We Have Much To Learn From 'A Place Like Mississippi'

How did a little state that rests alongside the banks of a mighty river make so many contributions to American letters and literature?

That's the question posed early on in A Place Like Mississippi, Ralph Eubanks' new book about his home state. And he's got a point: The state produced Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward, and so many others, all spinning stories of the South and class and gender and race.

Eubanks wanted to explore how the place shapes the writing — and how the writing shapes our understanding of the place. In the book, he uses a quote that's often attributed to Faulkner: "To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi." Eubanks says it's not actually clear if Faulkner ever said that, or if people just wanted him to say that. But either way, he says, he believes it's true. "There's so much that you can learn about the world, and I would say about this country, from studying what Mississippi writers have done and written about this place, which I think telescopes onto our larger national issues, and even some of our larger international ones."

Interview Highlights

On what Mississippi can say about our national issues

I always say that to find a good Mississippi story, you have to explore the silences. It's the things that people don't talk about. And I think in this country, there are lots of things that we don't talk about. But in Mississippi, we are getting to the point where we are talking about a lot of those things and we're exploring them and we're probing them as deeply as we possibly can.
I think Natasha Trethewey does that exceptionally well in her poetry. And I begin this book not in the place where we think Mississippi literature begins, which would be in Oxford or in the Mississippi Delta, but on the Gulf Coast, right there in Gulfport, where in her poem "Theories of Time and Space," she says, go to this point, bring only your tome of memory and your blank pages, and begin there.

And that's exactly what I did. It was it gave me a sense, too, of what that silence was and maybe some of the things that people didn't talk about, looking out at Ship Island, thinking about the Native Guard that no one ever talked about — and no one talked about until Tretheway wrote her collection, Native Guard.

On including photos by Eudora Welty

One of the things that I love about Eudora Welty's photographs is the intimacy of those photographs. She always connected with her subjects in some way. And I have spoken with her biographer, Suzanne Marrs, about this. And Dr. Marrs says she never really used a photograph to create a story. But there's a photograph, "A Woman of the '30s." And whenever I see that photograph and I read her story, "A Worn Path," with the character Phoenix Jackson, it describes her right down to the buttons on that dress.

On Welty, who was white, photographing Black people

I think that one of the reasons that Eudora would ask permission from people to take the photographs is that, as you know, anyone who studies photography knows that to take a photograph of something is to appropriate the thing photographed. So she knew she was taking something from them. And she also knew that Black people had a lot of things taken from them in this state. So before she took their image, she wanted to make sure that she connected with them. And very often what she did was she would go back and she would give them a print of that photograph that she had taken, and I think that speaks to Eudora's understanding of what the racial dynamic was in the state.

I mean, one of my favorite stories by Eudora Welty is her "Where is the Voice Coming From?" Which is a story that she wrote the night that Medgar Evers was murdered. And she said, "it's the only story I ever wrote in anger. And I wrote it because everyone in Mississippi knew the mind of the person who committed that murder. And I wanted to communicate that to people." It's a story that I believe — you know, Martin Luther King said the great enemy of the civil rights movement was the white moderate. And I think that was a story that had more influence on the white moderate than anything else that happened during the civil rights movement.

On the tensions inherent in Mississippi, between beauty and devastation

I think Jesmyn Ward knows exactly how the Gulf Coast as a place has been devastated. And when I visited with Jesmyn in her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi and looking out on that landscape, she could tell me exactly what that landscape looked like before [Hurricane] Katrina and what it looks like now. But she also has a long family history there. Some of it is marked by violence, by death, by destruction. And she sees that, too. But she also reconciles that with the beauty of the place. And when I ask her, you know, "why don't you leave? I mean, why do you stay here?" And we were standing out there. She said, "You feel that warm breeze around you?" And I said yes. She said, "That's like an embrace. I just can't leave that." And I understood.

On the Oxford City Grocery, a literary bar in Oxford, Miss.

It's it's a bar that has a very rustic looking floor, right on the square in Oxford. The bar has a copper top on it. And then there are these brass plates on it with regulars' drinks on them, and their names. And whenever a writer had a reading at Square Books, there was always a standing ovation given to them when they went up the stairs into the bar. And whenever there was an occasion, when there was a new book, there was a birth, or there was a death, it was where everyone gathered, I think probably post-pandemic, that is the thing that I am looking forward to the most, is gathering my friends again at City Grocery.

This story was edited for radio by Justine Kenin, produced by Elena Burnett and adapted for the Web by Petra Mayer

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