People often talk about all the places you can go with a book. LeVar Burton assured me on Reading Rainbow that, partnering with a book, my imagination is unstoppable, and I can travel anywhere in time or space. I can empathize with others and learn what it’s like to be a pauper, a king, or that person next door I just didn’t quite get before.
Everyone should travel through books, with books, and to places where you can’t even take books, then write about it. But as I’ve traveled around the world and moved within the US, my yearning for settledness, or a sense of home, has intensified.
Feeling a hunger for community, identity, and home, I became engrossed in literature of displacement, particularly Irish literature. Home preoccupies many Irish writers, who have been scattered from their close-knit island across the planet, left to make sense of their identity without the help of the familiar. This struggle obviously isn’t unique to the Irish, though. Today, according to the UNHCR, over 51 million people are forcibly displaced from their homes, and millions more are unsure where to call home for other reasons. Displaced or not, we feel the longing for home, the need for settledness that we may not find even in familiar surroundings.
As I leaf through the pages of the Jackson book, each image helps me piece together my home. I didn’t grow up in Jackson, but in many ways I’m finding myself here. The memories I have of each image join with the collective memories of my neighbors and others across the city, helping me know and love this place better.
When I see photographs of the Eudora Welty Commons, memories of wedding receptions I’ve attended there come back to help me piece together what was. Friends who now live across the Atlantic are suddenly back with me on that page to re-celebrate their special day and remember distant community.
On another page, I visit the Elite Restaurant, where my family used to regularly dine before attending a ballet, theater, or musical performance at Thalia Mara Hall. The cozy booths reassemble memories of good conversations, delicious food, and feelings of anticipation in this historic Jackson landmark.
This is why I can’t recommend the Jackson book enough—for long-time Jacksonians and those tasting their first sip of sweet tea, for brides and grooms starting their first home together here, and for Jackson ex-pats who need a tangible way to reconstruct home wherever in the world they find themselves.
No, you can’t really buy home in book form. But you can re-remember it, putting splintered fragments back together in your mind. And Jackson helps make home whole again.
Written by Marianna
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.
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