Category: Southern History (Page 1 of 7)

Author Q & A with Jerry Mitchell

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 2)

An assignment to cover the press premiere of a movie 30 years ago would bring a decades-old Mississippi murder case back into the nation’s spotlight–and change the life of not only court reporter Jerry Mitchell, but untold numbers of many who thought justice would never come.

A staff writer for The Clarion-Ledger in 1989 when he attended the press screening of the blockbuster Mississippi Burning film in Jackson, Mitchell inadvertently found himself sitting near two veteran FBI agents and a seasoned journalist who had all been involved with the 1964 murder investigations portrayed in the movie.

The conversations he held with his seatmates after the movie would be the springboard of a career dedicated to pursuing justice for some of the nation’s most infamous cold case murders of the civil rights movement.

Mitchell was stunned to find out that night that none of the 20 Ku Klux Klansmen involved in the deaths of three civil rights workers had been brought to trial. He soon decided to take on the task of investigating–and ultimately reopening–the case himself.

His career memoir, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era recounts nearly 20 years of investigations of four notorious cases that helped send four Klansmen and a serial killer to prison.

Jerry Mitchell

Mitchell’s work has earned him the title of “one of the most decorated investigative journalists in the country,” with more than 30 national awards to his credit. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Columbia’s John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, and many others.

After more than 30 years as an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting in Jackson in 2019, providing investigative reporting to news outlets and with a goal to “train up the next generation of investigative reporters.”

Below he shares some insights about his career, his new book, and his hopes for the future of investigative journalism.

As a young person, what influenced your interest in journalism, and, specifically, investigative reporting?

My mother had me reading three newspapers a day by the time I was 7. I had no choice! I first experienced journalism in high school and soon gravitated to investigative reporting. Reading All the President’s Men inspired me and made me want to expose wrongdoing and right wrongs. I guess I’ve been doing it ever since.

Tell me about the movie that spurred your interest in the decades-old cold cases of murderers who had never been brought to justice, and why that film prompted you to begin a journey that would take almost as long to right those wrongs.

Watching the film Mississippi Burning outraged me. How could more than 20 Klansmen kill three young men and never be tried for murder? It made no sense. In addition, I saw the movie with two FBI agents who investigated the case and a journalist who covered the case. Watching the film with them made all the difference because they gave me the full story of what happened. That really kickstarted my investigation into the Mississippi Burning case and those that followed.

The late Pulitzer Prize winning author/journalist David Halberstam once called your work “a reflection of what a reporter with a conscience can do,” and Race Against Time has been described as “a remarkable journalistic detective story and a vital piece of American history.” That said, who should read this book, and why?

I would hope anyone who likes to read true crime or true detective stories would enjoy the book. How these horrible killings came to trial decades later is a fascinating tale. Prosecutors, investigators, FBI agents and others all deserve a tremendous amount of credit for piecing these cases together against impossible odds. Most important, the book tells the story of these courageous people in the civil rights movement and their families, who never gave up hope, never stopped believing. They continue to inspire me.

Where do you think Mississippi–and our country–stand today in the journey to racial equality?

Our journey to racial equality in this nation seems to have always been one of a few steps forward and a few steps back. It seems lately we have been taking steps back with white supremacy and white nationalism on the rise. My hope is that we, as a nation, can begin to see what brings us together, rather than what tears us apart. We need each other. Now more than ever.

Please tell me about the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, the nonprofit that you started, and why investigative reporting is especially important in today’s world.

Newsrooms are vanishing across the nation and especially Mississippi. That’s why we started the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting in 2019. We provide newspapers and news outlets with investigative reporting they don’t have the money or manpower to do. We provide news outlets with stories that make a difference. For example, we reported on the powerful control of gangs in Mississippi prisons months before this gang war resulted in the killings of five and countless injuries.

We believe in shining a light into the darkness. We believe in exposing corruption. We believe in telling the truth because the truth still matters. We hope others will join us and help support this valuable mission. Our new offices are located on the Millsaps College campus, where we will begin working with college students in Mississippi. Our goal is to train up the next generation of investigative reporters.

 Lemuria has selected Race Against Time its February 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Jerry Mitchell will be Lemuria on Tuesday, February 4, beginning at 4:00 p.m. to sign copies of Race Against Time.

Michell will return on Wednesday, March 18, to sign books at 4:30 p.m., before joining in a conversation at 5:00 p.m. with Rena Evers-Everette, daughter of the late civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Author Q & A with Allie Povall

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 26)

Oxford resident and retired attorney Allie Povall’s exploration of what became of many of the South’s major military leaders after the Civil War provides an in-depth–and often surprising–look into their lives after they put down their weapons and left the battlefields.

Rebels in Repose: Confederate Commanders After the War highlights how these men followed their own divergent destinies, and how they interacted with each other: some became friends; others vehemently blamed their counterparts for the loss of the war. Whatever their fates, the memories of the American Civil War would mark them forever.

Povall, a Lexington native, served as a naval officer in the Vietnam War after he received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Mississippi. He went on to earn a law degree from Ole Miss and an LLM from Yale Law School, then enjoyed a long and successful legal career before his retirement in 1998.

He has authored three previous books, including The Time of Eddie Noel, a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Best Nonfiction Award in 2010, as well as Forward Magazine’s Best True Crime award that same year.

What influenced your interest in the Civil War and inspired your idea to write Rebels in Repose: Confederate Commanders After the War?

Allie Povall

I grew up in Lexington, Miss., and I was raised on Civil War lore. I had three great-grandfathers who served in the Confederate Army and a number of great-great uncles who also served, at least one of whom died at Shiloh. One of my high school teachers was Margie Riddle Bearss, and her husband eventually became historian of the National Park Service and an expert on the Civil War. She did much to kindle my interest in that conflict. By the time I finished high school I had, following Mrs. Bearss’s guidance, studied and written about the Civil War in depth.

Later, I would lose that interest and move on to other things, like law, but later in life–after I retired from the practice of law–I began to wonder about both Confederate and Union generals and what they did after the War. It really was just curiosity. So, I read a book about Robert E. Lee and his years after the War at Washington College, which eventually became Washington and Lee, and I loved the human side–as opposed to his military persona–of Lee as presented in that book. That epiphany led me to take a look at some of the other Confederate commanders, and that process led to this book, which is my fourth.

On what basis did you select the nine officers featured with their own chapters in your book, and the 10 others who were included in the final chapter?

There are no bright lines between the nine and some of the others, and the selection process for the generals to go in the “Ten Others” chapter was, with respect to at least some of those generals, mildly arbitrary. What I tried to do, however, was to address the “major” commanders first and then the lesser known and less major generals second. Some–Richard Ewell for example–in the “Ten Others” chapter might have gone in the first group, but I tried to concentrate on those generals who made the greatest contribution to the Confederate cause, whether good or bad, and there were some bad Confederate generals.

What do you hope your readers will gain from your examination of the fates of these Confederate offices after the Civil War ended?

The Civil War, in my opinion, was the defining event of American History. It left the South in shambles, and it changed in many ways–legal, political and militarily, for example–the way that this country functions. The War, thankfully, ended slavery, and it led to the passage of several amendments to the U.S. Constitution–the Fourteenth, with its “Due Process” and “Equal Protection” clauses in particular–that fundamentally altered American jurisprudence and that extended the protection of “fundamental rights” to all Americans, thus establishing the legal underpinnings of the Civil Rights movement.

In examining the lives of these men–from childhood until their deaths–I have tried, through them, to tell some of the story of American history during the period from about 1820 to the early 1900s. I also address their roles in the War, and in the War’s aftermath, I tell how they took widely divergent paths as they tried to adjust to the Union victory. Some went to Canada, some went to Mexico, and some sought positions in the Egyptian, Rumanian and Brazilian Army, for example.

I want the reader to see how, in some cases, their lives were intertwined after the War, in both good and bad ways, as well as how their lives were intertwined with some of the lives of their Union counterparts. I want the reader to understand, finally, the impact that the War had on the South, and through these men, the impact that it had on its leaders, who, after the War, were just ordinary men trying to make a living in the aftermath of a catastrophic war that resulted in an economically decimated South.

Why is this information still relevant in today’s America, and what lessons can we learn from it?

As I said, I believe that the Civil War was the defining event in American history, and I believe an understanding of it and its aftermath, as I present it in this book, is essential to understanding how we got where we are.

It is, therefore, important, I believe, to see how African-Americans took charge politically of the southern states after the war, only to lose control–even though in some cases they had a majority of the voters–to whites, through violence and the race-inspired Jim Crow state constitutions that deprived blacks of the right to vote and basically, the right to coexist equally with whites. These conflicting forces would give rise to the Civil Rights movement a hundred years later. I hope that my readers can learn that the fundamental underpinnings of the South that arose around the turn of the 20th century were set in motion in the immediate aftermath of the War, and that we must resolve never to let those things happen again.

Please tell me about your next book.

I originally planned to do one book on Confederate and Union commanders, but the combined book would have been too large for most publishers to swallow, so I decided to split it into two companion books. I have started on the Union book–Warriors at Sunset: Union Commanders After the War– and hope to have it done in the next couple of years. If you look at the bibliography for Rebels in Repose, there are about 100 sources and about 400 footnotes. The point is that the research for a book like this is, in a colossal understatement, daunting. Nevertheless, that is my goal, and I am on my way.

Signed first editions (of the paperback original) of Rebels in Repose are available both at Lemuria and its online store.

Author Q & A with Melody Golding

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (October 13)

Vicksburg’s Melody Golding spent 10 years collecting stories from riverboat pilots who shared personal tales of their careers spent on the water, spanning a 70-year period.

The resulting book from this author, photographer and artist is Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots (University Press of Mississippi). The volume is filled with drama, suspense and a sense of nostalgia as it chronicles the real-life adventures of men and women who have devoted their lives to the “brown water.”

Golding proudly acknowledges that she comes from a riverboat family, thanks to her husband’s 45-year-plus career in the riverboat and barge business. She also points out the incredible impact that riverboats contribute to the nation’s economy.

Her work has been featured at the Smithsonian Institute, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and in numerous universities and museums. Her previous books are Katarina: Mississippi Women Remember and Panther Tract: Wild Boar Hunting in the Mississippi Delta.

The Seamen’s Church Institute, a non-profit agency founded in 1834 and affiliated with the Episcopal Church, serves mariners through pastoral care and education. Golding has donated the royalties from the sale of this book to The Seamen’s Church Institute to help further their mission for mariners.

Tell me about your personal connection to the riverboat industry.

Our family has been in the river industry for decades. We have a riverboat and barge line that operates on our inland waterways. We are river people.

Life Between the Levees includes 101 stories shared by as many riverboat pilots who were born more than seven decades apart–from 1915 to 1987. You have said that putting this book together took almost 10 years. Explain the process that required such an extraordinary effort.

Melody Golding

The process of creating this book about pilots’ life on the river involved quite a bit of travel and an extensive amount of time. To interview my pilots, my journeys took me to many cities and ports, from Houston, New Orleans, of course Vicksburg, where I live, to Memphis, Paducah, and Wood River, Ill., just to name a few. I climbed on and off boats and carried my backpack of photographic and recording equipment as well as my Coast Guard regulation lifejacket and my TWIC card (Transportation Workers Identification Card) and I met them on land as well. I recorded the stories, which are first person reflections, then transcribed and presented them as they were told to me.

The book traces the progression of the riverboat industry through a time span that took navigational tools from lanterns placed on the riverbanks to today’s GPS, sonar, Satellite Compass and electronic charting software–but were there also elements of river life that the pilots indicated have pretty much remained the same.

One of the aspects of working out on the river that has remained the same throughout the years would be the “call of the river” that so many mariners experience. There is an old saying on the river that if “you wear out a pair of boots on the river you will stay on the river forever.” Many also say that brown water runs in their veins.

One of my pilots who is also a musician wrote a song about the river and some of the lyrics go, “I hate her when I’m with her and I miss her when I’m gone.” The pilots always reflect movingly on the time spent away from home because of their career, a universal reality for all mariners.

Another aspect that hasn’t changed on the river, and that has remained the same, is that there is no automatic pilot. The pilots have to steer the boat and know where they are.

You state in the book’s introduction that in today’s world, “the river is virtually an unknown territory to those who live and work on land.” Please explain how this is true, and the impact the industry makes on the U.S. economy.

The river is virtually an unknown territory to those who live and work on land largely because it is inaccessible to most people. Streets and railroads run through every town, but the river is bordered by levees and battures (the land between a low-stage river and the levees) and when travelling on the river one can go hundreds of miles without seeing any signs of life. It is a territory that is grand and vast.

The waterways and ports in the Mississippi corridor move billions of dollars of products throughout the U.S. and foreign markets. Inland and intercoastal waterways directly serve 38 states throughout the nation’s heartland as well as the states on the Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf Coast and the Pacific Northwest. The inland waterways of the United States include more than 25,000 miles of navigable waters.

The economic impact is evident as the majority of the grain that is exported comes down the river to the gulf. Over 30 percent of petroleum and chemicals moved in the U.S. today is moved on our inland waterways; and most coal and aggregates are moved by barge.

The first edition of Life Between the Levees sold out quickly. Why do you think this book has been so popular, and who should read it?

I am so very humbled by the interest in Life Between the Levees. I believe it is popular because there isn’t another book “out there” that is like it. This book is full of real-life drama, suspense and a way of life that most people otherwise would have no knowledge of. It is a fun read and can either be read “front to back” or picked up and read where the book falls open.

The photographs tell their own story if one just cares to visually experience the river. Anyone who has an interest in our inland waterways system will enjoy this book. The stories here are told by real river legends. They are the “real deal.”

Susan T. Falck’s ‘Remembering Dixie’ raises questions about historical memory

By Jay Wiener. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 1)

Reverberations remain from decades during which Southerners acted as if the Civil War was not concluded with the Confederacy losing. The narrative evolved through variations on a theme, but constant was diversion from discussion of a multiracial society.

Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi 1865-1941 offers opportunity to rethink the narrative. Author Susan T. Falck writes, “In crafting their historical consciousness whites emphasized the gentility of southern civilization, the valor of Confederate soldiers, and the courage of female and elderly male civilians who heroically protected the home front. The memory… was selective, with little room for black experiences told from a black perspective.”

Experiences during enslavement of people of color of mixed blood and in the free black community, and hierarchies arising through differences, were overlooked by “… white Civil War memoirists who subscribed to the notion that the South was tragically victimized during the war and Reconstruction.” Fixation upon the Lost Cause crippled the South—and the country—because it begat orthodoxy as rigid as Stalinism, stopping expansive inquiries:

What other possibilities exist?
What options offer optimal outcome?
Why ignore them?

One-dimensional defense of the slavocracy—as a paradise lost—prohibited white Southerners from full appreciation of how emancipation felt for former slaves, the experience during Redemption, at which time freedoms were revoked, and the dehumanization which ensued. Remembering Dixie yields insights.

Chapter Four addresses lacunae through discussion of photography in Natchez. That examination alone justifies buying the book, in the manner that one purchases magazines without reading everything. Art History classes are likely to utilize it. Anyone interested in photography ought to consider it, given profound perspective into the “thousand words” that a picture is supposedly worth.

The author writes, “[Henry] Norman’s photographs empowered his black subjects to directly challenge the rampage of racist cartoons, jokes, articles, and pictures circulating in the pages of newspapers and consumer periodicals nationwide. As symbols of personal and collective empowerment, Norman’s portraits contested characterizations of blacks as innately inferior, simplistic, and unworthy of respect or civil rights.”

Chapter Five is no less essential. “The creators of the Pilgrimage repackaged the dramatization of a mix of decades-old southern racialized ideology and white historical memory initiated in the early postbellum period as a product for Depression-era consumption.” Slavocracy was sold as an idyll, superior to the dislocations of the Great Depression and industrialization. “Out of the more practical features of the North we may have obtained our economic status, but it is to the South that we turn for the music and romance of our yesteryears.”

Otherwise put, “… the Pilgrimage invited 1930s audiences to step inside the world of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler and experience vicariously a carefully reconstructed mythical past.”

The advertising slogan “Come to Natchez Where the Old South Still Lives” coined by “George Healy, Jr., formerly of Natchez and an Editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune…” encapsulates the anodyne delusion.

Interestingly the women spearheading the Pilgrimage exemplified anything other than Healy’s antediluvian approach: Although they inhabited traditional femininity, they were thoroughly modern, shrewd and calculating businesswomen.

Sound business judgment ultimately created “a profound civic commitment shared by many in the community—whites and blacks—to promote and tell a more inclusive and accurate historical narrative.”

As Natchez has done so, utilizing the Historic Natchez Foundation, the Natchez Courthouse Records Project, and the National Park Service, it has instructed communities, elsewhere, struggling through challenges: “… [T]hanks to the coupling of strong and wise external and homegrown influences the healing of Natchez’s past is well underway, resulting in a flurry of innovative heritage tourism developments that while not always embracing a critically accurate narrative are more racially inclusive and historically accurate than ever before.”

Jay Wiener is a Jackson attorney.

Susan T. Falck will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 25, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Remembering Dixie.

Author Q & A with Sarah M. Broom

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 1)

In her debut book The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom presents a powerful memoir of the New Orleans she experienced as a child (growing up in a family of 12 children), and the house that swallowed up the dreams and finances of her resilient mother.

Broom earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and won a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. She was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011, and has been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony.

Her work has appeared in The New YorkerThe New York Times MagazineThe Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and others.

Today, Broom lives in Harlem.

Sarah M. Broom

The Yellow House is a richly detailed memoir of your life, sharing not just stories of your immediate family but those of at least two preceding generations. Why was it important to you to devote so much detail to previous generations to fully tell this story?

I wanted to provide context, a kind of grounding, to situate the story in a lineage. To begin at the moment of my birth would have been dishonest, and also would have ignored the people who compose me and make me who I am. I was setting up a matriarchal world, establishing the women who preceded me within the City of New Orleans. The story of my mother’s house felt, to me, indistinguishable from the story of my Grandmother Lolo and her many houses.

The neighborhood in which the Yellow House was built was part of New Orleans East, touted in the early 1960s as a “new frontier” and a “Model City” like nothing that had come before it. Describe the idea behind its expected growth, and why it would eventually fail.

New Orleans East was an enormous area of the city, east of the Industrial Canal, a navigation channel opened in 1923. Long before New Orleans East, Inc. arrived, there was a collection of communities within the east including Orangedale Subdivision, where my mother eventually bought the Yellow House. New Orleans East, Inc. began to build out the more easternmost parts of the area, which created a flurry of excitement and news stories. Eventually, the entire area of the city took on the corporate name. The East failed for many reasons–the oil bust, white flight which led to divestment, public policy and city planning choices, and inattention.

Your mother, Ivory Mae Soule Webb, was a 19-year-old widow when she bought the Yellow House in 1961, paying the $3,200 price with life insurance money after her first husband’s death. By 1964, when they moved in, she was remarried to Simon Broom, and they began married life with six children between them. Tell me about your mom’s pride in her home, and how important it was to her to keep everything looking nice, inside and out.

My mother loved to make a beautiful home. She was raised by women who took pride in all the places where she lived. For my mother, owning a house of her own was buying into the American dream. Through home ownership, I suspect she learned quite a bit about the frailty of the American dream, about the critical importance of the solidity of the “ground,” so to speak. (It was) understood through time that her investment might not build wealth for her as it might for someone else.

After several career moves and the devastation of Katrina, you eventually were drawn back to New Orleans. At the end, you state: “The house was the only thing that belonged to all of us.” Ultimately, what did (and does) the Yellow House mean to you and your family?

It is to this day a repository. Witness to our lives. The place our mother paid for, in which she built a world full of joy and surprise and sometimes sadness, but it belonged to her and it still is ours even as a memory.

Lemuria has selected The Yellow House its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Luke Lampton and Karen Evers

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 7)

Images in Mississippi Medicine: A Photographic History of Medicine in Mississippi by Dr. Luke Lampton and colleague Karen Evers, presents an unprecedented chronicle of the practice of medicine here from pre-statehood days to the technologies of today.

Along with Lampton’s historical narratives that cover everything from the state’s hospitals to the early physicians, the treatment of mental illness, the advancement of public medicine, the beginnings of medical education and more, the book is illustrated with many rare and significant photos.

The volume is published by the Mississippi State Medical Association (MSMA) under the auspices of the Commemorative Committee for the 150th Anniversary meeting of the MSMA House of Delegates.

Lampton has served for 25 years as a family physician at Magnolia Clinic in Magnolia, where he resides. He was born and grew up in Jackson, and he currently publishes Hinds County’s oldest newspaper, the Hinds County Gazette in Raymond.

A fifth-generation Mississippi physician, Lampton is Editor in Chief of the Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association (MSMA).

Karen Evers has filled the role of managing editor of that Journal the past 24 years. The daughter of a physician and a nurse, she lives in Jackson. Her professional background before her appointment at the Journal was in advertising in New York City.

The book earned a gold award from the Columbia Books Association Trends contest, which is a top national prize for the best of professional association publications.

The reception for Images in Mississippi Medicine has been so successful that a “volume 2” is already under consideration, its authors say.

Please tell me how this book came about . . . whose idea was it, and why was it 20 years in the making?

Dr. Luke Lampton

Lampton: The origin of the book is the origin of a column in the state medical journal. After the two of us came together as editors in 1998, we contemplated feature columns which would interest our physician readers. One of these columns was Images in Mississippi Medicine, which presents a historical photograph or graphic image with accompanying narrative. We would occasionally discuss gathering them together as a book in the distant future. In 2017, as the state medical association prepared for the 150th meeting of its House of Delegates, Dr. Michael Trotter, chairman of the Commemorative Committee, asked us to create a historical book from these monthly columns, which dated back to 2002. We added many other rarely seen images and settled on 300 in our attempt to tell more fully the story of Mississippi medicine.

Dr. Lampton, what was your primary role in the production of this book?

Lampton: As author and creator of the monthly historical column, I wrote all of the copy and collected the majority of the images over the years utilized in the book. I also wrote all of the essays, narratives, and cutlines used in the book; thus, I was the primary author. That said, I did want to acknowledge Karen’s significant editorial assistance and vision with the book, and I requested her inclusion as joint author with me.

Ms. Evers, what was your primary role in the production of this book?

Karen Evers

Evers: As managing editor of the Journal during the life of the column and the creation of the book, I assisted Dr. Lampton in research, copy editing, and coordinating publishing and printing. I also helped him locate [the] many of the images [that] did not come from his extensive personal collection of photographs. It was fun! Discovering the story behind the images and how the pieces of history were relative was amazing. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the University of Mississippi Medical Center Department of Archives (Misti Thornton) were invaluable resources, as was The Mississippiana collection at Mississippi State University’s Mitchell Library (Fred Smith). We also worked closely with Adrienne Dison in the artistic production of the book.

Can you name a few of the standout doctors and/or medical accomplishments that have taken place in Mississippi over the years?

Lampton: There are many, and perhaps the major accomplishment of this book is to shine the light on many neglected heroes in our state’s historical parade. Certainly, Dr. William Lattimore (1774-1843) deserves more prominent remembrance by both citizens and physicians for not only his public health accomplishments, but also his selfless political leadership. He, with the help of his brother and other Natchez physicians, created the state’s first hospital, its first board of health, its first use of vaccination and quarantine, and the first board of medical censors. These are remarkable and progressive public health accomplishments. Lattimore also served as Mississippi’s first Territorial Congressman and in that capacity determined the dividing line between Alabama and Mississippi and located the current site of Jackson. He is remembered for making morally justified decisions but not politically opportune decisions, which cost him the governorship.

In the more modern period, Dr. Joseph Goldberger’s brave and groundbreaking work eliminating pellagra in Mississippi in the early 20th century had global implications. Few realize that this Orthodox Jew who was an immigrant to New York married the niece of Jefferson Davis, who was his right hand in all of his brilliant public health work. Goldberger’s Mississippi connections through her proved critical in the success of his work.

Also featured in the book is the work of public health legend Dr. Felix Underwood, who revolutionized public health in Mississippi and was called “the man who saved a million lives.” Other public health leaders are featured, including Dr. Waller Leathers, Dr. Ed Thompson, Dr. Mary Currier, and Dr. Alton Cobb. Cobb may have made the most important contributions to public health and medicine of any Mississippian over the last 50 years. The modern public health system in Mississippi can be credited to his work and vision, and he set standards of excellence at the Department of Health and a focus on science which endure today. Thank Alton Cobb for Mississippi not having a measles outbreak recently, because he was the one who helped fashion our strict vaccination laws well before other states realized their importance.

As well, the University of Mississippi Medical Center plays a central role in the history of medicine in the state. Its purpose is explored beginning with the earliest development of a two-year school in Oxford up to the bold move to Jackson in the 1950s. The legendary early professors, Drs. Guyton, Pankratz, Snavely, Hardy, Batson, and others are mentioned. Early attempts at medical education are also discussed, most notably the first four-year medical college, the Mississippi Medical College, which operated in Meridian from 1906-1913.

The role of mental health, especially the long history of the state’s mental health institutions, is discussed in detail, with fascinating images of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum–as it evolved into the Mississippi State Hospital–in both Jackson and Whitfield and the East Mississippi Insane Hospital in Meridian. Also, the development and growth of community hospitals and sanatoriums are explored around the state, from 1805 to the Civil War to the later King’s Daughters movement to the later Hill-Burton period.

And there is more.

Why is this book important to Mississippi, and who should read it?

Lampton: The book reveals that medicine played a vital role in the broader history of our state. Education, politics, race, poverty, and public health come forth on every page. There exists no comprehensive history of medicine in the state.

This book provides the framework for the state’s medical history, and we hope it encourages more writing and research on many of the topics highlighted. The book is important not only for historians and physicians but also for students and lay readers.

Signed copies of Images in Mississippi Medicine are available at Lemuria’s online store.

‘Life Between the Levees’ unleashes powerful legacy of American river commerce

By Lovejoy Boteler. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 2)

One summer in my twenties I worked as a deckhand on the Greenville, a towboat that plied the upper Mississippi River from Alton, Illinois to Davenport, Iowa. In that short span of time I came to understand the tremendous power of the river and the importance of its commerce. Melody Golding’s superb book, Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots, with its countless tales of adventure and antics on “brown water” transported me straight back to that time.

Golding is uniquely qualified to have compiled Life Between the Levees. She states in the first line of the introduction, “I come from a river family.” With that simple but powerful statement, she hints at the soul of the river as it can only be revealed by the folks who have an intimate connection with that life. Her deep love for the river comes through, and must have fueled her passion to create this comprehensive work. She has given us a book with beautiful documentary photographs, both personal and archival, and authentic stories told by colorful characters, many of whom she has known.

For ten years, with single-minded purpose, Golding of Vicksburg traveled thousands of miles on the Mississippi and its inland waterways to record over one hundred voices and stories of brown water mariners: steely-eyed captains, pilots, deckhands, cooks, and chaplains, some of whom have now passed from the scene. Her interviews reveal events that occurred over a seventy-year span of time. Older captains who were trained by the legendary pilots of the great paddle wheelers of the nineteenth century provide poignant, provocative and sometimes hilarious insights. Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots captures a slice of history that is destined to become an important and lasting part of American folklore.

Sometime the call of the river came at an early age. Joy Mary Manthey, from Louisiana, remembers steering a towboat as a young girl. “I had to stand on the milk crate to see over the wheel, and I steered the boat. I loved it. I mean…I was only ten years old.” After some interesting life adventures, Joy Mary became a nun, and then a towboat chaplain.

Perry Wolfe remembered his first experience on the river as a young boy. His dad called him “his first mate.” He slept on sandbars. Perry soon realized that his life would forever be on the river. He would eventually become a deckhand with Brent Towing, out of Greenville and talked about how life on the river was in the old days. “Actually up there at Lock 26, it was more wild than Natchez Under the Hill … being a captain back then was a lot harder because you had to referee all the fights.”

Captain William Torner, on old-timer, recalled the steamboats of yesteryear. “I am one of the few river men still living who has worked on a steamboat built in the 1800s”. In 1940 Captain Torner worked on the Reliance out of Pittsburgh.

The Mississippi River and its tributaries have influenced the shape of the collective psyche of America through Mark Twain’s tales of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and now with Melody Golding’s seminal book, the voices of modern-day captains and crews.

The river is a place where a person can find peace. Patrick Soileau, thirty years on the waterways summed it up. “…it’s your time for solitude…I could probably solve the world’s problems up here.”
In Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots, through captivating interviews, Melody Golding chronicles stories of hope and pathos, friendship and sometimes disaster, away from the bustling world of landlubbers. Life Between the Levees is a book to be savored and enjoyed for years to come.

Lovejoy Boteler is author of Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Jackson.

Melody Golding will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Mississippi: The Delta” panel at 9:30 a.m. at the State Capitol Room 201 A.

Author Q & A with Michael Ford

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 2)

Pennsylvania native Michael Ford will tell you that his “snap decision” nearly 50 years ago–to ditch a dream job offer in Massachusetts, uproot his family, and move to Oxford, Miss. to pursue a hunch–turned out to be the best decision he ever made, as he launched his dreams that would ignite a successful and fulfilling career.

Now a filmmaker in Washington, D.C., Ford’s photo essays in his new book North Mississippi Homeplace: Photographs and Folklife (University of Georgia Press) reveal his passionate reverence for the area he has come to call his “homeplace.”

The unique volume contains only two chapters: one about moving to rural Mississippi and living in Oxford from 1972 to 1975; and the other explaining what brought him back multiple times four decades later. It includes scores of color photos taken during both periods. Ford notes that all these images–taken decades apart–invariably settled into three main themes: the land, the light and the people.

The materials he recorded for the documentary film he produced during his Mississippi stay are now archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress as The Michael Ford Mississippi Collection.

During your first trip to visit in-laws in Oxford in December 1971, you made a quick decision to leave a secure teaching position at Boston’s Emerson College and move to Oxford with the idea of making a documentary film. Explain how this came about.

Michael Ford

I was working on my thesis film for my master’s program in film at Boston University. We had to design a master’s project and I had considered something about rural America, maybe in Vermont or New Hampshire.

When I began exploring the land (around the outskirts of Oxford) during that Christmas break, I had no reference for what I saw–the remoteness, the country shacks, the hogs’ legs hoisted in tree branches for gutting. I had studied (photography history) and I knew things like this shouldn’t exist in America anymore. I had done hard news for two years, and I knew there was a story here.

So, four months later, here I was, a Yankee, driving into Mississippi in an old VW bus with a peace sign on it and New York plates. I was just beginning to figure out that everyone might not like us so much. I began settling in with a deep immersion into the Mississippi hill country. I started reading Faulkner. I spent maybe six months driving and talking to people, getting a cold drink, and sometimes taking their pictures.

My number one anchor to the community was (Oxford blacksmith) Mr. (Morgan Randolph) Hall, who hired me as his apprentice. Number two was Hal Waldrip, who owned and ran an archaic general store in Chulahoma, Miss. He saw himself as one of the “keepers of the lore.” He told me, “I could fix this store up. I could add air conditioning and heat and clean it up. But it would lose some of the atmosphere.”

There were others–Doc Jones, who sold molasses at Waldrip’s store; AG Newson, who actually made the molasses with the help of his mules, Frank and Jake.
These were the people I found. They found me. They were important because they were all preserving this last flash of old times.

Tell me what you discovered about Mississippi–and yourself–as you began to capture the images in your book.

I had no idea this kind of life still existed in the U.S. anymore. I was making an independent documentary. You couldn’t make any preconceived ideas about where it was going. It designed itself. You can shape and interpret it, but you can’t invent it.

I realized that in a concrete sense when it came time to write it. It was the essence of the documentary–the experiences of the intuitive or spiritual side of life–that I wanted to share.

So, one of the things I had to learn as a documentarian was to shut up, that is, shut up the (analytical) left side of the brain, so the (creative) right side can do what it needs to do. I learned over the years that the best situation I could ask for was to shoot something and say, “I got it!” You just know. Words define a thing, but a photograph speaks for itself.

You write that your return visits to Mississippi in 2013-2015 were initially driven by nostalgia and curiosity. How did these trips of new discovery turn out?

What really sparked it were several things that came together at once. My grown daughter, who was a baby when we moved to Oxford, was insisting I do something with my film and audiotapes from Mississippi before I “croaked,” in her words; and technology had advanced to a point that I could do much of the work myself. That stuff had sat for 40 years in cans and boxes in my closets–not forgotten, but definitely ignored.

While reviewing old audio tapes, I listened to a recording of Mr. Hall talking to me. Out of nostalgia I Googled his name and (wound up getting) in touch with Andy Waller, an apprentice of Mr. Hall’s after I left Oxford. Andy had bought Mr. Hall out when he retired.

(That conversation) convinced me there was no doubt it was time to return . . . That was in April 2013. I’ve been back another half dozen times since then.

What I discovered was that it was different. The country people were gone, especially the older people. The sense of community had diminished. Today, even as far out as you can go in the country, you have can have a TV satellite and the internet. Having a place where people get together is difficult. There is not a downtown in most of these communities anymore.

The old way of life was mostly gone forever.

What did you ultimately learn from this whole unique experience, and how has it affected your life and career?

Two answers: one would be “everything.” It has affected everything. I lived where I’ve lived and done what I’ve done all because of it. I started my own film production company, Yellow Cat Productions, which I’ve had for 45 years. Maybe it taught me that I learned to take risks.

On our 1972 trip headed (from Massachusetts) to move to Mississippi, we stopped in New York and visited with (a friend). At that time, it felt in some ways like we were going to a land of darkness, chasing something I barely knew existed and wasn’t sure what to expect.

I told (my friend) that I wasn’t really sure why I should do this, and she said, “Why not?”

Everything changed at that instant. It was like I got it. I learned that when you look back, you see that it’s the single microseconds, not the big bangs, that change the course of a life.

I see the world in patterns, visually, and this is the way Mississippi works in my mind. Mississippi has a special place in this world.

Harper Lee’s sequel mystery solved in Casey Cep’s ‘Furious Hours’

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 12)

One of the enduring mysteries after the 2016 death of author Harper Lee was: Did she work on a book to follow her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird and was there an unpublished manuscript?

Casey Cep in Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee does an admirable job in solving the mystery—in more ways that one.

Foremost, she solves the mystery of the much rumored book that Lee was reportedly working on through painstaking journalism, tracking down sources, doing interviews, resurrecting lost notes and compiling a fascinating picture of Lee’s life post-Mockingbird.

But she also resurrects the tale itself, the story that Lee referred to as “The Reverend,” producing a book within a book by writing herself the book that Lee couldn’t find a way to piece together.

Cep recounts that Lee spent three years trying to write “The Reverend,” going about it the same way that she had helped childhood friend Truman Capote compile his book In Cold Blood.

Just as Lee and Capote spent months in Kansas doing interviews and watching the murder trial that resulted in the “nonfiction novel” Capote wrote to great acclaim, Cep writes, Lee attempted to recreate the feat alone in Alexander City, Ala.

Lee’s case of suspicious deaths revolved around the Rev. Willie Maxwell, beginning with his wife Mary Lou found dead in her car Aug. 3, 1970. While investigators couldn’t prove a murder, they found that “his private life bore little resemblance to the one his parishioners thought he was living, and no resemblance at all to those he extolled in his sermons.”

He was acquitted at trial, based on the possibly perjured testimony of his neighbour, Dorcas Anderson, whom 15 months after the death, he married.

She was 27 to his 46 and, conveniently, and suspiciously also, a new widow.

It was a trend. Then, his brother died and, like Mary Lou before him, Maxwell had taken out several life insurance policies on him, totaling $100,000 (about $500,000 today).

On Sept. 20, 1972, Dorcas was found dead—with 17 life insurance policies the Reverend had on her.

He married wife number three in November, 1974, with Ophelia Burns. Shortly after, a nephew died.

All were under suspicious circumstances that neither police nor insurance investigators could prove were the product of a crime.

The community began to view the black preacher as a hoodoo conjurer. After his first wife’s death, “a lot of people were convinced that he had used voodoo to fix the jury … and charm a younger woman” into marrying him, but “as time passed and more people died, the stories about the reverend grew stronger, stranger, and, if possible, more sinister.”

It was said “he hung white chickens upside down from the pecan trees outside his house to keep away unwanted spirits and painted blood on his doorsteps to keep away the authorities. … Drive by his front door, and the headlights on any car would go dark. Say a cross word against him, and he would lay a trick on you.”

One could certainly see how this Southern gothic tale would be enticing for the creator of such characters as Scout, Atticus—and the scary Boo Radley.

But Cep posits that in “The Reverend” Lee believed she would redeem herself as a story teller of the “true” South—where the status of race relations was more complex and nuanced than black and white, as in the morality tale of Mockingbird.

Mockingbird had been read as a clarion call for civil rights, but Lee’s views were more complicated than any editor wanted to put into print,” Cep writes, as demonstrated by Go Set a Watchman, the original text for Mockingbird.

When Maxwell was brought to trial a final time, in 1977, with the suspicious death of Maxwell’s adopted daughter, Lee was there to watch it, and she found the medium for writing a book that would parallel Mockingbird, but present it in a more complex manner.

It had a black hero, who was also a vigilante operating outside the law; a black villain, who while masquerading as a preacher was also believed to be evil incarnate; a white crusading attorney, who was also profiting off of black death; crimes that looked like murder but were treated more like fraud, and “white and black lives that existed almost side by side in small Southern towns but were worlds apart.”

How and why “The Reverend” never came to print is a separate story, believably related.

In Furious, Lee’s admirers will discover a new perspective on the reclusive author while also catching an enticing glimpse of the “lost” book that could or would have been a more modern sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Casey Cep will be at Lemuria on Monday, May 13, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Lemuria has selected Furious Hours as its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Casey Cep

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 5)

In her debut book, writer Casey Cep takes on the almost unbelievable 1970s crime story of an Alabama man who dubbed himself “The Reverend” and went on to commit a spree of murders so outrageous that he would meet a shocking end to his own life–and his offenses would bring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee to a decision to write her own account of his crimes.

And although the celebrated author of To Kill a Mockingbird spent years dedicated to researching the story of “The Reverend” Willie Maxwell, Lee would never finish the book.

In Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, Cep chronicles the dual stories of Maxwell’s crimes with Lee’s unsuccessful attempt to complete her own narrative of those events, despite her obvious gift for journalism.

A Maryland native, Cep is a graduate of Harvard University and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among others.

What drew you this unique story in Furious Hours and write it as not only a chronicle of “the Reverend” and his crimes, but an inner glimpse into the life of Harper Lee?

Casey Cep

I first learned of these murders while reporting on Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman, so in some ways my book was always going to include her. The more I learned, though, the clearer it became that she wasn’t just a coda to the story, but an integral part of it. Her own reporting had been substantial, so I wanted to honor that, but I also thought her struggles provided a useful way of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical challenges that any journalist faces when trying to write about other people’s lives, especially with true crime.

Lee, who grew up known by her first name, Nelle, has said that she never felt like she fit in during her school years. Why was that?

Right, Nelle is Ellen backward, which her parents chose to honor her maternal grandmother. Stories about Lee as a young girl map onto her beloved heroine, so if you think about how Maycomb reacted to Scout Finch, then you get a sense of how Monroeville reacted to her: no one knew quite what to do with the clever tomboy who wore overalls and liked playing with the boys. Even when she went off to college, Lee stood out: quoting obscure English poets, wearing blue jeans, smoking, and swearing with gusto. From her letters, though, we know it was a bit of a two-way street: she was odd, but not an outcast; her distance from her peers was as much her own doing as theirs.

Lee longed to be a writer and envied her contemporaries whose personalities allowed them to blossom and share their talents, but there were times she found herself unable to write because she was between “perfectionism and despair.” How did this affect her writing?

I think perfectionism can make it hard to finish something and despair can make it hard to start, so if you are a writer who seesaws between the two, it can be paralyzing. Lee could spend an entire day on a single page but also impulsively toss out whole manuscripts, and because she valorized suffering as necessary for artistry, her struggles were self-reinforcing.

But she wasn’t like that when she wasn’t trying to write, and I found it moving when her friends would share memories of how charming she was, and how raucously funny she could be. Harper Lee would hold court with stories about her neighbors in Monroeville and her neighborhood in Manhattan that were like something out of Chaucer or Dickens, and you just wish she could’ve written them down as easily as she told them around the dinner table.

As Lee took an interest in the massive story of “the Reverend” and decided to write a book about it, it turned out that she was a keen investigative reporter, a task she obviously loved and was good at. It seems that she felt a sense of energy and pride as she worked on this crime story–but the book was never completed. Why?

You’re right that she was an incredible reporter. People she interviewed in Kansas while helping Truman Capote with In Cold Blood and people she interviewed in Alabama while working on “The Reverend” say she was the most interesting, inquisitive person they ever met.

She could put any source at ease, and she had the kind of patience it takes to get people to tell you their secrets. She was energized by the social aspects of reporting, but of course the hard part about writing a book is that at some point you have to actually write it, and she really struggled with that solitary work. She was also living in the shadow of her own bestselling, prize-winning masterpiece, so on top of everything else, she was facing sky-high expectations, from herself and from the world.

Your research for Furious Hours is impressive, as you give readers an inside look into decades-old crimes and their outcomes; as well as information about Lee that many have never heard. How did you approach the research and organization of this book?

Early on, I did what I always do when I’m starting something new: I read everything I could get my hands on. Not just about Harper Lee, but also voodoo, murder, the insanity defense, sharecropping, dams, revivals, insurance fraud, courthouses, and on and on and on. After that, I started tracking down leads about the original crimes, and then doing the same thing for Lee. I always knew the structure–the Reverend, the Lawyer, and the Writer–so I would just file what I found into folders and then organize the folders, and every day I’d hope to find some new document or convince someone new to talk with me. But at some point, you have to accept that some things are lost to time and some people just won’t talk with you, so you say a prayer, and start writing.

You say in the book that Lee “was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries.” Please explain.

I wrote that line when I was particularly struck by the incongruity between the tremendous interest in Lee and the paucity of information about her. She was always private, and she remained that way despite having written one of the world’s most popular novels. After years of reporting, and even getting to interview some of those who knew her best, there was still just so much more I wanted to know. I realize that everyone’s inner lives are somewhat mysterious–even those closest to us, like our siblings or our parents–so of course the mind and heart of an artist like Harper Lee will always remain a little elusive.

Casey Cep will at Lemuria on Monday, May 13, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Furious Hours. Lemuria has selected Furious Hours its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

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