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By Gregg Mayer. Special to the Clarion Ledger Sunday print edition (March 17)

Few individuals in Mississippi’s modern history are as emboldened, important and inscrutable as James Meredith.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962, Meredith has been a challenging and criticizing voice in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi ever since. In some ways, Meredith started it all in his home state, and he documented that struggle in his first book Three Years in Mississippi (UPM, $30), a 336-page memoir that this year received a much-needed reprint by the University Press of Mississippi.

Originally published in 1966, Three Years in Mississippi takes readers back into Meredith’s own raw words shortly after he had returned to his home state in 1960 having spent ten years away.

“To understand the events that occurred during my three years in Mississippi, one must always remember that I returned to my home state to fight a war,” he writes. Throughout his first-person account, Meredith refers to himself as if a soldier in battle.

Meredith chronicles the events in diary-like fashion, using bold headings–such as Provoking the Attention of the Police, The All-Night Session, The Question of My Security–about what he saw, who was with him, and the attitudes and culture he was trying to change.

The centerpiece is Meredith’s denial of admission and eventual lawsuit against Ole Miss, a suit that was nearly ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which had ended public school segregation.
In leading up to the legal challenge, Meredith includes the complete texts of letters he wrote to Civil Rights leaders of the time, including to Thurgood Marshall, who would later sit on the U.S. Supreme Court:

“I have always been a ‘conscientious objector’ to my ‘oppressed status’ as long as I can remember,” Meredith wrote Marshall. “I am familiar with the probable difficulties involved in such a move as I am undertaking and I am fully prepared to pursue it all the way to a degree from the University of Mississippi.”

With the support of the NAACP, Meredith filed suit in federal court after his admission was denied. Long excerpts of court testimony are included in the book. The trial judge incredulously found that “[t]he evidence overwhelmingly showed that the Plaintiff was not denied admissions because of his race,” adding that race was not even considered by the University. Such hollow pronouncements were eventually reversed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Meredith was admitted to school.

On September 29, 1962, Meredith traveled to Oxford, but he writes he turned around amid reports of rioting. It wasn’t until two days later, with the smell of tear gas still in the air, that Meredith was on campus and learned the full extent of the rioting, including that two men were killed and several injured.

“Some newspapermen later asked me if I thought attending the university was worth all this death and destruction,” Meredith writes. “The question really annoyed me. Of course, I was sorry! I hadn’t wanted this to happen. I believe it could have been prevented by responsible political leadership in Mississippi.”

Enduring harassment as a daily routine, Meredith earned his political science degree from Ole Miss on August 18, 1963. Since that transformative time, Meredith has made his way down many unexpected paths, and over the years, “squandered his reputation through odd political choices, business failings, and quirky behavior,” writes University of Memphis Professor Aram Goudsouzian in a brilliantly illuminating introduction to the book that puts this touchstone event in Civil Rights history into contextual focus.

But despite whatever Meredith chose to do after his time in Oxford, the import of Three Years in Mississippi is how it powerfully records the fervent narrative of a young man who lived within a system that considered him inferior, and he pushed back against it.

Gregg Mayer is a lawyer and writer who serves as Chief Operating Officer at Mississippi Public Broadcasting. He graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Mississippi Law Journal.

James Meredith will be at Lemuria on Saturday, April 13, in conversation with Cara Meredith and Jamar Tisby, at 2:00 p.m.

Author Q & A with Peter Heller

By Guest Author

On March 17, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 17)

Award-winning, bestselling author Peter Heller reinforces his standing among America’s notable adventure writers with his riveting newest edition, The River.
The hair-raising novel begins with two college friends embarking on the challenge of canoeing the Maskwa River in northern Canada, but what was expected to be a leisure trip turns into a desperate wilderness survival test beyond their imaginations.

An avid outdoorsman and adventure traveler, Heller’s writing is heavily influenced by these personal passions, resulting in three previous novels (bestsellers Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars) and four nonfiction works.

He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction and is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. He lives in Denver.

The River, and many of your previous books reveal your strong interest in adventure and nature stories. How did you develop your interest in writing about the outdoors?

Peter Heller

Ever since I was the littlest kid, all I wanted to do when I grew up was be a cowboy and drift the High Lonesome for weeks on horseback, or mountaineer, or canoe wild rivers. Maybe tough for a kid growing up in Brooklyn. But I loved reading anything about nature, about wild places, and the sea. And I think I knew that I would write about these places one day, because I began to study botany, ecology, birds. In college I learned to kayak, and that became a way to explore some of the most beautiful country.

I wrote about those expeditions for magazines, and in composing the stories I learned a lot that I used later on in writing fiction–techniques for creating a vivid sense of place and characters that jump off the page; and I learned about cadence and pacing.

I’m still happiest sitting at a fire by some mountain creek, drinking coffee, or stringing a fly rod. So now when I’m writing a novel, I often transport myself to the places I want to be, and they are usually remote, and there is usually a fire and a stream, rain, wind, the cries of birds.

The story in The River revolves around its two main characters, college students Jack and Wynn, opposites in many ways. Could you describe their friendship, and what drew them together?

Jack is a tough ranch kid from Kremmling, Colorado. He’s spent half his life in the saddle, and cooking over a fire and sleeping under the stars are second nature. Wynn is an architect’s son from Vermont. He’s a gentle giant, sweet in every cell, who loves nothing more than making ephemeral art out of stones and water. But they both love books–novels and adventure stories, and poetry–and they are both consummate outdoorsmen. They meet on a freshman orientation backpack trip in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and they outstrip the group by miles as they talk excitedly about adventure stories and wild country. They discover that they are not at all literary snobs: they both adore Louis L’Amour westerns.

They become fast friends. What makes their friendship work, aside from these shared loves, is that they complement each other: Wynn expects the best from people, Jack is more skeptical and wary. And sometimes one has more appetite for risk, sometimes the other. How those traits play out is crucial to the story in The River.

The ill-fated river trip they plan as a leisurely break turns sinister, as they face not only unbelievable forces of weather and wildfire, but the possibility of being tracked by a would-be murderer. It is during this trip that Wynn discovers a different side of Jack, one that frightens him. What can you tell us about that, without giving the story away?

Jack is a hunter. He grew up facing extremes of weather in the rugged mountains of western Colorado. He spent weeks at a time in on horseback. He also suffered a hard personal tragedy when very young, and it affirmed his reticence, and gave him a certain wariness toward the vanities of humans, especially his own. He is tough to the bone. What Wynn discovers is that Jack is willing to protect their little party at all costs, without hesitation. That he is a warrior. That discovery can be scary.

Your description of the wildfire they battled is described in amazing detail. How were you able to write about this so realistically?

Years ago, when I was living in Paonia, Colorado, I stepped outside and saw a plume of smoke rising out of the junipers on the north side of the valley. I thought it looked very close to my friends’ place. I threw a shovel and a chainsaw in the back of the truck and raced up there.

By the time I got up the rough dirt track to the house there was a wall of dark smoke upwind. A volunteer fire truck was already there. We began cutting trees around the house, shoveling out flames where sparks landed, while Chuck and Jane shuttled valuables to their cars. Suddenly a stiff gust blew through and we heard trees exploding and the wall of smoke became flame. The firemen cut their hoses and yelled “Outta here!” I’ll never forget bumping down the track at the head of a line of vehicles with a cat doing crazy laps in the cab and smoke and sparks and flames crossing the road. We got down to a big irrigation canal where all the police and first responders had gathered, and I looked back. Ninety seconds later the fire swept the whole hillside. It was that close. It made a deep impression on me.

I also called Jim Mason, a fire chief and wildland firefighter in Glenwood Springs, who had battled some of the deadliest wildfires in our history, and he was invaluable in providing details, and in helping me understand some of the science of fire.

What’s your next literary “adventure”?

I just finished a very different novel called The Orchard. It’s about a young woman and her 8- year-old daughter who move to an orchard in southern Vermont. The woman, Hayley, is a towering translator of a famous Tang Dynasty poet named Li Xue. The book is about mothers and daughters, and language, and the power of place and of storytelling. I’m very excited about it.

Lemuria has selected Peter Heller’s The River as its April 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

New native son battles enemies, self in ‘Cemetery Road’ by Greg Iles

By Guest Author

On March 14, 2019

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10)

The “Natchez Burning trilogy” cemented Greg Iles’ place in the top tier of America’s literary blockbusters. The novels met with commercial and critical success, spanning 2,000-plus pages of adrenaline-spiked prose, and the third, Mississippi Blood, debuted at the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
From that pinnacle, what next? Where to turn after Penn Cage has dragged every skeleton out of Natchez’ historical closet?

Apparently, Iles decided to get out of town.

His newest, Cemetery Road, is set in the fictional town of Bienville, seat of Tenisaw County on the Mississippi and a piece up the road from Natchez. Like many river towns, Bienville has seen its glory days come and go; the town is shrinking from “a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease.” That is, until a group of local big shots lure a Chinese paper corporation to town. Their proposed mill will bring billions of dollars to the area and give Bienville a shot at a new life.

But—as happens in Iles’ work—history complicates the present. The site designated for the prospective mill lies atop a trove of Native American artifacts dating back centuries. The moral imperative to preserve these relics butts up against civic progress and private greed. Soon the tension erupts into bitter—and murderous—conflict.

Watching it all come to a boil is Marshall McEwan, a native son who has achieved fame as a Washington journalist but returned home to reconcile with his dying father, owner of The Watchman, Bienville’s newspaper. Soon Marshall is investigating the story of his career—a web of corruption more intricate than any he saw in D.C., right in the sleepy small town of his youth.

Turns out the old boys of Bienville are a good deal more organized and nefarious than Marshall or his newsman father ever thought. Though everything is kept “smooth on the surface, in the Southern tradition,” the Bienville Poker Club has been calling the shots in town since Reconstruction. The Club fully intends for the paper mill to become a reality, no matter the collateral damage. And they have augmented their post-Confederate ranks with ties to the New Jersey mob, courtesy of the town’s riverboat casino. The old boys now have connections to made guys.

Iles dials the tension up higher. Marshall is not long back in his hometown before he runs into his first love, Jet, and begins an affair with her. That Jet is now married to Paul Matheson, a classmate of them both and Marshall’s childhood friend, only deepens the betrayal. And the cost of discovery is high: Paul is a Special Ops veteran of the Middle East conflict and heir apparent to his father’s seat in the Poker Club.

It is impossible to tell more without revealing secrets of an intricate plot where the intrigue is as thick as kudzu and grows at twice the speed. Iles works tension into each page, a threat materializing from every quarter as Marshall digs deeper into the Club’s dealings and his own past. Iles seems to have learned how to squeeze all the menace and suspense of his Natchez trilogy into a single, standalone novel.

But what is best to see in Cemetery Road is that while Iles may have moved on from Natchez, he has retained the melancholic tone and long view of history that made his trilogy an important meditation on Southern history. “I think it’s probably best to leave the past in the past,” Marshall says in a rare moment of surrender. To which an older, wiser Mississippian replies, “If only we could.”

Novelist Matthew Guinn is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University, and the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe.

Lemuria has selected Cemetery Road as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

A life spared amid a reign of terror in Lovejoy Boteler’s ‘Crooked Snake’

By Guest Author

On March 13, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Southern History

By Charlie Spillers. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10)

“I don’t know how many people were kidnapped in Mississippi in 1968, but I was one of them,” writes author Lovejoy Boteler in the first sentence of the Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard. Kidnapped at 18 by murderous escaped convicts, Boteler pens a fascinating account of the life and crimes of one of his kidnappers, Albert Lepard. In this remarkable book the author puts readers in the minds of convicts, lawmen, and dozens of victims. He takes us along on desperate escapes, intense manhunts, and lives scarred by crimes Lepard committed.

Sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of an elderly woman, Albert Lepard escaped from prison six times in 14 years. During one of those escapes, Lepard kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, stuck a gun in his ribs, and forced him to drive Lepard and another escaped convict from Grenada to Memphis. During the trip, young Botelor’s quick thinking averted an armed robbery and possibly another murder.

In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded murderer’s life using historical records and personal interviews with ex-convicts who ran with Lepard, family members who sheltered the fugitive during his escapes, the lawmen who hunted him, and the people he victimized.

When he conducted interviews for the book Boteler established rapport with fellow victims and elicited their chilling stories. They are bound by common horror and experiences with the same cold-blooded killer. John Nellum was ten years old when Lepard and two other escaped convicts broke into his home, tied up John, his 12-year old brother and their father, and held them for several hours. Lying face down with his hands bound, John was sure he was going to die. His heart felt like it would leap out of his chest as Lepard pressed the barrel of a rifle against the father’s head.

“I got ninety-nine years and one dark Sunday and it won’t make a damn bit of difference to me if I blow your head off right now,” Lepard declared as he placed his finger on the trigger.

Decades later, John still struggles with the memory of being tied up when he was ten. “What a crapshoot,” the author thought after interviewing John. “His psyche had been indelibly seared at the tender age of ten. At least I had been eighteen when I met Lepard.” Like 10-year old John Nellum, the then 18-year old Boteler faced pure evil and thought he was going to die during his intense encounter with Lepard.

Seventy-four year old Mary Young was not so fortunate. Lepard and Joe Edwards went to her home where they tied and blindfolded her. They pistol-whipped her and demanded she tell them where money was hidden in the house. When she refused to talk, Lepard went into a blind fury. He grabbed a claw hammer, swung it wildly and hit her in the head. They threw her on a bed, still tied and blindfolded. She was gagged but they could hear her moans. After finding money, they poured kerosene on Mary and the bed, and lit it. Lepard and Edwards walked out and coldly counted their loot while the house was consumed by flames and Mary Young burned to death.

The author was seared by his own experiences while crammed together with Lepard and another convict in the cab of a pickup truck during that long trip to Memphis. He was sure he was going to die. Lepard not only spared his life, but performed a small act of kindness when they let him go. Boteler always wondered why Lepard let him live. Through his research, the author finally uncovered the likely reason and reveals it on the last page of the book.

Joe Edwards was convicted with Lepard of the murder of Mary Young. Writing of Edwards, who became a preacher, Boteler says, “In old age, he is a man who struggles with a past he cannot change–one that holds him fast and won’t let go.” The same is true for the author who has spent a lifetime living with a terrifying experience and wondering why a murderer spared him. Readers can be thankful it inspired him to write this compelling book.

Charlie Spillers is the bestselling author of Confessions of An Undercover Agent: Adventures, Close Calls and the Toll of a Double Life and Whirlwind: A Frank Marsh Novel, an international thriller. Flashpoint, the sequel to Whirlwind will be released later this year.

Author Q & A with Ken Wells

By Guest Author

On March 10, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Southern Cooking, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10).

Louisiana native and journalist Ken Wells fondly recalls what he and his five brothers called “the gumbo life” in rural Bayou Black–a lifestyle lived close to the land and that meant he would not see the inside of a supermarket until he was nearly a teenager.

That phrase–Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou–is the title of his culinary memoir which not only details the history of gumbo, but recounts recent stories of its role in today’s culture and kitchens.

Wells left Bayou Black decades ago to travel around the world as a writer for the Wall Street Journal, and he has penned five novels of the Cajun bayous. Today, he lives in Chicago.

In Gumbo Life, you describe gumbo as “more than a delicious dish: it’s an attitude, a way of seeing the world.” What exactly is gumbo, and can you tell us briefly about its diverse history?

In Louisiana, gumbo’s predominant interpretation is a café-au-lait colored soup cooked with a roux–flour browned in butter, oil, or lard–and served over white rice. Typically, ingredients include chicken, sausage, shellfish, okra, and a combination of vegetables known as the Trinity: celery, bell pepper, and onion.

Food historians think gumbo is at least 250 years old, probably older. The first written mention dates to New Orleans in 1764, and shows a dish called “gumbo fillet” or what we now know as file’ gumbo, being cooked by West African slaves. The Africans arrived with word-of-mouth recipes for spicy okra-and-rice stews that are the likely template for the first gumbos. In fact, the Bantu dialect word for okra is “gombeau”–probably how gumbo got its name.

An 1804 account by a French journalist has gumbo being served at a party in the Cajun bayous of southeast Louisiana. That reference fueled the myth of gumbo as a Cajun invention. But the Canjuns have played a critical role in gumbo’s evolution, specifically the roux. The most compelling theory is that the Cajuns, using animal fats that were ubiquitous in colonial cooking–bear lard, in particular–deployed the roux with such skill and gusto that today it is rare to find gumbos cooked without a roux.

You state that when you and your five brothers were “living the gumbo life” in Louisiana in the late 1950s, gumbo was pretty much “a Cajun and Creole secret, a peasant dish.” Tell us about gumbo’s rise in popularity around the world.

When I left the bayous for graduate school in Missouri in 1975, nobody there had a clue what gumbo was. Two things–the breakout of Cajun/Zydeco music to a national and world stage and the post-’70s boom in Louisiana tourism–began to change that. The music fueled an interest in the culture that produced it and, hence, the food that nourished it. Gumbo is…the only truly indigenous regional cuisine in all of America; not just a dish but a style and a way of cooking.

Ken Wells

Gumbo has traveled in part because of what I call the Cajun Obligation. My momma not only taught me to cook gumbo, but taught me that if you cook gumbo, you are required to share the love.

As a journalist, I’ve traveled over much of the world. I’ve cooked gumbo for friends in London; Sydney, Australia; and Cape Town, South Africa. The reviews are always the same: “How can anything be this good? Can you show me how to cook it?” I came to realize I was only the vessel stirring the roux. It’s what I call the Gumbo Effect: the dish itself. Gumbo, if you just stick to the plan with love and attention, transforms itself into food magic.

Gumbo Life is a deeply personal family story about growing up in a rural Louisiana setting where food and family were paramount. Living in points around the world since then (and Chicago now), and looking back, is it almost hard to believe how different life was for you then, compared to now?

I feel blessed. When we moved to our little farm on the banks of Bayou Black in 1957, I felt the place was happily stranded in the previous century. My dad worked for a large sugarcane-farming operation that still kept a mule lot–not entirely trusting all the plowing to tractors. My brothers and I learned to swim in the bayou. We got our water from a cypress cistern. The sugar company owned thousands of acres of marshland, fields, and woodlands that we were free to roam, hunt, trap, and fish. My brothers and I were in the 4-H Club and raised chickens and pigs that we entered in the annual 4-H Club fair–and harvested for the pot.

Food was central. My mom cooked Cajun–not just gumbo but dishes such as sauce piquant and court-bouillon with ingredients like snapping turtle and redfish that we harvested ourselves. We ate well! We grew a huge garden. I don’t think I set foot in a supermarket until I was 12 or 13 years old. That’s because there weren’t any near-by.

You book is also a history of one of Louisiana’s greatest cultural and culinary offerings to the world, along with glimpses of current gumbo tales that emphasize its adaptability–not to mention that you’ve included a glossary of regional and culinary terms, a map of the Gumbo Belt and 10 recipes! What did it mean to you personally to write this “culinary memoir”?

I obviously love my gumbo and I felt a deep exploration of its roots and iterations was a good way to tell the wider story of our singular, food-centric culture. I say “our” even though I have not lived in the Gumbo Belt since 1975, my journalism career having compelled me to living in big cities far away. I think that living away has helped me see my roots in a way that I might not have seen them had I stayed.

I have two grown daughters who, now in their 30s, love Dad’s gumbo as much as I loved my mother’s. But their childhoods could not have been more different than mine. We moved among cosmopolitan cities, lived abroad, traveled widely. They will never lead the gumbo life as I lived it and so in a way my book was written for them–to remind them of their connections to a place where our roots run so deep.

Ken Wells will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 13, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Gumbo Life. Lemuria has chosen Gumbo Life as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Greg Iles

By Guest Author

On March 3, 2019

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 3). Click here to read this article on the Clarion-Ledger’s website.

In his first novel since the acclaimed Natchez Burning trilogy, Mississippian Greg Iles offers readers a crime thriller with a fresh setting, new characters and a whole new set of troubles–topped off with a bundle of family secrets that lead to another shocking Iles ending.

Cemetery Road introduces Marshall McEwan–a successful Washington, D.C. journalist returning to his hometown of fictional Bienville, Mississippi, to run the family’s newspaper in the wake of his father’s illness. In a story of love, betrayal, corruption, and, of course, murder, the bonds of family and romantic interests are tested beyond a breaking point–all keeping McEwan a very busy man.

The author of 15 New York Times bestsellers, Iles has seen his novels made into films and published in more than 35 countries. He is a longtime member of the “lit-rock” group The Rock Bottom Remainders, and lives in Natchez with his wife and has three children.

What was it like switching gears and sitting down to write your first novel since the Penn Cage trilogy?

Greg Iles

I really needed a break from the travails of the Cage family, and from the worst years of the civil rights struggle. My readers probably do, too. The Natchez Burning trilogy took me the better part of 10 years to write, and I nearly died (in a serious car accident) in 2011 while trying to finish the first volume.

Cemetery Road is just as intense as the trilogy in some ways, but it focuses less on race, and more on the secrets hidden in marriages and extended families. The secret at the heart of this book is pretty shocking, I think, but I don’t want to say more than that.

The plot of Cemetery Road is filled with danger, crime and surprises–not to mention many regrettable relationships–in the fictitious river town of Bienville, with main character Marshall McEwen in the thick of it. How would you describe his personality (given his past tragedies and his relationship with his father), and the tumultuous events he faces on a daily basis?

As for Marshall McEwan, I think a lot of people can relate to him. He left the small town he grew up in, worked hard for success and fame, yet now he must return home to care for a dying father he’s barely spoken to in 30 years.

That’s the chief difference between Marshall and Penn Cage (in the Natchez Burning trilogy). Penn and Tom Cage loved and respected each other all their lives, but Marshall and his father were driven apart by a family tragedy when Marshall was only 14. Marshall’s father blames him for that tragedy–unfairly. I think.

Marshall returns to Mississippi more to help his mother than to care for his father, but I think we want father and son to find a way to reconcile before the end, because Marshall got a lot of his strength and stubbornness from his dad. And he needs every bit of it to handle the SOBs he faces in Cemetery Road.

Are there any threads of truth (from Mississippi or elsewhere) that were the basis for the goings-on of the Bienville group known as the Poker Club in Cemetery Road?

The Bienville Poker Club absolutely grew out of stories I heard as a boy growing up in Natchez, and from talking to Mississippians from many walks of life. The people who run small Southern towns are rarely those in the official power structure. Always been that way, and probably always will be.

As Robert Penn Warren knew, corruption is deeply ingrained in our lives, even in the human spirit. And in all politics, sadly… money talks louder than anything else.

Is it possible that we will hear from Marshall McEwan again? Perhaps a sequel or a brand new direction for McEwan. Or, can you tell us of any other ideas you may be working on for your next book?

You may well hear from Marshall again. I’ve been working behind the scenes in Mississippi politics for about three years, and that’s given me some great ideas. I also have a very twisty noir story that’s perfect for Marshall and for Nadine Sullivan, another new character in Cemetery Road.

Another ambitious book tour has claimed your schedule for the month of March–with 27 stops in 19 days!–and once again with the kickoff in Mississippi cities. Tell me about the tour.

I’m always conflicted about my book tours. I like staying home on my country place. Racing to two or three cities a day for a month will wear you out quick. But it’s the only time I get out among my readers, and I always have some wonderful experiences out there. Some people travel a long way to get to my book signings, and I try to give them a great talk, as well as visit with them a bit.

Greg Iles will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, March 5, at 3:30 p.m. to sign copies of Cemetery Road. The reading will begin at 5:30 p.m. Lemuria has selected Cemetery Road as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Haunting Mississippi images in Florence Mars’ ‘Mississippi Witness’

By Guest Author

On February 25, 2019

In African-American, Civil Rights, Photography, Southern History

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 24)

Many recall Florence Mars from her groundbreaking book Witness in Philadelphia, her personal account of the upheaval that surrounded her native Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the wake of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964.

But perhaps little known until now with the publication of Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars, it’s revealed that Mars was a talented photographer, as well.

James T. Campbell, a Stanford University professor, writes in an excellent introduction to the photos that Mars only started photographing her surroundings after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing separate but equal schools. Mars writes that she recognized that the world in which she was living was soon to be a thing of the past and wanted to capture it on film.

The photos, curated by Elaine Owens, recently retired from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, were mostly taken from 1954 to 1964.

Mars was not a professional photographer, though she exhibits mastery of the form in her work. Rather, she was born into relative wealth in Neshoba County, her family owning thousands of acres of land, a livestock auction, and a mercantile business in the county seat.

Like Eudora Welty, a writer who also picked up a camera and chronicled the people, places and things around her during the Depression two decades before, she applied her own knowledge and interests to her work. And, like Welty, the photos were published in definitive form only years after they were taken.

As Campbell writes, the “similarities in their circumstances and sensibilities are obvious. Single white women, they lived at once inside and outside the confines of the conservative, racist, patriarchal society. Solitary by nature, both understood the yearning for connection. Acutely observant, both saw the wonder in ordinary life, the aching beauty that survived the ugliness.”

Many of the photos are simply haunting. While most are portraits without name, background or explanation, they are environmental in that the elements of the photos tell a great deal—perhaps more than simple words can tell.

For example, one shows a young black girl facing the camera in a cotton field where the stalks tower over her. At her feet, dragged behind, is a cavernous cotton sack filled to near bursting by the bolls she has picked, perhaps weighing as much as herself. The expression on her face is at once sad and defiant, resigned, proud and beaten. It is the face of a child living the life of a hardworking adult, too young to be careworn, too old to be that of a child.

In another, a young black woman is washing clothes in a galvanized tub, her hands gnarled by the work, her face a portrait in stoicism, scrubbing out dirt.

Others include:

White jurors taking a break in the Emmett Till trial, which Mars attended. Their casual, exasperated looks don’t exactly telegraph a fair hearing.
A white performer in grinning black face entertaining lounging white farmers in overalls at the stockyard at Philadelphia.
A young black woman washing naked white children on a porch at the Neshoba County Fair, 1955. In the notes section at the end of the book, the authors relate that Mars had penciled a caption on the back of the print: “Certain things are taken to be self-evident.”

Mars, Campbell writes, stopped taking photos after the civil rights workers were killed, as “the tense atmosphere made photography difficult.” In its stead, Mars confided “writing took over from the photography in the middle of my life.”

Her Witness in Philadelphia was published in 1977. She died in 2006.

Mars’ photographs are as she intended, an enduring testament to a time in Mississippi long gone. Printed on heavy stock in a large format, they are a rare treasure.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, February 27, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of and discuss Mississippi Witness.

Author Q & A with Adam Makos

By Guest Author

On February 24, 2019

In History, War

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 24). Click here to read this article on the Clarion-Ledger’s website.

It was Adam Makos’ grandfathers’ service in World War II that inspired a career for their grandson, leading to Makos’ deep interest in the military and the American heroes whose stories he feels is his duty to tell.

The author’s newest book, Spearhead: An American Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II, chronicles not only the surreal story of one young tank gunner’s epic battle in Germany, but that soldier’s deliverance from its trauma that would come some 70 years later.

Having earned a spot in what has been called “the top ranks of military writers,” Makos’ previous works include New York Times bestseller A Higher Call and the widely acclaimed Devotion.

Today he lives in Denver.

Your books have highlighted tales of historical military heroes whose stories would have otherwise gone unheard by the American public. Why has this pursuit been a such a passion for you personally?

I love searching for untold stories because it gives my readers a chance to see a new side of World War II, or to meet a new hero, like watching a movie for the first time.

To me, it’s also about justice. To think that some young man risked his life for us, all those years ago, or maybe he made the ultimate sacrifice and bled out on some European battlefield, as one of the heroes of Spearhead actually did, I don’t think it’s right for us to ever forget their names.

How did you find out about Clarence Smoyer, a U.S. Army corporal and tank gunner from Pennsylvania coal country who served in World War II?

Adam Makos

I truly feel I’m “led” to some of these stories, in the spookiest ways. A college buddy told me about Clarence, a quiet hero from his hometown. So one day in 2012, I went up to Clarence’s brick row house and knocked on the door. He welcomed me inside, pulled up a chair at the kitchen table and we talked for a bit before he stunned me with a revelation when he asked, “Would you like to see a letter from the German I fought against?” He was in touch with his former enemy.

Smoyer’s defining moment of the war was a dramatic showdown in Cologne, Germany, between the newfangled American M-26 Pershing “Super Tank” he commanded and the fiercely infamous German Panther tank–a 1945 duel that was, almost unbelievably, captured on film. What was it about his story that compelled you to meticulously research and document it in Spearhead?

Before I met him, I knew about Clarence’s remarkable, Wild West-style tank duel in the street of Cologne. It’s considered one of the most famous actions of World War II, because it was caught on film. Now, anyone can watch it with the click of a mouse button.

But even putting the reader into the middle of that duel, two tanks quick-drawing on each other, 75 yards apart, wasn’t enough to fill a book. It was the deeper, human story that drew me to write Spearhead. Our World War II tank crewmen faced a terrible reality every time they started their engines.

The first tank always gets hit.

That was the nature of tank combat on the Western Front in early 1945. The Germans were on the defense; they could dig in and wait for our guys to come over the hill or around the bend. They could wait to fire until the first American tank rolled into their crosshairs.

So to go first took guts, because that guy was probably going to get hit. When Clarence was assigned the Pershing, a deadly new role fell to him: now, his tank would go first, in every battle.

So I asked myself: Why would any man saddle up for that? Why did Clarence? And the answer was quite profound. He did it to keep his buddies safe. He told himself: We have the biggest gun, we belong out front.

You recount Smoyer’s disturbing decades-long bout with PTSD, and how he finally decided to face it. Explain how this unlikely outcome (of meeting his former enemy in person in their later years) was such a defining chapter in his life.

Like many veterans, Clarence came home and buttoned-up his memories of the war and never aired out the troubling things he’d seen.

So, in his later years, when the memories resurfaced, there was no one left to talk with–all of the men from his crew had passed. There was just one man he could turn to, who had seen the same horrors in Cologne, but from the other end of the street. This man had been his enemy (in the tank duel), Gustav Schaefer.

When Clarence returned to Cologne in 2013 and sat down to talk with Gustav, his former enemy proved to be his saving grace. Talking. It’s what helped him put his ghosts to rest. And he emerged from the ordeal with a new friend. He and Gustav called each other war buddies. They used to exchange Christmas cards and letters. They even Skyped on the computer, talking face to face.

It’s a one in a million chance that they’d have found each other, 70 years after they fought. Then to have actually met, with Clarence flying across the ocean and Gustav driving from northern Germany. And then for them to become inseparable friends? You couldn’t script a better ending to a war story.

Any plans for your next book?

I do have a new World War II book in the works, likely the last I’ll write while veterans are alive to share their stories. For now, however, I’m just enjoying my time celebrating the heroes of Spearhead.

Clarence is 95. Buck Marsh, the GI who used to ride into battle on Clarence’s tank, he’s 95, and he’s coming with me to Jackson, to our signing at Lemuria Books on March 1. For now, I just want to throw a big party for these heroes, to let people meet them and shake their hands, and realize how lucky we are to still have them, 75 years later.

Adam Makos (and Buck Marsh) will be at Lemuria on Friday, March 1, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Spearhead. Lemuria has chosen Spearhead as its February 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

‘Just Trying to Have School’ records how students, teachers, administrators experienced desegregation

By Guest Author

On February 18, 2019

In Civil Rights, Southern History

By Steve Yates. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 17)

“You realize you are digging up some old bones,” Leon Johnson, one of the first black students to integrate DeKalb High School in Kemper County, told author James H. Adams.

Both James and his coauthor Natalie G. Adams could identify with this sentiment firsthand. They, too, had experienced desegregation 45 years before Johnson closed a phone call with those fitting words. James and Natalie kept digging, and the result is the sweeping history Just Trying to Have School: The Struggle for Desegregation in Mississippi.

After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, no state fought longer or harder to preserve segregated schools than Mississippi.

“We’ll go on as always.” “It won’t affect us.” “Let them enforce it.” The authors glean these quotes that rolled in defiance from the tongues of superintendents that year in Mississippi.

This massive resistance came to a crashing halt in October 1969 when the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Holmes Board of Education that “the obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools.”

Over seven years the authors interviewed more than one hundred parents, teachers, students, principals, superintendents, and school board members who did the heavy lifting in what the authors call “one of the most significant social and educational changes in the twentieth century.”

Thirty of the thirty-three Mississippi districts named in the 1969 case were ordered to open as desegregated schools after Christmas break. With little guidance from state officials and no formal training or experience in effective school desegregation processes, ordinary people were thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Before this book, their stories were largely ignored in desegregation literature.

The tasks the authors described proved arduous and complex. How were bus routes determined? Who lost their position as principal? Who was assigned—students and teachers—to what classes?

Without losing sight of the important larger forces in precipitating social change, the authors shift attention to how the daily work of “just trying to have school” helped shape the contours of desegregation in communities still living with the decisions made fifty years ago.

Natalie G. Adams is director of New College and professor of social and cultural studies in education at the University of Alabama. She is co-author of Cheerleader! An American Icon and co-editor of Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between. James H. Adams is professor of instructional systems and workforce development at Mississippi State University. He has published articles in the Journal of Career and Technical Education, the International Journal of Instructional Media, the Journal of Interactive Learning Research, and the Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies.

The thorough authors provide chapters that cover almost every aspect of public-school life. There are chapters on black parents, superintendents, principals and local enforcement, teachers, sports, and extracurricular life such as dances, or the lack thereof. The authors include two telling chapters on resistance and protest and on what they call resistance through exodus in the flight of white families to private academies.

And there is an invaluable and necessary chapter on lessons learned. Was it a success? The authors hear from multiple authorities that that measure is relative to the metrics applied and the context of the narrative demanded. But this book, reliant above all on oral history, that great, leavening counternarrative, yields unforgettable quotes.

The authors cite Joy Tyner, principal at Clinton’s Northside elementary: “I love the fact that I can walk down the hall and look into any class and it looks like Mississippi.”

Steve Yates lives in Flowood and is the author of the novels The Legend of the Albino Farm, Morkan’s Quarry, and The Teeth of the Souls.

Natalie Adams will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “A Spotlight on Mississippi Civil Rights” panel at 12:00 p.m. at the State Capitol Room 201 A.

Author Q & A with Maurice Carlos Ruffin

By Guest Author

On February 17, 2019

In African-American, Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (February 17). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

New Orleans native Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel is a darkly thought-provoking satire on race in America that is based on one African-American man’s plan to spare his teenage son from racial disparities he and his own father have endured–thanks to a new medical procedure that can change his biracial son’s skin white.

We Cast a Shadow has been called “a surrealistic satire about identity, race, and family relations” with a plot that, though many will find outrageous, will make readers pause and think.

An award-winning writer, Ruffin has earned an Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. His work has been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, and others.

He is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and is a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

In We Cast a Shadow, a well-intentioned and unnamed father of the future–a hardworking, goal-oriented black attorney–works to secure enough wealth to have his son Nigel undergo a “demelanization” procedure to change the teenager’s skin to white, thereby promising his child a brighter future. How did you develop this story idea, and why?

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

I thought about all the ways we’ve tried to push against racism in our history as a nation. We’ve protested, fought the Civil War, passed laws, and, yet, we still deal with the problem today.

The narrator wants to protect his son, and he wants to do it in a way that is foolproof and effective. He reckons that no one will bother his son if he’s white! Of course, we see celebrities alter themselves all the time to gain notoriety: skin tanning, liposuction, rhinoplasty, etc. I was thinking about what would happen once we can change virtually any part of our bodies. It’s not so far-fetched now that we can genetically modify babies in the womb!

It’s clear throughout the story that Nigel and his mother are against the idea of having the procedure done, but the father is adamant. In the end, three lives are changed forever–each of their destinies a thought-provoking surprise. What lessons can readers learn from this anonymous dad’s sobering tale?

One lesson is that racism affects us all. It doesn’t matter your race, gender, or age. None of us are really safe until all of us are. Another lesson is that none of us should be too arrogant about our beliefs. Both parents are sure their approach is right. But what if both are right and wrong at the same time? A bit of humility might go a long way to ultimately ending racism and the damage we do to ourselves and our families.

The word “shadow” is used frequently in the book, as a noun, verb or adjective. Tell me about the title of the book. Was it based on the novelist E.M. Forster’s quote from A Room with a View? “We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place . . . because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm . . . and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

I wasn’t consciously aware of the Forster quote! I was thinking of Kanye West’s song “All of the Lights.” In the video for the song we see that he’s trying to protect his daughter from the dangers of their rough neighborhood. With my narrator, he wants his son to have every possible opportunity that any American child should have. He wants him to see “all of the lights.” I flipped that idea on its head to create the title. They are caught in the shadows.

A character in the book told the narrator that race was “just an idea,” and said, “We’ve got to ignore race to transcend it.” Can you explain what this means, and do you agree?

It’s an old idea. People often say they don’t see race, as if that’s a good thing. However, if you don’t see race, then you’ll never understand how policies related to housing, policing, health, education, economics, etc. more negatively affect black people and other people of color.

Racism is a sickness. Imagine how terrible it would be if your daughter had diabetes and you said, “I don’t see diabetes!” That child would not do well with you serving her waffles with syrup each morning. If there is a solution to America’s racism problem, it lies in turning off the systems that automatically disenfranchise people every day. But you can’t turn off the systems if you refuse to see them.

Do you see another novel in your future soon?

Absolutely. I’m writing it now. But don’t ask me what it’s about because I don’t know. I tend to throw everything into the pot until it smells right. So, I’ll keep working on it until it’s a dish I’d serve to people I care about.

I always rely on faith that the writing will work out. It usually does. It did with this novel!

Signed first edition copies copies of We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin are available at Lemuria’s online store.

Author: Guest Author (Page 10 of 28)

James Meredith’s ‘Three Years in Mississippi’ receives a much needed reprint

Author Q & A with Peter Heller

New native son battles enemies, self in ‘Cemetery Road’ by Greg Iles

A life spared amid a reign of terror in Lovejoy Boteler’s ‘Crooked Snake’

Author Q & A with Ken Wells

Author Q & A with Greg Iles

Haunting Mississippi images in Florence Mars’ ‘Mississippi Witness’

Author Q & A with Adam Makos

‘Just Trying to Have School’ records how students, teachers, administrators experienced desegregation

Author Q & A with Maurice Carlos Ruffin

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