If you were to travel back in time to Constantinople’s Taksim Square in the 1920s, you might hear the lively beat from Club Maxim. Inside, you’d likely find a black man in a top hat, perhaps with a pipe in his hand. He might just tell you, as he did one tourist, how he’d overcome “difficulties that would stagger the ordinary man.”
This would be Frederick Bruce Thomas, known later in his life as Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas, the Mississippi farm boy who became a Moscow impresario and introduced jazz to Asia.
Thomas was born June 12th, 1872 to Hannah and Lewis Thomas, who owned 600-plus acres in Coahoma County, Mississippi. In 1886, a white planter took over their land. Against all odds, the Thomas family sued the planter, and in what must have been one of the few successful cases for black landowners at the time, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in their favor. However, the planter appealed and, under threat, in 1890 the Thomas family decided to leave Mississippi and settle in Memphis. In late October, 1890, just a few months after moving the family to Memphis, where he took work as a flagman for the railroad, Lewis Thomas was hacked to death in bed by a jealous husband.
A short time later, Frederick Bruce Thomas, who’d only known life in the South, hopped on the rails, first to Arkansas, then to St. Louis, Chicago, and Brooklyn. He went to Europe in 1894, and in 1899, after crisscrossing the Continent, mastering French, and honing his skills as a waiter and valet, he signed on to accompany a nobleman to Russia.
Thomas’s career in Moscow proved to be more successful than he could ever have imagined. He found no color line in Moscow, where he worked for ten years as a waiter, a butler, and a valet, before becoming assistant to the owner of Yar, the city’s most prominent café-theatre. The Sokolovsky gypsy choir performed there on a regular basis and their songs about their years as slaves likely reminded him of his own people’s story.
Yar was frequented by the bourgeoisie of Moscow and Frederick Thomas became the darling of the wealthy clientele. By 1911 he had earned enough money to open an entertainment garden, “Aquarium,” with the help of two Russian partners. In 1912, he rented a music venue in the city center called “Maxim” which very quickly became popular with wealthy Muscovites.
In Russia, Thomas was one of only a dozen blacks. With his résumé of jobs in the finest European hotels and restaurants, he had the three things he needed most: opportunity, access and know-how. Ironically, he also had history on his side. The African Abraham Gannibal had been seen as “the dark star of the Enlightenment” in Russia as far back as the 18th century, and his great-grandson, Alexander Pushkin, became an icon of Russian literature.
With his talent for booking musical acts from Western Europe, Thomas’ night spots, Aquarium and Maxim, became the spots in which to be seen (and from which to disappear) during Russia’s late imperial era. Black performers visiting from the States remembered, everything was “gold and plush” so that “you would sink so deep in carpets that you would think that you would be going through the door to the cellar.”
Frederick Thomas blossomed in Moscow. He obtained Russian citizenship, was married three times and had five children. Around 1914, he bought a dacha near Odessa and he also owned buildings in Moscow. An African-American immigrant from Mississippi, the son of slaves, had made a fortune in Russia.
But when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Thomas found himself on the wrong side. His newly acquired wealth trumped his past oppression as a black man in the United States. He went to Odessa, but the city was evacuated in April 1919 by the French and British forces allied to the White Army. He managed to embark with his wife Elvira, his children and other refugees on the Russian ship “Emperor Nicholas” bound for Constantinople.
Arriving in the Ottoman capital, he hastened to the American embassy to seek help, or even repatriation to the United States. Officials at the embassy refused to recognize his American nationality and therefore refused to help him; his skin color undoubtedly played a decisive role.
Having lost all his wealth, Frederick Thomas started to do business again in Constantinople, like many Russian refugees. After three months, he opened his Anglo-American Garden Villa (the “Stella Club”) on August 31, 1919, with acts by “Mr. F. Miller and Mr. Tom.” Thanks to his new establishment’s success, he rented the basement of the Magic cinema with gardens in Pera in 1921, and transformed it into a jazz and night club. He named it “Maxim” in memory of Maxim in Moscow which had allowed him to start his career in the entertainment world. Harry A. Carter and the Shimmie Orchestra to headlined the first season, 1921-22.
Though opening “Maxim” left Thomas on the verge of bankruptcy, business at last started to pick up. After the First World War, you had been an American tourist looking for a good time in Constantinople, you probably would’ve been directed across the Golden Horn to one of the popular Russian-Western, European-style “cafés chantant,” where you could order a drink (outside of Prohibition), sample the finest cuisine, listen to all kinds of music and dance.
Despite the economic and political upheavals of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Frederick Thomas succeeded in making his establishment the most popular place in the city. He was the first person to import jazz to Turkey, and its popularity among the city’s natives and swarms of well-heeled tourists consolidated his success and made him rich once again. All those who remained of the Stanbuliot bourgeoisie, along with the English and French soldiers occupying the capital, hurried to listen to jazz at Maxim. Thomas became known as the “Sultan of Jazz.”
It’s astonishing that a black American who’d left the U.S. in 1894 and became a Russian citizen in 1914 was bringing America’s greatest music to the other side of the world by hosting black jazz bands in Constantinople before Louis Armstrong had even joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. But Thomas had already done similar things for the tango in Russia, and whatever obstacles he had to overcome as a Russian refugee. Ottoman Turkish had no word for Negro. Thomas told those who visited his clubs “he was ‘conservatively rated to be worth at least $250,000,’ which would amount to $10 million today.
Then, during the first years of the Turkish Republic, business began to decline. Foreigners and a large part of the bourgeoisie had left the city, while embassies and their staff began to be transferred to the new capital, Ankara. Frederick Thomas plunged into debt. Unable to pay his creditors, they had him put in jail and seized his nightclub, which they renamed “Yeni Maksim”.
Frederick Thomas was never to recover. Although his skin color was of no concern to the Turks, he could not avoid dealing with the diplomats in the American Consulate General in Constantinople, or with their racist superiors in the State Department. When he most needed their help, they refused to recognize him as an American and to give him legal protection.
Abandoned by the United States, and caught between the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic and his own extravagance, Thomas fell on hard times, was thrown into debtor’s prison, and died in Constantinople on July 12th, 1928 at Pasteur Hospital in Taksim. Forgotten by the Americans, Russians, Stanbuliots and all those he had entertained throughout Europe, Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas was laid to rest at the Protestant Feriköy Cemetery in Istanbul, far away from the “most Southern place on earth.”
(Thomas’s biography, The Black Russian, by Vladimir Alexandrov, was released by Atlantic Monthly Press in 2013.)
Hoover Lee was a grocer in Louise, Mississippi who created a marinade to replicate Cantonese duck. His concoction has a heavy soy background accented with garlic and ginger. These chicken leg quarters were marinated overnight and roasted in a slow (250) oven for a ninety minutes. The skin was crisp and the flesh succulent, reminiscent of the character if not the flavor of roast duck.
In her acceptance speech for the 1969 First Federal Foundation Awards given by the University of Mississippi, Charlotte Capers said, “I had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, and most especially, with the right people, to be able to make a contribution to my home state.”
That’s half the story. Capers was able to achieve what she did because she was the right person in that place and time and had the strength and malleability to withstand the upheavals in a watershed era for Mississippi. Moreover, she had the intelligence and initiative to know what needed to be done and how to do it. She also had the perspective and character to maneuver with dignity, efficiency, and relentless humor in a highly volatile political landscape.
Let me be the first to say that this monograph is inadequate; Charlotte Capers at the very least deserves the sort of biography afforded Fannye Cook. Might I add, given the firm conviction that Capers would agree, that a Pulitzer awaits the person who bring Evelyn Gandy from behind the curtain.
Ellison Capers, known as “the Fighting Bishop,” joined the Confederate Army as a major, saw the action at Ft. Sumter and was later promoted to lieutenant colonel of the 24th South Carolina. In May 1863 the regiment joined General Joseph E. Johnston for the Vicksburg Campaign. Capers was wounded in the leg at Jackson, Mississippi, promoted to Colonel, and then to Brigadier General shortly before the end of hostilities. In December 1865, he was elected secretary of state for South Carolina. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1868, he served as the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina from 1894 and cHancellor of the University of the South from 1904, until his death in 1908.
Bishop Capers officiated at the marriage of his youngest son, Walter, to Louise Woldridge, on June 29, 1904, in St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Columbia, Tennessee. Walter Branham Capers was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1870, attended Furman College and the University of South Carolina, and served as rector of St. Johns Memorial Church, Farmville, Virginia, after his graduation from Virginia Theological Seminary. From Virginia, Capers was called to Tennessee, where he was president of Columbia Institute, the diocesan school for girls, and rector of St. Peter’s Church, Columbia, from 1902 until 1918. He received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from the University of the South at Sewanee in 1917. In Columbia, he met and married Louise Drane Woldridge. Here the two Capers children, Walter Woldridge (1905) and Charlotte (1913), were born. Capers was called to St. Andrew’s Church, Jackson, in 1919, where he served as rector until 1946. He died in October, 1952.
In Jackson, the Capers family lived in the new rectory on the corner of North State and George Streets. Charlotte later wrote,
Charlotte with her dog, Rita
“It seems to me that 705 North State Street was a fine place for growing up in Jackson and learning the lay of the land. Around the corner and less than five minutes by skate, foot, or bicycle, was Davis School. The New Capitol was only a few blocks away, and young skaters did not hesitate to skate through the tiled basement floor and admire the Egyptian mummy who was the star of the building. A streetcar track ran in front of the house. When we were very young, we would put two straight pins on the track, spit on them, and wait for the streetcar. As it rumbled past it fused the pins into a charming design of crossed swords. If you wished to travel, the streetcar could deliver you north, south, or west. East was the Pearl River, and the suburbs in that area were not yet developed.”
“As St. Andrew’s was the only Episcopal church in Jackson for a long time, my father’s congregation was scattered all over town and from Clinton on the west to Madison on the north. Sometimes Father would let me ride with him in the family Essex when he went calling, and we covered a lot of territory. The Fairgrounds were within walking distance, as were the downtown picture shows. Beulah, my nurse, took me to the Fair every year on the five dollars my grandmother sent us. This included lunch. When we got home, Beulah became our cook. I should note that Beulah was not my nurse because I was sick, but because I was a child, and nurses were what children had in the 1920s. Nurses were for taking care of children, cooks were for cooking, and so far as I knew, maids had bit parts, like ‘Your carriage awaits, madam,’ in the occasional stage plays which came to the Century Theater.”
“In spite of the real economic hardship of the Depression, I don’t remember it as a bad time. It was in the 1920s that we learned to dance, and perfected our skills later during the Depression at dances in our homes, including the Rectory, to the Dixieland jazz of Joe White and his combo, fifteen to twenty-five dollars for four hours, depending on the number of instruments.”
Capers graduated from Central High School in 1930. That June, The Jackson Daily News reported: “Miss Capers Entertains with Lovely Dance”—No graduating affair has been more enjoyable than was the beautiful dance given by Miss Charlotte Capers on Wednesday evening from 9 until 1 o’clock in the ballroom of the Edwards Hotel. Miss Capers in a most becoming creation of green lace with her escort Mr. George F. Woodliff, was assisted in receiving by her parents Dr. and Mrs. Walter. Capers. Mrs. Capers was charming in a dress of apricot satin. The ball room had been converted into a lovely scene with palms and other greenery, forming a pretty background for the beautiful dresses worn by the high school and college girls, who with their escorts participated in the delightful occasion. Joe White’s orchestra furnished the wonderful music and dancing was enjoyed until a late hour.”
With the goal of becoming a journalist, Capers attended the University of Colorado and Millsaps College. She was awarded a BA degree in English from the University of Mississippi in 1934. After a brief stint with Condé Nast’s publicity department in Boca Raton, Florida, Capers returned to Jackson.
The year 1938 would prove pivotal for Charlotte Capers. The Capers family suffered a tragedy in the loss of her older brother, Walter Woldridge Capers. Born in 1905, Capers earned his LL.B. at Vanderbilt University, and attended the International School of Law at The Hague, Holland. In 1936 was chosen to serve in the state senate for the four-year term and was appointed chairman of the judiciary committee. He was also dean of the Jackson School of Law He died in December, 1938, from complications of rheumatic fever, in Biloxi, Mississippi, and was buried in Lakewood Memorial Park in Clinton, Mississippi.
In 1938, Charlotte Capers joined the staff of the Mississippi Department of Archives & History (hereafter, MDAH) as a stenographer. Capers later wrote, “I managed to avoid the responsibilities of hard times of bringing home some bacon during the Great Depression, I wanted to play on, until the Right Man swept me away to some swinging tune from A Great Big Band. When the R.M. failed to appear and the wolf was at the Rectory door, I was offered a job in MDAH, and was persuaded to accept it by a family increasingly nervous about making ends meet, and tired of supporting me.” She was to quip, “I came in for a cup of coffee and stayed 45 years.”
MDAH was established by an act of the Mississippi legislature. Governor A. H. Longino signed the bill into law on February 27, 1902. Mississippi became the second state after Alabama (1901) to establish such a department. The first director was Dr. Dunbar Rowland, a lawyer, from Coffeeville. The Department’s first quarters were the rooms adjoining the House of Representatives in the Old Capitol. The department moved to the ground floor of the New Capitol in 1902. Dr. William D. McCain was appointed Director of MDAH in 1938. The Department remained in the basement of the New Capitol until 1940, when slightly more commodious quarters were provided in the War Memorial Building.
When McCain was called to active military service from 1943-45 and 1951-53, Capers was promoted from her position as research and editorial assistant to Acting Director. On May 25, 1955 McCain accepted the position of president of Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg and on June 1, at a special meeting of the Board of Trustees of MDAH, Charlotte Capers was unanimously elected Director of the Department to serve out the unexpired term of Dr. McCain, and to begin a six-year term beginning on January 1, 1956. She also became editor-in-chief of The Journal of Mississippi History and chairman of the Mississippi Historical Society.
Capers soon exercised her new authority in a spat with another state agency. Plans of the State Highway Department for the proposed route of a new lane for Highway 49 North, between Jackson and Yazoo City, called for the leveling of a pyramidal mound near the town of Pocahontas. From archeological source materials in the Archives, it was determined that this mound was an important archeological site of prime importance by Moreau B.C. Chambers, former archeologist with MDAH.
In July, 1956, Director Capers invoked for the first time a little-known law which makes MDAH responsible for the safety and preservation of “ruins and archeological sites” in the State of Mississippi. House Bill No. 62, Chapter 161, General Laws of the State of Mississippi, 1938, provides that “any person who shall appropriate, excavate, injure or destroy any historic or prehistoric ruin or monument, or any object of historical, archeological or scientific value, situated in the State of Mississippi without first securing the permission of the Director of MDAH shall be guilty of a misdemeanor . . .” The Director informed the State Highway Department of the historical and archeological significance of the Pocahontas Mound, and the 1938 law; as a result, the new lane of Highway 49 North would by-pass the mound, and the State Highway Department would make a roadside park, appropriately marked, nearby.
The Highway Department had its revenge almost sixty years later, however, when in July, 2013 a newly-opened rest area on U.S. High-way 49 at the Pocahontas Indian mound was named for three people instrumental in saving the historic site from development. What Miss Charlotte would say about the Capers-Blake-Scales Rest Area is a matter ripe for speculation.
THE BASIC EIGHT
In the 1950s and ‘60s, Capers was a member of a small, exclusive social circle.
(Eudora) and seven other friends gathered almost weekly for dinner, conversation, and parlor games; they called themselves the Basic Eight. Charlotte Capers, then assistant director of MDAH, which she would eventually head, was a central figure in the group. One of the world’s great raconteurs, even if the world beyond Mississippi did not know it, Charlotte also wrote a regular column for the Jackson Daily News under the pseudonym of Miss Quote. Charlotte’s young assistant Ann Morrison and Ann’s architect husband, Bill, were also members of the Basic Eight as were Jacksonians Jimmie Wooldridge and Major White. The seventh and eighth places were filled variously by friends who returned to Jackson on regular visits—Frank Lyell and Hubert Creekmore most frequently. A different group member would entertain each week-once at the Morrisons’ the guests saw their hosts climb into a bathtub in order to wrap a large roast in layers of wet, salted newspapers, emerging to place the wrapped meat in a barbeque of hot coals. Another time the group painted a mural in the stairway that led from the Morrisons’ basement apartment to Charlotte’s house above. One evening they met to see a moonflower bloom at the home of Major White. At anyone’s home they might play word games: each person writing one line in the set pattern of a story, folding a piece of paper to conceal what he or she had written on it, then passing the paper to another, who would complete a second part of the pattern and so on. Eventually all eight or more lines would be revealed to the assembled group. The results could be hilarious. One exchange led to this sentence:
The beauteous Marlon Brando Jocosely Accosted the luscious but naughty Greta Garbo by the sea He said, “I want you.” She said: “It couldn’t matter to me less, one way or the other.” They rode off on a bicycle built for two.
The Basic Eight never themselves rode bicycles built for two, but they did make excursions together. A favorite overnight stop was twenty miles north of Jackson at Allison’s Wells, a notably eccentric spa. There one evening soap bubbles began to waft from the laundry up through the dining room, and the proprietor, Hosford Fontaine, made the best of a bad situation: “Aren’t they beautiful, aren’t they lovely?” she rhetorically inquired. Like Hosford, the Basic Eight knew how to find amusement and pleasure wherever they gathered.
Members of the group entertained, together or separately, notable writers, editors, agents, and photographers who came through Jackson to see Eudora. In February 1952 Robert Penn Warren delivered a lecture at Belhaven College and then spent an evening with Eudora and Charlotte. “Not a serious word was spoken,” Warren later recalled with pleasure. (Suzanne Marrs, Eudora Welty: A Biography)
THE OLD CAPITOL
Capers was learning to develop the directorship of MDAH into an effective agent not only to enforce the antiquity provisions in the Mississippi constitution, but also as a spearhead to carry out the directives of the executive branch. It wasn’t long before she would use her good offices to carry out an objective that had been cherished not only by her predecessors but also by the new officers in state government: the restoration of the Old Capitol.
The Old Capitol had been saved from total destruction in 1916, and Dunbar Rowland, as well as McCain and Capers all recommended a “Hall of History” in a restored Old Capitol, and both Rowland’s successors, McCain and Capers, included such recommendations in their biennial reports. In the late 1950s, Governor J.P. Coleman personally charged MDAH was with planning and creating a state historical museum to be housed in the restored Old Capitol. He was supported by Secretary of State Heber Ladner, Speaker of the House Walter Sillers, and State Tax Collector William Winter.
The Building Commission would perform the restoration, but the MDAH Board of Trustees was to plan the museum. As director, Capers was responsible for carrying her board’s policies into effect. While Capers had a large and direct stake in the restoration, she had no authority over the architect, John Ware. What she did have was a powerful personality and enormous personal influence. She was a friend of Secretary of State Ladner and of Speaker Sillers as well as Sillers’s wife and sister. She and Governor Coleman had been schoolmates at Ole Miss, and Speaker Sillers and State Tax Collector William Winter were on the MDAH Board of Trustees.
Capers had no museum experience, no museum staff, and no budget. She was attempting to create a historical museum in a building on which work had yet to begun. In addition, she had to develop policies for a state historical museum as well as an exhibit plan, and she had to match her rationale and her exhibits plan to Ware’s restoration plans.
Charlotte Capers rose to the occasion. She began by educating herself and by establishing contacts within the museum world. During 1957 and 1958, Capers wrote hundreds of letters seeking advice and help, and she joined professional museum associations and attended their meetings. By the beginning of 1958, she had established a close professional relationship with Dr. Arnold B. Grobman, director of the Florida State Historical Museum and president of the Southeastern Museums Conference. For exhibit expertise Capers turned increasingly to Ralph H. Lewis, chief of the National Park Service’s museums branch. From Grobman, Capers could get expert advice on museum policies, space allocation, budget, and staffing. From the National Park Service, she could get expert help in designing exhibits.
The famous “Mississippi Mummy” didn’t meet Capers’ criteria as a Mississippi relic.
Two years later, in January 1959, plans had been completed. The ambiguous division of roles in the restoration produced some disagreements between architect John Ware and Charlotte Capers. Capers recognized that Ware was ultimately responsible to the Building Commission, the final authority for the job. Although she knew that she had no direct authority over the architect and that her primary duty was to create the museum, Capers nevertheless had a mandate from the Board of Trustees to advise and consult on the restoration. Governor Coleman, the Building Commission, and the Board of Trustees of Archives and History all agreed that the restoration should be as pure as possible. The restored building would be the centerpiece for MDAH’s state historical museum, thus making the entire building, in a sense, a grand exhibit.
In 1956, Capers had a staff of seven, including a janitor and three clerical workers. In 1958, another clerk was added. None was a museum specialist. In her biennial report of 1959, Capers assured the legislature and the general public that the planning of the Mississippi Historical Museum had not been haphazard, and that it “represents the best thinking in the museum profession in America.” Over the next three years, Capers visited key legislators to enlist their support and made countless speeches to civic clubs and patriotic societies. The staff and budget request Capers submitted for the 1960-62 biennium included money for museum staff and exhibits. Her request included eight additional full-time employees and one half-time. When she submitted the budget to the Commission of Budget and Accounting on August 24, 1959, she noted that she was asking for “a sizeable increase” from $95,165 in the previous biennium to $246,492, more than a one-hundred-percent budget increase. When Capers heard a rumor that her request would be cut by $12,000, she wrote her friend Speaker Sillers asking for help. The department received $248,075 for the 1960-62 biennium and a new museum staff of five, headed by a museum curator.
When the Old Capitol opened on March 21, 1961, Governor J.P. Coleman gave the principal address, stating that the building was “an emblem of the faith that was new and shining in 1839, 122 years ago, and which continues today.” Charlotte Capers presided.
THE CIVIL WAR CENTENNIAL
In the Clarion-Ledger of Friday, March 10, 1961, columnist Tom Ethridge, in his “Mississippi Notebook,” noted that “the total cost of the restoration for the Old Capitol was over $1.5M—a sound investment as an historical asset and tourist attraction. It will play a big part in Mississippi’s observance of the Civil War Centennial.”
The restoration of the Old Capitol was important because in the late Fifties, due to the state’s violent reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, Mississippi’s reputation was at a very low ebb and state officials were struggling to present a more positive face to the nation.
In the committee assignments of the Society of American Archivists, in December, 1959, Capers was named liaison to the Civil War Committee of the Civil War Centennial Commission along with Dallas Irvine of the National Archives and Sidney Foreman, archivist and historian of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The seven-member committee was appointed by Mrs. Mary G. Bryan of Georgia, president of the American Association of Archivists, at the request of General U.S. Grant III, chairman of the Civil War Centennial Commission. In a talk to the Downtown Kiwanians at the King Edward on March 23, 1961, Capers mentions a two-volume Mississippi in the Confederacy to be published by MDAH “One of the finest collections of material on the Confederacy is in the Department and available to researchers.” Capers also published a feature essay, “Mississippi’s Civil War Role Extensive,” in The State Times, Tuesday, March 28, 1961, prior to the opening of the Old Capitol on June 3.
The nation commemorated the centennial of the American Civil War in the midst of the Cold War and a civil rights struggle at home. Mississippi Governor James P. Coleman had envisioned a conservative commemoration and looked to the state’s heritage organizations and historical community, including MDAH Director Capers, who was slated in a leading position, to shape a respectful remembrance. However, his successor, Governor Ross Barnett, used the centennial to publicize his views about the “southern way of life,” emboldening support for his stance against integration. One of the state’s largest centennial events, the March, 1961, celebration of Mississippi’s secession from the Union, featured Barnett costumed as a Confederate general, marching at the head of several thousand similarly dressed “Mississippi Greys” in downtown Jackson. Tens of thousands of spectators roared to the sounds of “Dixie” and cheered the University of Mississippi’s half-block-long Confederate battle flag. In 1989, she recounted,
“You just cannot imagine the to-do that was going on. We wanted a lot of people to see the museum. It had been the big plan and it worked. Fourteen thousand people attended. And they were wild people; we had complete chaos. They hadn’t understood a museum at all. And they mainly said, “Where’s the bathroom?” And we lost a baby that day because there was a baby buggy with a baby in it that somebody noticed and then later they noticed the buggy, but the baby was not in it, a lot of peanuts were in it. Governor Barnett came and the elevator kept going up with him, but they wouldn’t stop to let him out. So, somebody remembered the buggy and the baby and Governor Barnett in the elevator, so when we found peanuts in the buggy and didn’t find the baby, we thought he was still in the elevator with Governor Barnett. I don’t know where he was, but he wasn’t dead. It was the wildest thing you’ve ever seen. I just wanted to kill myself.”
Though Charlotte toed the line in the state’s overblown celebration of the Confederacy, her personal political views were progressive, if not to say liberal, as Suzanne Marrs relates in her splendid Eudora Welty: A Biography:
“In February 1964 Robert Penn Warren paid a welcome visit. He was in Mississippi doing research for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? And one evening Eudora invited him to join her and Charlotte Capers for dinner. The three had a wonderful time; Warren reported that he “woke up the next morning with my stomach muscles sore from laughing.” Much of the laughter had been directed at former governor Ross Barnett. In November, Robert Penn Warren wrote Eudora for permission to use a fictionalized account of the evening he had spent with her and Charlotte (see above). He wanted to incorporate it in his book Who Speaks for the Negro? Eudora consulted Charlotte about the piece, and Charlotte was immediately opposed to its use, feeling that she would be easily recognized and that her criticism of Ross Barnett and Paul B. Johnson, Jr. would result in the loss of her job as director of MDAH. “I think,” Charlotte told Warren, “they would be reasonable in firing me when considering the use of the words: idiot, drooling, face like an old wash rag, ripped right open like a hog killing, and defective child, in connection with the chief executive and chief executive-to-be. Incidentally some of these expressions are not familiar to me.” Warren promptly replied “to hell with publishing it,” and the difficulty was resolved. Charlotte and Eudora’s dismay at the state of Mississippi politics was not.”
THE ARCHIVES & HISTORY BUILDING
Minutes of a meeting of the Board of Trustees of MDAH, held on July 25, 1963, include a plea from Capers to press for a new building. The Board unanimously adopted a resolution strongly recommending that $1,250,000 be made available to MDAH for the construction of “adequate, modern facilities to house the archives and records program of the State of Mississippi, and that these facilities be constructed in as close proximity to the State Historical Museum in the Old Capitol as possible.”
Little progress was made toward securing funds for the building until 1965, when Dr. R. A. McLemore recognized the opportunity of promoting a new archives building as part of Mississippi’s celebration of her Sesquicentennial of Statehood in 1967. Mr. William F. Winter, member of the executive committee of the Board of Trustees, drafted a bill calling for a new archives building as a permanent memorial to the Sesquicentennial of Statehood, but it never came out of committee. An Extraordinary Session of the Legislature was called on November 9, and Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. made a personal telephone call to Capers, asking the amount that would be required to construct an Archives building. Capers gave him the figure $1,250,000, which was the amount originally requested by the Board of Trustees. A few days after the Governor’s telephone call, the sum of $1,120,000 was provided for an Archives building in House Bill No. 7, Laws of Mississippi, 1966-1967 Extraordinary Session. This bill was signed into law by Governor Johnson on January 5, 1967.
Capers reported this belated triumph to the Board of Trustees at its January 13, 1967 meeting. On April 13, 1967, the State Building Commission appointed Overstreet, Ware and Lewis of Jackson architects for the project. E. J. Yelverton was executive secretary of the State Building Commission at the time. Mr. Joe Ware, partner in the Overstreet, Ware and Lewis firm, and Capers visited many archival establishments throughout the country to familiarize themselves with the special requirements of archival repositories, and put the plan for the new building which was eventually approved by the Board. (The design called for a largely windowless second floor, but Charlotte insisted an eastern window in the executive office so she could, “keep an eye on Rankin County.”)
It was not until February 6, 1969, that the matter of a site was finally settled. The State Building Commission again approved the Capitol Green site which had been approved by the Board of Trustees, the State Building Commission and the State Capitol Commission of the previous administration in 1967, and finally, four years after the Board of Trustees and the director began their drive for a new building, the stage was actually set for construction.
On November 6, 1969, bids on plans for the Archives and History Building were opened by the State Building Commission. Miss Capers, Dr. McLemore and Mr. Winter were present in the Woolfolk State Office Building auditorium when the bids were opened. Mid-State Construction Company, bidding on the plans of Ware Lewis Partnership, was low bidder with a base bid of $1,061,525, and a base bid plus alternates of $1,108,925. With the addition of architects’ fees, equipment, and contingencies, the total cost of the building came to $1,290,000.
On December 3, 1969, ground-breaking ceremonies were held on the site of the building. The ground was broken with souvenir shovels, each bearing a metal plate with the inscription, “Archives and History Building, December 3, 1969.” When Capers retired in April, 1983, the structure was renamed the Charlotte Capers Building.
THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION
Capers, director of MDAH since 1955, was reelected to a six-year term at the January, 1968) meeting of the MDAH Board of Trustees. But in May, 1969, she apparently decided she had had enough and informed the Board of her decision to resign from the directorship of the Department on July 1, 1969. Dr. R.A. McLemore, president of the board, said that the Board accepted Miss Capers’s resignation with “regret and appreciation for the distinguished contribution she has made in the State of Mississippi.” When she stepped down from the directorship, Capers was appointed to head the Department’s division of Information and Education, doubtless she anticipated a return to writing and editing. Instead she was named principal executive for the restoration of the Governor’s Mansion, a $2.7 million project begun in 1972.
By 1971, time again threatened the Mansion, which had been a focal point of Mississippi history for more than a century. Governor and Mrs. John Bell Williams moved out of the Mansion in July, 1971, on the advice of engineers who declared it unsafe. Mrs. Bill Waller, campaigning with her husband, said that if Bill Waller was elected, the Mansion would be restored. Waller was elected, and shortly after his inauguration in 1972 the State Building Commission appointed the Jackson architectural firm of Ware, Lewis, and Eaton (now styled Lewis Eaton Partnership, Inc.), as project architects for the restoration of the Governor’s Mansion.
Although MDAH had some responsibility for the Mansion under the Mississippi Antiquities Law of 1970, it was directly involved in the restoration only through a resolution of the State Building Commission, which asked the Board of Trustees of the Department to advise the project architects on the historical aspects of the restoration, and named Charlotte Capers as principal executive for the project. The Archives board recommended two consultants to the State Building Commission: Charles E. Peterson, architectural historian, restorationist and planner, best known for his Independence Hall restoration; and Edward Jason Jones, architect, interior designer, and consultant to the White House.
The restoration and reconstruction of the Governor’s Mansion was completed in May, 1975. Governor and Mrs. Waller opened it to the public on June 8, 1975. At that time Mrs. Waller accepted the National Historic Landmark designation from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
THE CAPERS PAPERS
When Dr. William McCain started The Journal of Mississippi History in 1939, then-stenographer Capers was made research and editorial assistant. She had still not abandoned ambitions to be a journalist. Between 1949 and 1961, Capers published fifty-two book reviews in The New York Times. Among the titles were The Secret Pilgrim, by Meridian, Miss. native, Edward Kimbrough (Oct. 30, 1949); The Insolent Breed, by Borden Deal, from Pontotoc, Miss. (Sept. 13, 1959); Tammy Tell Me True, by her fellow Millsaps College student, Cid Ricketts Sumner (Nov. 29, 1959); and two Louisiana novels, Victorine (Oct. 28, 1958) and The Chess Players (Jan. 22, 1961), by popular sentimental novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes. On Nov. 7, 1948, the Times also published a letter from Capers that begins, “Ask most New Yorkers what they know about Mississippi; even now they will answer, ‘Bilbo.’ The fact that a vital contribution to America’s literature is being made currently by this most-maligned state often goes unnoticed.” Capers introduces the Times readership to Elizabeth Spencer, Stark Young, David Donald, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Hodding Carter, William Alexander Percy, Shelby Foote, Ben Wasson, James Street, and, of course, Eudora Welty. Capers wrote an additional forty-eight reviews for The New York Times Book Review. She also edited many books on the history of Mississippi and the South. She was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Mississippi History from 1956-1969, and wrote historical articles for Encyclopedia Britannica.
In a January 29, 1967, article in the Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, Louis Dollarhide wrote, “Charlotte Capers has made a very efficient and imaginative State Archivist. To her friends, she has always been one of the best raconteuses anywhere about. In recent issues of The Delta Review, we have been able to enjoy in print some of her best tales. The recent issue has another chapter in her odyssey. What we should expect of Charlotte is more and more writing.”
Friends had long encouraged her to publish some of her writings in a collection, which she did in 1982 with The Capers Papers contains the “Miss Quotes” essays that she wrote for The Jackson Daily News, Jackson Star-Times, and her “Good Life” pieces in The Delta Review. Her old friend Eudora Welty wrote the foreword:
CHARLOTTE CAPERS NEVER thought to collect her papers. Her colleagues in the Archives have now done it for her, making their choices from a large number that go back for several decades. Here they are for our delight.
We will all have to agree at once to this: they represent Charlotte but they cannot convey her. They weren’t written with that in mind, for they came about by circumstance. Many of them—some of the best, in fact-are samples of her warmly remembered Sunday newspaper column, “Miss Quote,” set down spontaneously in response to an occasion. The occasion would have been local; it might have been of public or personal import, might have been anything that flagged the author down as she came its way or it came hers. They were crowded by space limitations and pressed by the deadline, but they were tossed off with ease and speed. And they acutely reflected their day. They can still call it up, and remind us well that Charlotte Capers never missed a thing in the passing scene.
She’s such a part of it herself. Charlotte does a variety of things well and enthusiastically besides write. She’d rather rise up and dance than sit down and type. She favors the spontaneous, she enjoys the immediate response, the give-and-take of conversation, in which she is a virtuoso. Writing is something you do by yourself. This is the most serious strike against it, or Charlotte may jokingly let you think that; but in the judgment of another writer who has kept urging her on, she writes entirely too well not to take an honest satisfaction from doing it. When we read the collection here we want still more.
Most of these pieces were written to amuse, and they abundantly do so. If some of them are fleeting, so was, and so is, the passing scene. The point is that Charlotte caught something. Her perceptions are not only quick and bright but accurate and wise. She knows her world. She sees the social world we all move in with its history behind it, too, that built and shaped, and sometimes shadowed, our times. She is a viewer with perspective.
It is above all, though, the sense of people, of human nature and intractable human behavior that intrigues and stirs and delights her mind, and fairly often confirms her expectations. It’s the rest of us that set her off. Herself too she can take on as an equally qualified subject; her own adventures make her best pieces. Her writing might spring out of that sensitivity to human idiosyncrasy which very often brings about such a satisfactory evening of conversation between friends. (Southern conversation, as we know and practice it.)
They are wonderfully conversational, these flowing pieces. However, she makes it appear, the conversational style is not at all easy to get down on paper. Charlotte has mastered her style without seeming to try; this is characteristic of her. The Capers papers as in her character, is intuitive, receptive, hospitable, unpredictable but succinct.
To relish human nature (which is a talent all its own, you probably have to be born with it) is to pretty well know it, to be well-prepared and seasoned to its surprises and revelations. She applies the extravagant idiom, the outrageous now and then it offers her a reasonable amount of scope in a small column of type, and comes in generally handy for reporting what goes on here. Exaggeration is one of her splendid accomplishments. Just as a towering skyscraper can only be built on bed rock that goes deep and stands unquivering, to exaggerate as tellingly as Charlotte can, you need to be pretty firmly based in human truths.
These pieces vary in subject and mood and kind. But they convey in common a warmth of feeling you won’t fail to recognize as Charlotte’s own. In reading the Capers papers we hear the Capers voice.
The beautifully written “God and My Grandmother,” an essay given the full development it deserves, has the power to deeply stir us. “Pawley’s Island” is a sensitive and very special evocation of a place. The exemplary portrait of the “Tiny Tenant” is made up of one part clear eyed observation, one part headlong devotion, and no part whatever of sentimentality. You will decide which are your own favorites. In any case, the last piece, “Autumn Light,” an elegy of our state in 1954, is likely to remain a picture in all our minds, not fleeting but indelible.
CAPERS CANINES
In 1999, Patti Carr Black published The Capers Canines a series of essays Capers had written about her beloved dogs, with charming illustrations by Mack Hunter Cole. All of these animals were in their turn the stars of her anecdotes, but none more so than the inimitable Fred Friendly, the Dog Who Came to Dinner.
FRED’S CIRCLE WIDENS
By the time Fred had been with me about a year, he was an accepted and respected member of the neighborhood. He had an active social life. Mr. Birch, who took his devoted peeka-poo for a long walk every night, still stopped by to pick up Fred, who was waiting, alert, for his call. Fred unleashed ran interference for Joey when he was threatened by a larger and more unfriendly dog. Their walk lasted about thirty to forty-five minutes, and Fred always returned peacefully after a friendly good-night to Mr. Birch and Joey.
When I had company, Fred liked to be indoors, so that he could be as helpful as possible. He usually greeted guests enthusiastically at the door, to the consternation of some gentleman callers when he gave them unnecessarily close check-ups. However, this was a brief encounter, and when the guests were seated, Fred went from chair to chair inquiring with his large and protruding brown eyes as to their needs. Of course, he shook hands, all around, several times, and even sat up while shaking: to prove his true hospitality. He was such a natural host I would not have been entirely surprised to hear him inquire, in his deep and husky voice, “Can I get you anything?” So time went along, Fred and I grew older, and his popularity steadily increased. He routinely received Christmas presents from the neighbors, and he seemed to accept his role as my friend and defender. The smooth tenor of our ways was occasionally interrupted by his overnight stays at the dog pound, where he made friends readily. In fact, when I missed him, I knew exactly where he might be found. The keepers were always sad to see him go. I never retrieved him without a parting message from his captors: “He sure is a nice dog. I hate to see him go.” Fred evidenced his love for one and all, even after he had broken the law and paid the price for it, and always seemed glad to be home again.
About this time, however, Fred began to travel. 1 think it was because I began to travel, too, farther and farther away from our home place, like England, and even Italy and Greece. This would not have been possible if Fred and I had not been supported by a large circle of friends. My office staff assumed some responsibility for Fred, in that his collar proclaimed their telephone number. The neighborhood support group included the Culvers next door, who fed him; Ann down the street, who had agreed to receive his missing-in-action calls; and of course Mr. Birch and Joey, who still kept their appointments with him when possible.
When I returned from my first stay in London, they all had tales to tell. It seems that Fred’s travels during my absence suggested that this country dog with a mysterious past absorbed some love for culture during his life with my friends and me. I was told that my office received a call from the state office for continuing education, where it was reported that a friendly dog had scratched at the door, come in, and indicated an interest in the program. He doubtless shook hands, and they reported, “He is such a nice dog, we wanted to get him safely home.” So they called my office, and the Committee for the Preservation of Fred swung into action. Ann picked him up and returned him to our home, and all was quiet until the next call came. It was not long in coming. “Do you have a dog named Fred?” The affirmative answer brought the same comment made by the education people. “He surely is a nice dog. I am at Dr. X’s office. He’s a dentist, and we found Fred at the door when we came in. He is here in the office and we will keep him until you come.” It seems that Fred, being speechless, was not able to say why he was there, but I have to admit that his teeth were not in perfect occlusion. By this time no one at my office discounted the evidence that Fred may have had unusual powers. No matter, Fred was brought home again, amiable as ever, and there he was when I returned from my trip a few weeks later.
We rocked along as usual, and Fred seemed settled and glad for both of us to be home. He was help with company, a great topic of conversation, and good company when I was alone. I thought Fred had missed me too much, and had naturally traveled to find company.
On these first travels, his moves were to the South. For many years the Butcher Shop was our town’s best and most expensive meat market and delicatessen. During one of my summer absences, left in charge of my – and his – faithful friends, Fred checked it out. In his mysterious manner he made it through heavy traffic and across Lakeland Drive unscathed. My friend and neighbor on Berkley Drive received the call. “Do you have a dog named Fred?” was the question. On admitting some responsibility for Fred, my friend was told that he had arrived at the Butcher Shop, and that, though dogs were not welcomed there, “he is such a nice dog” that the owner had presented him with a large bone and escorted him to one of the apartments above the Butcher Shop, that overlooked Lakeland Drive. There on the balcony my friend found Fred, tied to the balcony rail, lounging lazily while chewing on the largest and meatiest bone she had ever seen. Fred was especially interested in the incessant flow of traffic east and west and was not especially interested in being rescued. Nonetheless, he took his capture in a gentlemanly manner and went on home, there to dream of his one-and-only adventure with east-west traffic and prime beef.
The first indication I had of a northerly instinct in him came when my neighbor Mary Brister went grocery shopping at Kroger’s, a supermarket located several miles from Berkley Drive. She reported that when she came out of the store, there was Fred at the door, gravely shaking hands with everyone who came or went. She recognized him at once, and she asked him if he wanted to come home. Without any hesitation he got into the car with her, and she deposited him on my doorstep, where he seemed content to be.
RETIREMENT
On Feb. 24, 1983, Gov. William F. Winter issued a proclamation that read, in part:
WHEREAS, Charlotte Capers, writer, editor, literary critic, historian, raconteur, and administrator is now retiring after her distinguished and productive career in state service;
NOW, THEREFORE I, William Forrest Winter, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby make known the high regard in which Charlotte Capers is held by the executive branch of government of the State of Mississippi by declaring Wednesday, the 30th day of March, 1983, as Charlotte Capers Day, and order all state agencies to observe the day in an appropriate manner.
Charlotte Capers retired on April 1, 1983. When she joined MDAH in 1938, she was one of three employees; in 1983, the department had grown to include 150 employees in six divisions. Charlotte Capers had been a part of every step of that development. The fact that she retired on April Fool’s Day did not escape the notice of her many friends.
DARK DECEMBER
Charlotte Capers died December 23, 1996. Services were held in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, where she was the first woman elected to the vestry in 1968. Survivors were her friends and adopted family Ann K. Morrison, William D. Morrison III, Barry K. Morrison and Charlotte Morrison. Pallbearers were John Allin, Cecil Heidelberg III, Sam Lane, Dale Lane, Robert Wise and Harry Weir. Burial was in Lakewood Memorial Cemetery.
On March 3, 1966, a supercell thunderstorm developed over central Mississippi and produced a large tornado around 4:00 pm CST near the old Adams community in Hinds County, several miles south-southwest of Raymond.
Tracking generally to the northeast, the tornado moved through mostly rural areas, though several barns and a few homes were heavily damaged. Around 4:30 pm CST, the storm struck the southern limits of Jackson as an F4 or F5 tornado and leveled the Candlestick Park shopping center, which gave the tornado its name; cinder-blocks from the structure were scattered for long distances, a number of homes and businesses were destroyed, eyewitnesses reported pavement scouring and a few cars were tossed upwards of 0.5 mi (0.80 km). A brick church was destroyed with such force that it seemingly exploded. Once the storm moved through Jackson, it crossed the Pearl River and entered Rankin County, maintaining a nearly straight northeastward track through the county.
The tornado reached its maximum strength of F5 near the Leesburg community; multiple homes were swept away, large swaths of trees were leveled, pavement was scoured, and chicken houses were obliterated. In Neshoba County the storm began to weaken though not considerably as about a dozen more homes were destroyed before the system crossed into Alabama. The tornado finally dissipated near the city of Tuscaloosa around 7:45 p.m. CST. During the storm’s three-hour-and-forty-five-minute existence, it traveled roughly 202.5 mi (325.9 km), one of the longest paths ever recorded.
The Candlestick tornado touched down in what was in 1966 rural Rankin County, which like the area around Cooper Road is more heavily populated today. The tornado crossed Highway 25 (Lakeland Drive), and homes and businesses in the area around River Oaks, the north side of Jackson International Airport, Laurel Wood and Castlewoods lie in or very near where the tornado passed. The storm was also going through the Jackson metropolitan area between 430 pm and 5 pm, during the afternoon rush hour. In 1966, the interstate system was in the process of being constructed, but today the tornado would have been moving near the Stack just south of downtown Jackson where Interstates 20 and 55 converge. The tornado would have also been passing near or through the heavily trafficked areas along Highway 80, Flowood Drive and Lakeland Drive in Flowood.
The tornado’s story is told by Lorian Hemingway in her book, A World Turned Over: A Killer Tornado and the Lives It Changed Forever (Simon & Schuster; July, 2003). Hemingway, the granddaughter of novelist Ernest Hemingway (the daughter of Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory, who left his wife and eight children when Lorian, the youngest, was 6 years old), moved to Jackson with her mother and stepfather into a house fifty yards north of Candlestick Shopping Center some years before the storm and moved to Nashville a month before the tornado hit, but in an interview after the book’s publication said the tornado, “… wouldn’t let me alone. I was haunted by it. I’ve been haunted by it all my life; I’ve been haunted by it in dreams. Each time I would go back to Mississippi — and I did not go back until I was well into my adult life — just by happenstance, just sitting around and hearing people talk, that tornado would come up. Not through any provocation of mine. I was amazed to see how much it had lived on and how much it had impacted people and become a part of their history.”
Hemingway’s book takes us back to Jackson with interviews of friends and neighbors. Included are the stories of Ronny Hannis, who was severely injured but helped dig survivors from the rubble, and Donna Durr, who was sitting in her Volkswagen with her child and was carried away in the air, only to be gently set down in a field. As you might expect, there are plenty of people who talk of God and their belief that there was a plan to nature’s savagery. Hemingway, who shares her contrary thoughts with the reader, brings a sophisticated yet sympathetic tone to the conversations, never passing judgment. In fact, she seems desperate to reconnect with the people who made Jackson seem like home for her. Her style is radically different from that of her grandfather’s; the story is told in fully-rounded sentences often brimming with emotion, and the descriptions of the area around Caney Creek along Cooper Road seem pastoral.
She tells the story in her own words and those of other survivors. Weaving childhood nostalgia with apocalyptic images of that world “rolled onto a spear, of the sky punctured at its heart,” Hemingway draws the reader into the nightmare, describing the moments preceding the tornado and the instant when everything was turned upside down. Hemingway describes how a familiar setting is suddenly turned into a morass of shattered concrete, twisted metal, splintered glass, mangled cars and broken bodies and how everyone walks and speaks “with reverence because what is heaving and bending at jagged turns all around them is a burial ground they must undo.”
Even after Candlestick Shopping Center was rebuilt, local residents stayed away. They couldn’t bear to remember.
This recipe comes from the Harvest Café in Oxford. We always served it with a dollop of sour cream, sides of (brown) rice, and a dense crusty bread we got from some stoner in Abbeville. It was a substantial dish, and this recipe will feed dozens of people. The tomatoes were optional depending who was cooking and how hungover, but were always added after the beans were cooked. This is crucial: if you add tomatoes or salt to dried beans, they will toughen and sour.
1 lb. black beans 2 medium white onions finely chopped 5 cloves garlic, minced 1 4 oz. can chopped green chilies 4 poblanos diced 1 can diced tomatoes, drained (optional) 2 tablespoons ground cumin 2 tablespoons paprika 2 tablespoons chili powder 1 teaspoon black pepper corn oil Salt
Sort and rinse beans, place in a heavy metal pot with six cups water (or vegetable stock), and bring to a rolling boil for fifteen minutes. Reduce heat, add onions, garlic and chilies. Simmer covered until beans are soft, adding liquid as needed. Add mixed seasonings and keep on low heat. This is when you should add tomatoes. Blend in a slash of corn oil for consistency. Salt to taste. When serving, provide pico de gallo or a pepper sauce, and toppings such as diced avocado, chopped cilantro, minced onion and peppers.
Calhoun County provides north Mississippi with a bucolic idyll between the burgeoning metro areas of Tupelo and Grenada. The Skuna and Yalobusha Rivers run east to west through Calhoun at equal distance into the Yazoo via the Tallahatchie, so geographically the county is divided into thirds. The land is typical of north central Mississippi: wooded hills creased by swampy bottoms.
Given the proximity to Oxford, the county provides a model (if not original) of Yoknapatawpha, but the county seat, Pittsboro, arguably the smallest county seat in the state, is a sleepy village, much the opposite of Faulkner’s bustling Jefferson. Pittsboro sits atop a ridge of hills that marks the southern edge of the Skuna River valley. To the south, the land slopes in a more leisurely manner to the Yalobusha just south of Vardaman, Derma, and Calhoun City.
Jo Brans is a member of the Reid family, who have lived in Pittsboro for time out of mind. Brans’ writings have explored many subjects, most in a much more scholarly vein, but Feast Here Awhile is a thoughtful examination of the changes in American cuisine from the 50s to the 90s. Feast Here Awhile (the title, by the way, is taken from Shakespeare’s Pericles, I,iv,107) is the story of her own culinary coming of age that takes her from the gentle hills of north Mississippi to Belhaven College in Jackson (which was strictly for young ladies until the year after she graduated, in 1955), to various locations in Texas, Minnesota and, finally, New York City as well as through two marriages, one to an American journalist, the other to a Dutch academic.
Brans moves from her mother’s kitchen through college cafeterias, Texas eateries and European fare on to DeNiro’s TriBeCa Grill. She also moves through (predictably, since the book has a pronounced literary bent) Child, Beard, and Rosso, managing to mention Proust, Welty, and Kerouac on the way. Indeed, Brans is somewhat of a compulsive name-dropper, both of the famous and the near-famous, but I was infinitely proud of her for managing to squeeze in Ernie Mickler and his wonderful White Trash Cooking.
In short, Feast Here Awhile is a personal encapsulation of the American culinary experience in the second half of the twentieth century, and a compelling read from any standpoint. It helps, of course, to be up on the literature, culinary and otherwise, but Brans is an excellent writer and rarely boring. I would recommend this book for any Southerner interested in food and cooking, more specifically Mississippians of that bent and particularly the good people of Calhoun County itself.
In preparation for this article on her, I attempted to get in touch with Brans for an interview, but countless attempts to discover her publisher or literary agent failed. Finally my friend Michelle Hudson, who heads up the reference department at the Welty Library asked, “Have you tried the phone book?”
Well, no. Sure enough, in minutes Michelle gave me a number to call. When I did, early on a Saturday evening, a polite young man answered the phone and said he’d pass my message on to Jo. Within an hour Ms. Brans called. After making sure I was from Calhoun County (that didn’t take long at all) we chatted. She said she’d think about my request and let me know. Some three days later, she replied:
Dear Jesse,
After serious reflection, I have decided that the project you propose is not for me. I enjoyed writing Feast Here Awhile. I am pleased to find that it has found favor with readers, including, especially, you. Many folks, over the years since its publication, have looked me up (“on purpose,” as we Southerners say) to offer thanks and to relate their own pleasures at the table. I would have had material for several sequels.
But no, I thought, and think, not. Essentially I have said in Feast what I have to say about the changes in American eating over the last five or six decades. It’s all there, from the joys of good home cooking and the family dinner table to the more complicated pleasures of Julia Child and those whom she terrified, taught, and liberated–usually all three–and beyond.
Feast Here Awhile is also a personal odyssey, if that’s not too highfaluting a term for just growing up. I ate my way from childhood in a small Southern town through various stops along the road to life in New York City, and recorded the trip, hit or miss, in “The Food Book,” which became Feast. Though food was the focus, I was always aware as I typed away that I was recording the arc of my own life. No news for either of us there: that’s what writers do.
Jesse, I’m flattered that you want to work with me, but don’t be content to retread. I really like your piece about Sambo Mockbee and I suspect, from our brief communication, that you want to be a writer, not an editor. If I’m right, cut loose. My way in was food. Maybe yours is food, too, but your food, not mine. Find your own way in. Tell your story. And send me a copy when the book comes out. Good luck and God bless, Jo Brans
Banner is a hamlet in Calhoun County some three miles north of Bruce, Mississippi. In 1975, Tom Yancy, a junior at Bruce High School, wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, who responded.
Coming to Mississippi, enigmatic to others and more often than not to we who live here, is objective enough for writers seeking an exotic literary locale within the United States. As one as such, Theroux joins V.S. Naipaul, Bill Bryson and Richard Grant. Without exception each have paid homage to the voice from Lafayette County, Mississippi that rings across the world.
Theroux reserves a passage for “The Paradoxes of Faulkner”, in which he provides a thorough analysis of the man and his works as well as observations on somewhat peripheral matters such as Blotner’s biography. Theroux is a thorough writer, meaning he is considerate to detail, as is evident throughout Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, which includes much that we should be grateful to have on record from a writer with an exceptional eye. The paradox of his title refers to Faulkner’s writing itself, which Theroux describes as either falling or flying, a critical encapsulation that might well describe any major writer with a significant volume of work, and Faulkner’s oeuvre spans generations.
It’s good to read the words others write about us, and it’s important that we read what others have to say about Faulkner’s twisted, frayed, and fallen South, however better perceptible by far in his own assessment than by any others.
In March, 2017, Joan Didion published the notes of her jaunt forty-eight years ago through Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in a slender book, South and West (Knopf). We’ll take a much more in-depth look at the book in a later entry, but first let’s focus on the passage in which Didion meets with the legendary “Voice of the Rebels” Stan Torgerson, in Torgerson’s home town of Meridian, Mississippi.
Bear in mind as you read that the month is June, the year is 1970. Nixon is in the White House for his first term. The nation as a whole is in a somewhat less turbulent mode after the riotous Sixties, but no section is more complacent than the South, where the key word had become progress. This passage is in essence an examination of the ongoing homogenization of the South as seem through the eyes of a transplant from the upper Midwest (Torgerson) and told to a visitor from California.
At times Torgerson sounds like a one-man chamber of commerce espousing racial harmony, social equality and industrialization. When Stan says, “We’re not as inbred as we used to be” he’s referring not (necessarily) to genetics but instead to the influx of people and ideas from outside the South; when he says “we don’t wear crinolines any more” he’s telling Didion that Old South is gone. But though he says, “If there were elm trees hanging over the street it would be very midwestern,” as they drive through residential Meridian, the issues of race and poverty he discusses are those of the South.
This section from Didion’s work appears here in its entirety not only for the more compelling reason that it needs to be read in toto to grasp its exhaustive effect on Didion and to understand more fully Didion’s comments in context—particularly the last line—but also on a somewhat sentimental level because those many of you–as I do–remain familiar with Torgerson’s voice from his 17 years on air with Ole Miss sports might recollect his voice in the cadences of the quoted passages.
When I called Stan Torgerson for lunch at his radio station, WQIC, and asked him the best place to lunch, he said Weidmann’s, “but it wouldn’t win any Holiday Magazine awards.” In fact it had, and was not a bad restaurant, but everyone in Mississippi begins on the defensive. “I’ll be the biggest man in a green shirt to come through the door,” he advised me. He was, at lunch, wary at first. He said he didn’t think I knew what I was doing. I agreed. He refused drink, saying he wasn’t in New York City. Stan Torgerson came out of the cold North (Minnesota, I think) and headed to Memphis, where he went into broadcasting. He worked in Miami, and then, for a year, in San Diego, living in La Jolla. He felt ill at ease in La Jolla—his neighbors kept to themselves, had their own interests—and he wanted to get back south. His son had won a football scholarship to Ole Miss. He was worried about his children and drugs in California. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I just haven’t reached the point where I think pot is a way of life.”
When the black radio station in Meridian came up for sale he bought it. He also broadcasts the Ole Miss games, something he began doing when he was in Memphis. “That’s right,” he said, “I own the ethnic station, WQIC. In its thirteenth year of serving the black community here.” He programs gospel and soul, and reaches 180,000 in several Mississippi and Alabama counties, the thirty-second largest black market in the country, sixty miles in all directions and forty-three percent of that area is black. We serve a major black market, program soul music and gospel music, but what does that mean? A month ago in Billboard there was a survey pointing out that the Top 40-format stations are playing basically soul. Jackson 5 with ‘ABC.’ ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time,’ that’s Top 40 but it’s soul. Once in a while we throw in some blue-eyed soul, like Dusty Springfield with ’Son of a Preacher Man.’ We don’t play rock because our people don’t dig it. We don’t play your underground groups like the Jefferson Airplane . .. We have goodly reason to believe that ten to fifteen percent of our audience is white; some of the phone calls we get in the afternoon for dedications, they’re definitely white voices. We get thirty-six percent of the audience.”
He said I was probably wondering why he came back to Mississippi. “I came because I dearly love this state. I have a son—he’ll be a senior this fall—playing football at the University of Mississippi.”
He pointed out that Meridian was timber country, hill country. Pulpwood is the backbone of the agricultural product. He pointed out how progressive Meridian was: its three new hospitals. “In most southern cities there is a much stronger tendency to old-line money . . . Southern retailers stayed in business privately, home-owned, until very recently. In most cases the retailer has just begun to feel the competition from the chains. There’s the greatest business opportunity in the country right here in the South . . . We don’t have a McDonald’s in a city of almost fifty thousand people, don’t have any of these franchises here yet. You give one corner of one intersection in Jackson, Mississippi, or you give me the whole ball of wax right here in Meridian, I’d take the whole ball of wax and I’d put a McDonald’s on one corner, a Burger Chef on the other, a Shoney’s Po’ Boy (sic! jly) ‘cross the street . . . “
His voice kept on, weaving ever higher flights of economic possibility. “There is and must be,” he said, a “continued turning to the South by industry. The climate is certainly one reason. Another is that the South wants industry and is willing to give a tax advantage to get it. Another, of course, is that there is a relatively low level of unionism in the South. Lockheed assembles tail sections here and ships them to California for assembly . . .
“Atlanta is the magic city for the young around here, across the whole social spectrum . . . The great migration out in the past ten years has been black, they get these glowing letters, and of course they’ve got relatively liberal welfare programs in some of the northern states . . . No doubt, too, there appears to be greater opportunity in the North.”
More on the progressive nature of Meridian: “Our radio station has probably got as fine a list of blue-chip clients as any in town, black or not. We’ve got all four banks, and anyone in retailing who’s interested in doing business with the black—the black’s dollar is very important. The minimum wage was probably the most important thing to happen along these lines, and then food stamps were a good dead, I would say they added millions of dollars to the economy.”
“We are in a transitional phase. There’s a tremendous push to education on the part of young blacks. The schools here are completely integrated. Of course, neither you not I can change the older black, the forty-year old, his life patterns are settled.”
“Ole Miss has its standards to keep up. As more and more blacks get an educational advantage, you’ll see blacks at Ole Miss. There’s a feeling among some black leaders that because these kids have not had advantages they should get some kind of educational break, but basically what has to happen is the standards have to stay up and the people come up to meet them.”
We were driving through town at night, and Stan Torgerson interrupted himself to point out the post office. “There’s the post office, the courthouse where the famous Philadelphia trials were held, the trials for the so-called Philadelphia deaths.”
“If there were elm trees hanging over the street it would be very midwestern,” Stan observed as we drove through the residential district. He pointed out his $29,500 house, a two-story frame, “twenty-eight hundred square feet, with magnolia, dogwood and pecan trees.” He pointed out Poplar Drive the “Park Avenue of Meridian, Mississippi, all the houses built by the old-line families.”
Fervently, he kept reverting to the wholesomeness of life in Meridian. His daughter, who would be a high school senior in the fall, had “her sports, her outdoor activities, her swimming. It’s a quiet, pacific type of living, which is one of the reasons I wanted to come back down here. The kids are taught to say ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ I know it’s very fashionable to poke fun at the South, but I’ll pit our slum area any day against the slum areas where the Cubans and Puerto Ricans live in Miami, Florida, and Miami’ll lose.”
Meridian is the largest city between Jackson and Birmingham, and there is a naval base there which means a great deal to the community. At apartment buildings largely inhabited by the navy there are cars with plates from all over the country.
Some random social observations from Stan Torgerson included: most of the local children go to college within the state, at Ole Miss or Mississippi (sic jly): the other country club, built with federal money, has a membership which includes “assistant managers of stores and some navy people’: most of the subdivisions in Meridian feature “custom houses.” Torgerson paused dramatically, to emphasize the versatility of the new blood in town: “A fabric store.”
I asked if some of the children did not leave, and he allowed that some did. “Nothing here for the kid with an engineering degree. And of course the girls go where they marry. Southern girls are notoriously husband hunting, but I guess that’s the same anywhere.” It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?
Torgerson was would up now, and I could not stop his peroration. “There’s been a great metamorphosis in recent years in the South, the Volkswagen dealership for example comparable in size to anything you’ll find anywhere.”
“The KKK which used to be a major factor in this community isn’t a factor anymore, both the membership and the influence have diminished, and I cannot think of any place where the black is denied entrance, with the possible exception of private clubs. We don’t have any antagonistic-type black leaders working against racial harmony. Since the advent of black pride, black power, there is a little tendency to be self-segregating. On our station, we have a program we call Adventures in Black History to point out the contributions black people have made—a black minister does it. I have blacks working in the WAIC Soul Shop, and there’s a black druggist here, a man eminently qualified, who is a local boy who went north and came back, received his training at the University of Illinois. We have a certain degree of black business, including this gas station here, which is owned by a black. The key is racial harmony, and education, and we’ll try to provide our people with both, ‘cause we’re gonna live together a long time. Every major retailer hires black clerks, Sears has a couple of black department heads, there’s a black business college here, and a black and white Careen Training Institute.
“Of course we have transplants, too, new ideas, like any other hybrid we’re generally stronger. We’re not nearly as inbred as we used to be. We’ve been withdrawn in this part of the South for many, many years, but we’ve become more aggressive, and as people come in they’ve helped us become more aggressive—we don’t wear crinolines anymore, no we don’t.”
“And about our politics, well, George Wallace got a lot of votes in Indiana, let’s face it. I’m not saying I’m going to have a black minister come home to dinner tonight, ‘cause I’m not. But things are changing. I had a man the other day, owns an appliance store, he never believed you could send a black repairman into somebody’s house. Now he can’t find a white … He asks me if I know a black man who makes a good appearance. That’s progress . . .”
Of course, there’s a tremendous lack of skilled blacks, and the problem is training and education. It’s no longer a matter of lack of opportunity, it’s a matter of lack of skills. We’re still two generations from full equality, but so are they in Chicago, in Detroit, and have you ever been in Harlem?”
Glazed by the two hours in which this man in the green shirt had laid Meridian out before us as an entrepreneur’s dream, a Shoney’s Po’ Boy (!) on every corner and progress everywhere, even at the country club, I dropped him off and drove through the still-deserted streets of the downtown. A few black women were on the streets and they carried umbrellas against the sun. It was almost five o’clock. In the middle of 22nd Avenue, the main street of Meridian, there was a man holding a shotgun. He had on a pink shirt and a golfing cap, and in one ear there was a hearing aid. He raised the shotgun and shot toward the roof of a building several times.
I stopped the car and watched him a while, then approached him. “What are you shooting at?” I asked.
“Pi-eagins,” he said cheerfully.
In this one demented afternoon Mississippi lost much of its power to astonish me.
In north Mississippi, where the Father of Waters skirts the final foothills of the Appalachians, the land undulates mile upon mile between river bottoms and wooded ridges, the sun is strong, and in December a weary green lingers in the woods and roadsides. There I spent my childhood. While not rich by any means, most of my family was well off when few were, but my father Jess Jr. made no bones about being a child of the Depression. He remembered the grinding hardships of his youth and sought to make better of his remaining time for us and for others.
Our lavish Thanksgiving comprised an overture to Christmas. Soon after, my mother Barbara filled the house with glowing towers of glazed glass jars, papier-mâché crèche figurines, and ornaments light as air hung with shining ribbons. Her trees took days to decorate; among her most memorable was a loblolly pine draped in angel hair studded by tiny blue lights and hung with glittering glass ornaments. Garlands of smilax, holly, and magnolia adorned mantles and lintels, bowls of walnuts, almonds and pecans, oranges, tangerines and hard candy topped the tables, and on the hearth stood a bucket of dried pine cones to start the open fires where we roasted peanuts and made popcorn in a long-handled pan.
Barbara provided a groaning board. What she didn’t cook herself, she shared food friends and relatives brought for her table: ambrosia from Aunt Gay, bread-and-butter pickles from Ruby Zane, tea cakes from Aunt Leila, peanut brittle from Betty Edwards, pecan divinity from Ora Crocker, or a coconut cake from Zara Arrington. A splendid cook, Barbara spent days on the Christmas feast, making pans of chicken and dressing, baking turkeys, a hams, and yeast rolls, candying sweet potatoes, and stuffing dozens of eggs. This largess was there for all who called, and our doors were always open.
Above anyone I’ve ever known my father Jess loved Christmas, threw himself completely and unreservedly into the essence of the season and drew everyone he knew along in his wide wake. He was the Spirit of Christmas Present, bigger than life, colorful, jovial, generous and gregarious. For him, Christmas was to be celebrated with everyone in that world he called his own.
By the first week of the month, Jess had set his plans in motion, beginning with a party at the community building at the city park on the south side of town where local bands provided music for dancing (an activity widely frowned-upon at the time) and the local blue laws banning liquor were casually set aside while he pumped his friends for contributions to fund his Christmas expedition. After the party, he would make a trip to Tupelo to the Lady Lee outlet store, where he would buy boxes of firecrackers and bottle rockets, huge sacks of Tootsie Rolls, cinnamon candies, peppermint sticks, and butterscotch rounds. From there we’d head to Cockrell Banana Company where he’d buy crates of oranges, apples, and tangerines.
These he brought home where they were put in a spare bedroom, and in the days before Christmas my brother Tom, sister Cindy and I along with a cadre of neighborhood children would sort them out and stuff them into small paper sacks, staple the tops together and pile them into boxes. On Christmas Eve, we’d pile into a car, at best a station wagon commandeered from a neighbor, at worst a ’65 Mustang convertible, and we’d drive across the tracks.
Jess wore a Santa suit, and Barbara would dress us children as elves. He once drafted his brother-in-law Jim to play Santa while he sauntered alongside laughing and greeting, often setting up visits to his law offices off the town Square. When we first rolled across the railroad tracks, we collected a troop of children flanking our route, shouting and jumping, reaching out to catch the sacks of candy, fruit, and fireworks. Jess would make sure that those children who were too shy to come to the car received their share, and he would often walk into homes where he knew of special need bearing a ham or an envelope with money.
Jess was in his glory then, doing what he felt was the most important thing he did all year. His career in public service gave him an opportunity to help many people, but seeing the eyes of these children for whom his visit was the only Christmas many if not most of them would have gave him a sense of wholeness that few men are afforded. His largess, his sense of noblesse oblige, was untainted by any shadow of arrogance; he remembered the deprivations of his own childhood and sought to ameliorate those of others.
Now I am an old man with quiet holidays, but the living memories of childhood resonate. In dull Decembers, my father’s gifts shine on.
