Steve Yates is winner of the Juniper Prize for his 2013 collection Some Kinds of Love: Stories (University of Massachusetts Press). In 2010, Moon City Press published Morkan’s Quarry: A Novel, and will follow it in 2015 with The Teeth of the Souls: A Novel.
I moved from the Ozarks to begin work in Jackson in 1998 at University Press of Mississippi. My favorite vista in Jackson is in the long courtyard leading to the Education Research and Development Tower (University Press of Mississippi takes up half that tower’s fifth floor). In that courtyard are six raised concrete bays in which reside the six most beautiful crape myrtles in all of Jackson. These bays abut Jackson State’s Universities Center and its Information Services Library on the east and dazzle the offices and back lobby of Mississippi Public Broadcasting to the west as the trees lead northward in a royal road of pink, olive green, mottled amber, and shredded taupe to the nine-story edifice of the Paul B. Johnson Tower. The best time to view them? In the resultant sauna following a morning, summer rain. The bark along the trunks always seems to be shedding in reptilian fashion, and rainwater flows in crystalline rivers along the exposed red and orange inner flesh. Pools of water, whole miniature nullahs accrue and tremble. And above you the boughs arch low, pendant with dripping, candy pink blossoms backed by light green struts and shot through with bright yellow stamen. Crape myrtles did not thrive and were never properly valued in the chilly, hilly Ozarks. When I have sent home via Facebook photographs of these six majestic canopies, my hillbilly correspondents and confreres have been mystified as to what sort of trees these could possibly be. They ask if I am on business in Borneo or on a holiday in Haorangi. Even in winter, the bare silver webs and mad chandeliers these giants raise up to the cold ivory and bureaucratic tan of the office tower make for a brilliant meditation and somehow suffice when I pine for snow and a touch of ice.
Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. Please join us in celebrating Jackson on August 5th at 5:00 in Banner Hall!
Comments are closed.