the South, particularly concepts such as southern identity and masculinity.

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  The Delta and Yoknapatawpha: The Layering of Geography and Myth in the Works of William Faulkner

  Phillip Gordon

  William Faulkner, that great voice who raised what he called his “postage stamp of native soil” to the heights of mythic significance, only rarely wrote about the most mythic space in his native state of Mississippi, the Delta. Born in New Albany, a town in the heart of the hill country, and raised in Oxford, his life resided mostly east of the great line of bluffs that stand sentinel over the low bottomland of the Delta.

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  Back to One City: The 1973 Memphis State Tigers and Myths of Race and Sport

  Aram Goudsouzian

  In 1973, the then-Memphis State (now University of Memphis) Tigers’ Men's Basketball team reached the NCAA tournament final. In the history of college basketball, Memphis State’s season is just a footnote, as the Tigers lost the title game to UCLA, which captured its seventh consecutive NCAA championship. But in Memphis, this team became a civic mythic legend. With each victory, the city’s enthusiasm ballooned, inspiring more paeans to players Larry Finch and Ronnie Robinson, coach Gene Bartow, and budding superstar Larry Kenon. Politicians and journalists upheld the team as a vehicle of interracial unity, healing the scars of the 1968 Sanitation Strike and Martin Luther King’s assassination. As with many myths, this one has elements of truth yet it hides as much as it reveals.

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  Telling About the South: An Autobiography of Antiquity

  James Carson

  The South’s antiquity is a story of theft. Legitimacy can’t be found nor can it be contrived. It can only be earned, by understanding that what happened at Jamestown, Stono, Cowpens, Appomattox, and Selma are in some ways just so many quick breaths taken in a very long life. Only when we try to understand how our usurpations have grafted our lives onto much more ancient rootstock can we begin to resituate how we live and how we think about how we live.

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  Elvis and Those Who (Still) Love Him

  David Wharton

  Every year, in the middle of August, people travel from throughout the world to gather in Memphis, Tennessee. The focus of their pilgrimage is the long-dead Elvis Presley. The occasion is the anniversary of his death, which occurred on August 16, 1977. In the days leading up to the annual “Death Day,” venues all over Memphis host Elvis-themed events, visitors pack the city’s hotels, restaurants, and bars, and the gathered faithful renew friendships begun during previous Elvis Weeks, some of them decades in the past. The week culminates on the 16th in front of Graceland (Elvis’s Memphis home) at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. At dusk, a candlelight procession ends at the Meditation Garden on the Graceland grounds, where Elvis, his parents, and paternal grandmother are buried.

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  Put a Taste of the South in Your Mouth: Carnal Appetites and Intersextionality

  Jaime Cantrell

  Despite all the attention paid to the pleasure of food, and food’s usefulness as a critical node for analyzing southern sociality, sexuality is largely neglected in those discussions. Nevertheless, food and sex are intimately linked.

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  The Lynching Blues: Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail" as a Lynching Ballad

  Karlos K. Hill

  Despite Johnson’s small body of recorded blues, his “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) is noted as one of blues music’s most terrifying songs, as well as a cornerstone of early blues music. Blues historians have interpreted “Hellhound on My Trail” in a variety of ways; however, the most popular interpretation is that the song evokes Johnson’s fabled deal with the Devil—a deal in which Johnson sold his soul in exchange for musical prowess. Though there are dangers in assuming that Johnson’s lyrics are real-to-life biographical descriptions, I will argue that the impetus and context for Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” may be partially biographical, specifically, that Robert Johnson’s stepfather Charles Dodds’s near lynching and flight from the Mississippi Delta in 1909 is a plausible rhetorical context in which to understand the song. Rather than simply an ode to his deal with the Devil, Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” can also be understood as a lynching ballad that describes grassroots responses to lynching, such as flight and the anxieties that arise from perpetually fleeing lynch mob violence.

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  Margaret Walker: A Photography Essay

  William R. Ferris

  A photography essay of Margaret Walker by one of her former colleagues at Jackson State University in the 1970s. Includes photos from her visit to Yale University's Beinecke Library in 1978, and to Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi in 1988.

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  Sister Act: Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty

  Carolyn J. Brown

  At the end of their lives, in the 1980s and ’90s, both Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty were recognized several times by their hometown and state for their long careers and bodies of work. The paths they traveled to reach this intersection of common recognition were quite different, however. Almost exact contemporaries -— Welty lived from 1909-2001 and Walker from 1915-1998 -— they share similar timelines and histories, both having lived through the Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. But as one was white and one was black, their stories are very different, as are their paths to becoming nationally known writers.

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  How to Eat to Live: Black Nationalism and the Post-1964 Culinary Turn

  Jennifer Jensen Wallach

  Beginning in the late 1960s, an increasing number of black food reformers rejected, or at least complicated, what they regarded as standard American food practices. They asserted a separate black national identity and a competing value system. Culinary black nationalists did not conceive of food decisions as a series of trivial personal consumer choices but rather as an arena for communal activism. The construction of black nationalist foodways was both an evolutionary process and a dialectical one. Radical food reformers analyzed white-owned eating establishments and dominant American foodways in opposition to southern, regional cuisine and in contrast to a vegetarian-inclined diet.