Category: Mississippi

Posted on

Evans Harrington: A Memoir by Howard Bahr

I always thought it a very cool thing to be able to say that Glennray Tutor, Glenn Ballard, and I took a writing workshop together in the summer of ’74. Indeed, so far as I know, it was the only writing class any of us ever took. There were other good students whose names I do not recall, but wish I could. Neither can I bring to mind the least remnant of what I learned in that class. The professor, however, was unforgettable.

He was a devilishly handsome man, funny and kind, and he seemed to know everything. Simply everything. He could summon a quote from the ether anytime he wanted. He read beautifully, both poetry and prose, and read as if the poet or writer were his best friend in all the world. He had written an actual novel (we didn’t know then about the ones he would always dismiss as “drugstore paperbacks”) published by an actual New York City house, and his short stories had appeared in actual magazines, and we boys looked on these accomplishments as commensurate with raising the dead. Nevertheless, he was humble in the presence of great writers, and treated even our sophomoric maunderings with delicacy and respect. More important, he practiced humility toward his own prodigious talent.

Our professor smoked a pipe, as all professors ought, and as most did in those vanished days. Over the years, I took every course he offered, and his routine never varied: he would arrive with his pipe and tobacco pouch and a thermos of coffee, greet everyone, open whatever book we were using, and commence to be brilliant. (He had a Nimrod Sportsman pipe lighter–the kind advertised in Field & Stream–and his old students will smile when I recall the image of that good man flicking his lighter and stoking his pipe and pouring a cup of coffee all at the same time.) He never used notes, and hardly ever wrote on the blackboard. Had there been Power Point then (God forbid!), he would have scorned it. Neither did he waste time with films or slides. He just talked, and read, and revealed the magical realm of literature to us.

Those who remember this excellent professor will be interested to know that, his life and contributions are contained in a biography: Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington (UP of Mississippi, 2017). Author and scholar Robert Hamblin knew Dr. Harrington as friend and colleague; he has drawn on that relationship, on a wide range of interviews, and on careful research to present as complete a portrait of the man as we are ever likely to have.

And what a man he was! Evans Harrington was born in Birmingham of parents who were conservative both in religion (his father, Silas, was a Baptist minister) and politics–which is to say that the elder Harringtons were Southerners of their time and generation. When Evans was three, the family moved to Mississippi, and there they remained. Young Evans grew up in the rural South of the ‘20s and ‘30s, a culture which shaped him in many ways. Harrington loved the Southern landscape; he was a skilled hunter and fisherman; he knew what it meant to work hard; he was schooled in the Bible and old-time religion; he was as mannerly and courtly and brave as any character in Swallow Barn. At the same time, he grew to manhood in a time when change was on the horizon.

Like many thoughtful Southerners before him, Harrington was exposed to unexpected, often uncomfortable, insights when he left the South and joined the service in 1943. For the first time, he encountered young men from the North and West who owned different ways of thinking; when called upon to explain his region’s unique qualities, Harrington, like Quentin Compson at Harvard, discovered he could not defend many cultural elements he had taken for granted. In an interview, Harrington admitted that, by the time of his discharge in 1945, he was “already an integrationist and a defender of the blacks.”

Throughout his adult life, Evans Harrington was a champion of equal rights, not only for blacks, but for all persons protected by the United States Constitution–and this at a time when such notions might cost a Southern man his life. Nevertheless, he refused to follow many of his educated, like-minded contemporaries (including William Faulkner) in their exodus to more “enlightened” areas of the country.

Hamblin takes his biography’s title from the essay “Living in Mississippi” (Yale Review, June, 1968), in which Harrington defines the extraordinary dilemma of one who insists on loving his native land in spite of itself. Harrington remained in the state he loved; throughout the tumultuous civil rights era, he fought, with ardor and passion, often at his own peril, and at considerable personal cost, for what he believed to be the only decent, humane, and just relationship among human beings.

Among the many virtues of Hamblin’s book is the decision to present different elements of his subject’s history–biographical, political, academic, and literary–as independent sections. A departure from traditional biography, Hamblin’s technique offers clarity and focus, though not at the expense of the narrative as a whole.

It well may be that Robert Hamblin’s outstanding work will find but a limited audience, since Evans Harrington’s is not exactly a household name, and it is unlikely Hamblin will make it one. This is a very great pity, for Dr. Harrington’s life would inspire anyone who values courage, honor, and the rare quality of thinking for oneself, especially when it challenges the entrenched world view of a conservative society. In any event, those lucky enough to have known Dr. Harrington will find this book a treasure indeed.

Having begun this review on a personal note, I will end it in the same fashion. I never saw eye-to-eye with our good professor on certain points of his philosophy. I continue to believe liberal thinkers of his era embraced an ideology that, while admirable, was wholly impractical. They were naïve in the sense that all are naïve who cannot imagine the unimaginable future, a fault shared by every person who ever lived. On the other hand, without idealists like Dr. Harrington, our flawed humanity would never improve, never move toward kindness and justice and mercy. We are intractable until we see our image in the mirror of history, held up to us by brave men like Dr. Harrington.

By the way, when we at last discovered the Doc had written novels under a pen name, we implored him to reveal it. Finally, one day, he did. “It’s Jacqueline Suzanne,” he said.

Thank you, Dr. Harrington. Well done, sir. May you rest in peace.

Posted on

Eudora’s Mosquito

Welty illustrated the cover for this musical piece written by her English teacher at Jackson Junior-Senior High School:

“O Mos-qui-ta, Mos-qui-ta,
you bi-ta my feet-a!”

(“Mosquito”, by Flo Field Hampton, arranged by Harry L. Alford.
Crystal Springs, Mississippi: Flo Field Hampton Publishing Co., c. 1926
Special Collections, University of Mississippi.)

Posted on

Shutting Down Eudora Welty Library Was a Mistake

This editorial by Jay Wiener originally appeared in The Northside Sun Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025. 

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) is reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s assessment of Richard Nixon, “He’s like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwards.”

Or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem,

“There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.”

It is difficult to reconcile a governmental department that accomplishes so much, extraordinarily well, with the entity that razed the city of Jackson’s flagship library.

The employees of MDAH are stellar individuals for whom I have utmost regard. Their probity is such that, if asked about book bans, they would agree that limiting access to books is indefensible. Nonetheless MDAH displayed no hesitation before eliminating a library housing countless volumes.

Why was the Eudora Welty Library razed? The flagship library was removed because its loading dock was conspicuous opposite the Two Mississippi Museums entry. (Please note the irony that the department overseeing the Eudora Welty House and the Eudora Welty Foundation destroyed the Eudora Welty Library.)

MDAH knew the location of the library’s loading dock before it broke ground for the two museums. They could have been entered on Mississippi Street or North Jefferson Street. A blind eye is turned toward that inconvenient truth as Jackson endures the absence of a flagship library, a crowning symbol of civic pride. Whenever Jacksonians lament the lack of a flagship library — as far as the eye can see — the penalty paid for serving as the state’s capital is inescapable.

Please do not take this critique to disapprove of public spaces shared by rich and poor alike. I am an advocate of public parks and prefer as many as possible, available in as many places as possible.

What I deplore, first and foremost, is that Jackson lacks sufficient funds to maintain city streets. MDAH could have constructed a state of the art public library, at state expense, in exchange for vacating the property sought. What occurred is as if one’s next-door neighbor bulldozed one’s home, refused recompense, and justified outrageous presumption, saying that the neighborhood was enhanced by the creation of green space.

The Northside Sun reported, on Friday August 22, 2025, that Jeanne Williams, Executive Director of the Jackson Hinds Library System, has informed Jackson’s City Council that the system’s board of directors recently “toured potential sites in an effort to re-establish the demolished Eudora Welty Library… ‘To renovate one of those sites would have been in the $12 million to $18 million range…’”

Second, state elected officials vociferously decry Federal Government overreach but, when the State Government overreaches, no conceivable dissembling is deemed excessive: When Thompson Field opened in 1963, it was built by the City of Jackson but, when the State of Mississippi sought control over our airport, the property was appropriated — once again without the citizens of Jackson being paid for the taking.

MDAH, given its focus on Mississippi history, is acutely aware of Mississippi’s troubling tradition of silencing dissent; running from town anyone saying what people in power do not want heard. I will not win friends among individuals fearful of realities being exposed that they prefer go unexamined notwithstanding the importance of pondering the pertinent problems implicated.

Not unlike Martin Luther’s protest, “I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”

Posted on

Ars Voces: Jaime Harker

My academic life has always been about hidden treasure. When I first moved to Mississippi, I read John Howard’s Men Like That, and he gave me a vision of a vast queer Mississippi underground, erupting in newspaper stories, highway rest stops, and bookshelves. He introduced me to three gay Mississippi writers, including Hubert Creekmore, Water Valley native, poet, novelist, translator, and editor. I checked Creekmore’s The Welcome out of the UM library; it took me over ten years to locate a copy. I have been asking every editor at the University Press of Mississippi to reprint the novel, with no success. Opening a queer feminist bookstore in Creekmore’s hometown is, I hope, the first step in a campaign to bring him back in print.

I love digging around in archives. I spent two weeks hunting for fan letters in Christopher Isherwood’s papers. I found amazing ones, including a young man from North Carolina who mailed Isherwood photographs of his lovers, with detailed commentary on the back of each; water color portraits in a handwritten tribute; flirty come-ons from English teenagers. He wrote them all back, and often invited them to his house. At Duke University, I found the papers of fantastic Southern lesbian feminists. They kept everything—not just letters with agents and editors, but love letters from exes, flyers for readings, gossip and descriptions of parties and chance encounters. Dorothy Allison’s are my favorite. Most archives organize correspondence by letter writer, and store them alphabetically. Dorothy Allison kept every piece of mail she received in order and has them in her archive by date.

One has to really dig to find the gems. But in between, you get a sense of her life as it was lived: Flip; a flyer for a reading; flip, a letter to her friend about her recent breakup; flip, a letter to her agent; flip, an invitation to an S/M sex party; flip, a letter to a manufacturer complaining about a defective whip she received in the mail; flip, a letter from Cris South, a member of the Feminary collective and novelist, about her forthcoming book and her shifting identity from butch to bottom; flip, a contract from her editor. Finding the treasures was a delight, but so was the rich tapestry of a live lived in real time, without a sense of what would be seen as ‘important’ later. That sequence is what makes it important, even as the gems I uncover become part of another narrative forming in my own head.

The treasures are the stories I share when people wonder how I could spend seven years working on a book. But the truth is I love the searching as much as I love the discovery. Doing research has taught me patience, something that my wife Dixie tells me I sorely need. She’s right. Chefs understand this, of course. You can’t rush the rising of the dough, the marinade on the pork, or the brine on the turkey; slow-roasted vegetables in the oven are better than the microwave or boiling water. I have a tendency to want things right away, but Dixie knows that the best things take time.

Writing a book teaches you that, too. You can’t dash off a dissertation, or a book, in a series of all-nighters. You have to work a little bit every day, without being able to see the end; you research, and write, and revise, and repeat, endlessly. To sustain this, you must learn to love the process, to learn to love the questions themselves, as Rilke put it: ““Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Violet Valley Bookstore is the same. I love the process—the arrival of books, the evolving categories on the shelves, the unexpected visitors to the store, from San Francisco and Durham and Jackson and Oxford. I love the excited teenagers, taking photos for Snapchat, and the serious bibliophiles, touching the vintage Mississippi textbooks. I would like this little 10×40 foot bookshop to be a hidden treasure in Mississippi for years to come.

Posted on

Delta Chinese Collards

This recipe comes from an article in The New York Times by Joan Nathan, “East Meets South at a Delta Table” (June, 2003) profiling the Sino-Southern cooking of the Chow family in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Wash and trim three bunches of collards and cut into more or less bite-size pieces. Heat wok or a very large skillet, brown a teaspoon of salt, and add about a quarter cup of canola or peanut oil. When oil is hot, add 6 sliced cloves of garlic and stir until lightly toasted. Add greens and a dash of pepper, stir constantly until wilted and tender, then blend in 2 tablespoons oyster sauce and a scant teaspoon of sugar. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve immediately.

Posted on

Faulkner and Welty for Young Readers

What compels great writers to write for children? For whatever reason, many do, and some titles are familiar: C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and T.S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a childhood favorite of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

More obscure are Joyce’s, The Cat and the Devil, Twain’s, Advice to Little Girls, Woolf’s, The Widow and the Parrot, Mary Shelley’s The Fisher’s Cot, and then we have these little-known children’s books by two of Mississippi’s brightest literary lights; Welty’s The Shoe Bird and Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree.

 

In 1927, Faulkner gave the story that was to become The Wishing Tree to Victoria “Cho-Cho” Franklin, the daughter of his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. Faulkner was still infatuated with Estelle and had hopes of her leaving her current husband and marrying him, which she did in 1929. Faulkner typed the book on colored paper, bound it himself and included a lyrical dedication:
        

                            To Victoria

     ‘. . . . . . . I have seen music, heard
Grave and windless bells; mine air
     Hath verities of vernal leaf and bird.

     Ah, let this fade: it doth and must; nor grieve,
   Dream ever, though; she ever young and fair.’

But Faulkner made copies for three other children as well, and when Victoria tried to publish the book decades later, copyright had to be worked out between the four. In 1964, Faulkner’s granddaughter Victoria, Cho-Cho’s daughter, got Random House to publish a limited edition of 500 numbered copies, featuring black-and-white illustrations by artist Don Bolognese.

The Wishing Tree is a grimly whimsical morality tale, somewhere between Alice In Wonderland and To Kill a Mockingbird. Dulcie, a young girl, wakes on her birthday to find a mysterious red-haired boy in her room who whisks her, the other children, the maid Alice, and a 92-year old man through a “soft wisteria scented mist” to find the Wishing Tree. They wish, and they unwish, and at the end they meet St. Francis who gives them each a bird–a little winged thought.  The Wishing Tree is about the importance of choosing one’s wishes with consideration. “If you are kind to helpless things, you don’t need a Wishing Tree to make things come true.”

On April 8, 1967, a version of the story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Three days later, Random House released a regular edition, which went through three printings that year alone and no more. The book is now regarded as a literary curio from the man who put an Ole Miss coed in a cathouse in Memphis.

Eudora Welty finished what was to become The Shoe Bird in 1963 under the working title Pepe to fulfill a contractual obligation to Harcourt Brace—and to put a new roof on her house. She sent the final draft to Diarmund Russell in March, and he was enthusiastic: “totally charming—something all ages can read.” Eudora readied what was now entitled The Shoe Bird for publication in early 1964 with illustrations by Beth Krush, dedicating it to Bill and Emmy Maxwell’s daughters, Kate and Brookie.

The Shoe Bird is Arturo, a parrot who works in The Friendly Shoe Store “in a shopping center in the middle of the U.S.A.,” helping Mr. Friendly greet customers and bringing him a match for his end-of-the-day pipe. Arturo’s motto is: If you hear it, tell it. One day, a little boy who was leaving the store said, “Shoes are for the birds!” and after the store had closed Arturo, true to his motto, repeats the phrase and all the birds in the world—including a dodo and a phoenix—gather at the shoe store to be fitted for shoes. The Shoe Bird is a nice little story with lots of puns, but it’s heavy-handed with the moral of speaking for oneself instead of just repeating what others say.

Reviews in adult publications were “cordial but restrained,” while reception among children’s literature commentators was either negative or—as in the case of the influential Horn Book, nonexistent. Kirkus Reviews described the novel as uneventful and concludes: “the overly wordy result is so obscure that readers are likely to want to leave dictionaries as well as shoes to the birds.” An orchestral ballet was composed by Welty’s friend Lehman Engel and performed by the Jackson Ballet Guild in 1968. A 2002 choral piece was also commissioned by the Mississippi Boy Choir and composed by Samuel Jones.

As to what compels a writer to write for children, can it ever be as simple as to win over a childhood sweetheart or to roof a house? It’s never that simple and never that easy.

Posted on

Pat Lamar’s Lasagna

When I was working at Audie Michael’s, a restaurant on the Square in Oxford (current site of the City Grocery), we became well-known for two items outside our regular menu. One was gumbo, and the other was lasagna. We ran both regularly as luncheon specials.

Since we were basically an upscale burger joint, we didn’t do a lot of catering, usually only large take-out orders for regular customers. But one day Pat Lamar, a wealthy, socially prominent patron and later mayor of Oxford, sent in a messenger carrying a beautiful, shin-high (swear to God) McCarty bowl with a tapered bottom. My boss came waltzing into the kitchen with this huge piece of pottery and said, “Mrs. Lamar wants you to make lasagna in this for her party tonight.”

“Sure,” I said. “Is this oven-proof?” He looked at me like I’d hit him with a hammer. “What do you mean, oven-proof?” he asked. (He was a nice guy, just lacked focus.) “Look,” I said. “I’m not about to take an expensive piece of pottery, fill it full of lasagna and bake it in an oven without knowing that it’s not going to shatter.”

When realization blossomed in his mind, he panicked. In my experience, this has been management’s basic reaction to anything that’s not in the manual.

“What are we gonna do?” he said.

“Call her up and see if she’s baked in it before,” I said.

A few minutes later he came back and said, “She’s never put it in the oven, but she thinks it will be fine.”

I was skeptical. Even if the piece was insured, I didn’t want to have to clean up an oven full of lasagna and broken crockery. So I got on the phone and called Ron Dale, the top ceramics professor at Ole Miss.

“Jesse Lee,” he said, “To be honest with you, I do not know if it will withstand the heat or not. But the one thing not to do is to put a cool piece into a hot oven. Bring it up to heat.”

So I took a deep breath and made lasagna. I filled the bowl with warm water to heat it up a bit, poured that out, and filled it with swirled layers of meat, cheese, sauce, and noodles, all warm.

The entire ordeal, a Vesuvius-looking wonder that took four people to lift, went into a cold oven. I turned the thermostat up maybe fifty degrees every fifteen minutes or so. My boss positioned himself in front of the oven on a stool staring at the oven door until I ran him out with a mop.

After three hours, the lasagna was bubbling beautifully and the bowl showed no cracks. I found a box big enough to hold the damn thing and was just closing the lid when Mrs. Lamar’s entourage came to pick it up for the party, which had already started.

Once it was out of my hands, I went up to the bar and got good and snockered.

Posted on

A Sacred Harp Memory

This memoir was originally written in 1996 and emailed to the Fasola – Discussions group. At the time, the worship activity we know as Sacred Harp was in the middle of a nationwide growth & resurgence.

The following is the description of one of the earliest Sacred Harp events that I can remember, even somewhat vividly. It is stored in the corner of my memory and every now and then it sneaks out to refresh my thoughts.

July 1973 – I was but twelve years old. I had been to Sacred Harp singings all my life but this was the first year that I was trying to take in as many of them as I could. Being late summer, the crops were “laid by” and conventions were beginning to occur in North Mississippi. I come from a very active churchgoing family so Saturday singings are at the top of my list. It was the Saturday before the first Sunday in August (last day of July), time for the Webster County (Mississippi) Convention. For many years, this had been a two-day singing but it had been reduced to one like many others that would follow.

I loaded my fence-rail frame into the back of an old Chevelle with Hugh and Henry McGuire, chauffeured proudly by their father, Hugh Bill McGuire. Making our way to the south end of Calhoun County, we turned on to a dusty gravel road just below Derma, Mississippi (go ahead, get out your atlas). It was a typical hot, scalding July day. The vegetation on the roadside was now a dull green from months of the hot sun and covered with layers of dust, put there by ambling autos and numerous farm implements. We crossed Topashaw creek bottom which included a handful of rickety old wooden plank bridges stretched across an almost dry creek bed. As you climb the first hill on the other side, you can look across the creek bottom and see a straight road for about a country mile (and then some) and watch the dust you have left behind settle gently above the road in the late summer heat. We pass through little communities so small that if you blink, you’ve missed them. One barn roof proudly proclaims “Bentley, USA”. Bently is now home to a 4th of July barbecue which is heavily attended in election years.

Somewhere in the woods we leave Calhoun County and enter Webster County. Within a matter of minutes, we enter the sleepy little community of Montevista where the local Baptist church is hosting the convention. Upon entering the church, it didn’t take long to figure out that without us Calhoun County folks, the pickins’ would be kind of slim. Most of the Webster County singers were on tenor, with a few others scattered on the remaining parts.

Here sat a group of folks, mostly senior citizens, who had attended singings most all their life. In their younger days, they had made their way to singings at local churches in wagons pulled by oxen, horses, or mules. On this day they came in vehicles named Fairlane, Galaxy 500, and Impala. They communicated by “yellin’ across the holler” as children but had lived to know that men walked on the moon. Today, they continued the tradition of singing from the Sacred Harp.

I still remember some selections from the day. The day’s singing included “When I am Gone,” “O, Come Away,” “Soft Music,” “Pilgrims Farewell,” “Wells,” “Windham” (led in 4/4 time by Joe Cobb) and “Easter Anthem,” which was traditionally sung in Mississippi at 2:00 in the afternoon. Other favorites were from the 1911 Sacred Harp (J.L. White edition) which were included in the 1958 Deason/Parris revision of the Christian Harmony. “Angel Band” and “Don’t Grieve Your Mother” were among those favorites.

Dinner, served under the oak trees behind the church, was a sight to behold. Plates of fried chicken graced the table alongside fresh butterbeans, tomatoes, corn, & squash. The meal could be topped off with some heavenly coconut cake or homemade chocolate pie topped with fresh calf slobber (meringue). One cook had brewed the ice tea a little strong. When the extra strong tea was poured out by me and John Leigh Vanhorn, it fizzled and made a layer of foam on the hot gravel in the driveway. A tastier batch awaited us in another jug on the table.

The afternoon session concluded with many thank you’s and “’preciate all you folks from other counties comin”.A couple of times someone looked over at Hugh, Henry, and myself and said “it shore is good to see these young fellers takin’ up sangin”. New Hope Baptist Church offered to host the convention the following year. After a song and a prayer, the convention was dismissed until 1974.

Before the long (35 mile) ride home back down the same dusty trail in a non-air conditioned car, Hugh Bill made a stop at the Montevista grocery store. This little cinder block building sat at the bottom of the hill below the church with a Southland Oil sign and kitty cat decals on the gas pumps out front. Once inside, Hugh, Henry and I made our way over to the old fashioned “drank box”. What a selection! Nestled inside the cooler were cold Nehi bellywashers (Peach & Strawberry), along with numerous other fruit drinks. I opted for a cold Grapette which was beside companions Lemonette and Orangette. These had to be the best fruit flavored soft drinks of all time. At least they were on that day. On the dusty car ride home, us boys sang songs we didn’t know from the Christian Harmony. Hugh Bill sang along with us while driving. He didn’t need a book since he knew them all from memory. (Still does, for that matter.)

For the next few years the Webster County Convention convened at New Hope Church, which sat on the main highway (Mississippi 9) between Eupora & Calhoun City. The remaining singers discontinued their visits to Calhoun County due to disability or they passed away. The last attempt at a singing was summer 1983 or 1984, I’m really not sure. The Webster County Convention went the way of many others in our state. They’re gone but not forgotten.

My memory of this was stirred when I read the J-card from a cassette recording from a convention in the north (somewhere in New England, I’m thinking). It included a list of singings begun in recent years. For every singing listed on that cassette, there is a singing in The South (such as the Webster Convention) that no longer exists, somewhere here in The South. I appreciate the efforts of all you folks around the country that have started singing groups, conventions, etc. In your own way, you’re preserving this fine old tradition we fondly know as Sacred Harp.

You may preserve the sound and the music. Unfortunately, you can’t preserve people, places, and time, nor the lost days of youthful boys.

Mark S. Davis Pearl, Mississippi