Guest Author – Page 16 – Lemuria Books

Author: Guest Author (Page 16 of 28)

By DeMatt Harkins. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 8)

In September of 1984, Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It” topped the US singles chart, as Prince’s “Purple Rain” dominated the album chart. Meanwhile in Belgium, four recording sessions from The Great Depression were the order of the day. That month, scholars descended upon Liège University for the International Conference on Charley Patton. The occasion marked the 50th anniversary of the pivotal Mississippi Blues legend’s passing.

Charley Patton: Voice of the Mississippi Delta compiles nine presentation transcriptions from that forum. Each piece, some revised or amended, explores the man who brought us “Pony Blues,” and “High Water Everywhere,” as well as his ripple effects.

Seven years after the conference, while attending a proper headstone dedication in Holly Ridge, Mississippi, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty compared Patton’s body of work to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Significantly, Charley Patton is the earliest Delta Blues musician with a known history.

Born in Bolton, Mississippi, Charley Patton moved with his family to the atypically egalitarian Dockery Farms near Drew. In the Delta, he excelled as a prolific musician, master showman, and regional celebrity. Although only one photo exists of a sharply appointed Patton, he recorded 71 songs from 1929 to 1934.

These songs were heard and seen by the Mississippians who migrated north forging the first guard of Chicago Blues. Expats Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James would later leave their mark on yet a younger generation, domestically and abroad. The direct line of influence from Charley Patton is evident, and the impact is profound. Hence, the legion at Liège.

Robert Sacré not only organized the Conference, but also edited Charley Patton: Voice of the Mississippi Delta. The professor at the host university opens with a primer of traditional African music’s journey to the 20th century South. Arnold Shaw follows with comparisons of Patton to fellow Blues stalwarts, Bukka White, Son House, and Robert Johnson. The common thread being self-exploration. Focusing on the individual and not the collective was brand new with post-emancipation African American music.

University of Memphis’ David Evans’ piece provides a thorough Patton biography, replete with updates culled from interviews conducted since 1984. He thoughtfully surveys Patton’s life, recordings, spirituality, relationships, and identity. Evans seeks to understand how a Blues musician simultaneously stayed a juke joint draw while remaining the go-to party act for adults and children, black or white. From there a second Liège professor, Daniel Droixhe, analyzes the mechanics of the famous cannon through Patton’s chord and lyrical structure.

Pivoting to the effect of Patton’s music, noted Louisiana music author John Broven demonstrates how Delta Blues traveled south to Baton Rouge. Similarly, through 16 songs, Mike Rowe traces the progression of Blues from an acoustic Delta style to an electric Chicago style.

Having befriended Howlin’ Wolf in the late 1960s, Chicago journalist Dick Shurman recalls the last years of a musician who genuinely studied at the feet of Charley Patton. An invaluable viewpoint follows from Luther Allison. Born in Magnolia, Arkansas, he moved to Chicago at age 14, eventually joining the Chicago Blues scene, alongside Jimmy Reed, Freddie King, and Little Walter.

Providing a current assessment of Chicago music (in 1984), Living Blues magazine co-founder and editor Jim O’Neal, who is coming to this year’s Mississippi Book Festival, addressed the conference. At that time, Koko Taylor, Little Milton, and James Cotton ruled the roost. While Mississippi still influenced Chicago, O’Neal points out that it was now a two-way street of artistic inspiration.

As Evans suggests in the book’s contemporary conclusion, a lot has evolved within blues since 1984. Yet at the same time, different iterations and artists experience revivals on a cyclical basis, revealing the style’s long history. Point being, Charley Patton maintains as much relevance today as he did thirty and eighty years ago.

DeMatt Harkins of Jackson enjoys flipping pancakes and records with his wife and daughter.

Author Q & A with Sonny Brewer about William Gay

By Guest Author

On July 9, 2018

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 8)

The legacy of William Gay–who became an iconic Southern Gothic writer after beginning his career as a published novelist in his late 50s–is alive and well with the posthumous release of one of his last novels, The Lost Country.

Fortunately for his fans, Gay’s longtime friend, editor, and road trip buddy, Sonny Brewer of Fairhope, Alabama, is taking the new book on tour himself.

True to Gay’s memorable style, The Lost Country is classic Gothic at its best: downtrodden characters who continue to suffer defeats, blended with a show of violence and a haunting sense of sadness as they struggle for redemption.

After the publication of his prize-winning first novel, The Long Home in 1999, Gay went on to add Provinces of Night, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Wittgenstein’s Lolita, and Twilight to his list of successes–after spending the previous four decades as a construction worker, house painter, factory worker, and TV salesman. He died of an apparent heart attack in 2012.

Sonny Brewer

Brewer, who wrote the foreword to The Lost Country, has spent much of his career in the roles of publisher and/or editor for a newspaper and a number of magazines and other publications, including the Eastern Shore Quarterly, The Southern Bard, and the Red Bluff Review.

His the author of four novels: The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac, and The Widow and the Tree. He also edited the widely known Blue Moon Café anthology series.

Tell me about your relationship with William Gay and how this book tour came about.

The publisher asked me if I would tour with this book and I said yes. The main reason for the request, I think, is because I was editor-in-chief at MacAdam-Cage Publishing at the time of William’s death, and the book was under contract there. A big search found only some 250 handwritten pages from the manuscript (which had been lost). I read those pages and had to deliver the disappointing news to the publisher that about half the book was missing.

So, my early involvement with the manuscript was part of why I was asked to help the book on the road. The other part was my friendship with the author. I write about how I met William in the foreword included in The Lost Country, so I’ll leave that bit for readers who get the book.

William Gay

But, I’ll say that I was instantly drawn to him in a way that had little to do with his writing, or his looming celebrity. He was a good man. Unassuming, honest, self-effacing, funny, intelligent, generous, and on and on. What was remarkable to me was how strongly and deeply he conveyed those qualities at a glance. It’s sort of like the old saw about judging the qualities of a man from the shoes he wears–which is inaccurate, but not ridiculous. Our faces and our eyes tell the story of who we are. And William was a good story.

Why was The Lost Country said to have been “anticipated for a decade”?

William first spoke publicly of the novel’s existence long before its release here in 2018. He read from its pages at literary conferences and at bookstores. But the whole manuscript was missing, and there’s a suggestion that he simply couldn’t remember where he’d put it for safekeeping. I can believe that because I recently failed to find a screenplay I had written. I had my sister looking and a friend looking. We never found the original. But a movie producer friend has a copy on his computer. I was too embarrassed to ask him for a long time.

Gay’s writings are noted for their trademark elements that make up true Southern Gothic writings, including mostly rural and often eccentric characters whose lives are trapped in poverty, crime, violence, and hopelessness. What, in your opinion, draws readers to Southern Gothic literature?

I was recently asked why I thought 125 readers bought Fifty Shades of Gray, and I said it must be good, on some level.

I think you want to know on what level are Southern Gothic stories and novels found to be a good read, and I would say for those readers they find settings, situations, circumstances, events, and characters that stir in them emotions of fear and love, of empathy and wonder, of curiosity, and find in the whole of their reading experience a common bond of humanity that wobbles along between the ditches of a highway taking us all someplace, to the same place of truth. And the company of these others, like us, that we find in these books helps to fend off loneliness.

In The Lost Country, set in rural Tennessee in 1955, main character Billy Edgewater seems to be a magnet for attracting troubles and aligning himself with the wrong people, as if his own bad decisions are not enough to add to his despair. It seems that Gay had a a gift for creating harsh stories yet offering them in a beautifully literary form. How would you describe his work, and his writing style?

I was a used bookseller, owned a store in Fairhope called Over the Transom Books, and I had some volumes that were collectible and pricey. When I found a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird worth several thousand dollars at a yard sale, a colleague in Florida told me there’s a distinction among antiquarian booksellers between scarce and rare. A scarce book comes along once in a few years. A rare book like the one I’d lucked up on comes along once in a lifetime. William Gay’s literary talent, his work, and his writing style, and, indeed, the kind of man he was, is like that. Rare.

Tell me about Gay’s personality, what motivated him, how he became so interested in the Southern Gothic genre, etc.

William told me about a middle school English teacher who “saw something” in him and handed him a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It was not a homework assignment. There would be no test. The book was a gift. And, by grace, something in that book plumbed the depths of his soul and discovered there a gift in him.

He told me that he read twice, before he turned 14, that 544-page book. Had he found in Eugene Gant a version of himself? Had William found in Wolfe’s dense prose writing that he believed he wanted to imitate? I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that. But William, it was apparent, did fall in love with words, their rhythm, their cadence, their flow, and had from reading an experience that electrified him and drove him to an addiction for the masterworks of Southern writers. And when he set his own pen to paper he became able to match them word for word in power and beauty.

I read to William a paragraph from his novel The Long Home and asked him about how long it took him to compose those sentences that staggered me when I first read them. He told me only as long as it took for him to write them down longhand because he had already crafted that paragraph and others during an eight-hour day hanging Sheetrock. How he didn’t cut off a finger with a hawkbill knife, I don’t know. William also said he could do that because he had a photographic memory. Which gift he also employed in the recall of long passages from his favorite books and that he could quote word-for-word. William Gay was called to be a writer, pure and simple. And, pretty as a song, he answered.

Are there other “lost” stories or novels by William Gay that are in the works for publication?

William’s home was robbed and vandalized while he was out of town doing a reading someplace. He told me his music CDs and his movie DVDs were slung out the back door and down the hill behind his place. He told me a box of his writing was stolen, and it included a completed novel manuscript on the bloody days of the Natchez Trace.

I asked him did he think we’d someday get it back as a posthumously published novel. He said no. He told me that he didn’t write sequentially, and some times forgot to number loose pages. He might write a scene from the end of a book at the beginning of a manuscript, for instance. “Nobody could put it together but me,” he said. Plus, the thief could be easier named if it comes out of hiding. I expect, too, however, there could be clemency granted the perpetrator if fans of William Gay had verdicts to cast.

Gay’s talent as a writer has been compared to that of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. Why is that, and do you believe that is an accurate assessment of Gay’s work?

I don’t like questions about comparisons between William’s writings and these three authors. It’s not unfair to ask. But the answer is readily available to those who read the books of Faulkner, and O’Connor, and McCarthy, and William Gay, or, at least from such reading an answer is personally well-formulated. Anyone who hasn’t read these writers does not care what I have to say. Nor, in fact, do those who have enjoyed the work of these masters.

Anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to include?

It should be said, for the record, how William was utterly devoted to his kids. Laura, and Lee, and Chris and William, Jr. drew a damn fine daddy.

Sonny Brewer will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, July 10, at 5:00 to sign and discuss The Lost Country by William Gay.

Jon Meacham reviews national turmoil in ‘The Soul of America’

By Guest Author

On July 3, 2018

In Culture, History, Politics

By Andy Taggart. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 1)

Already a Pulitzer Prize-winning and presidential biographer, Jon Meacham just made an important additional contribution to the civic and cultural health of the nation.

In The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House), Meacham reminds us that intense political turmoil and dissent are not new to the American scene, and however out of sorts might seem the body politic today, we’re going to come through it just fine.

More timely encouragement can hardly be imagined.

Meacham has made much in his prior best sellers and frequent public appearances of the power of the presidency, for good and for ill. And his keen grasp of American history spread large–he’s currently a distinguished visiting professor of history at Vanderbilt University–instructs his optimism and sense of humor even in the face of what he perceives as poor leadership and bad policy decisions.

Mississippians were the beneficiaries of his good cheer at the 2016 Mississippi Book Festival held at our State Capitol, and he will be returning in August for the 2018 edition.

His newest work is a review of major times of turmoil in the nation’s history, spanning about a generation per chapter. Not surprisingly, the Civil War and its antecedents, aftermath and legacy is his starting point, but what follows might be less familiar reminders of the nation’s resiliency in the face of painful periods of political enmity.

Did you know that a group of wealthy Wall Street players in the early 1930s tried to recruit a retired general from the U.S. Marines to stage a coup against FDR?

Or that the New York Assembly refused to seat five newly elected legislators because they were members of the Socialist Party?

Do you remember ever knowing that an anarchist tried to blow up the home of the attorney general of the United States, but succeeded instead only in blasting himself into little pieces all over the AG’s front yard?

Throughout, Meacham sounds the drumbeat of the soul of America, by which he means the “collection of convictions, dispositions and sensitivities that shape [our] character and inform [our] conduct.”

While it is clear from his writings and many of his allusions that Meacham is a man of personal faith, it is not a religious reference he intends when he writes of the nation’s soul. It is, rather, his conviction, and the witness of history, that there is an inner core that has made America into America and Americans into Americans.

Meacham frankly acknowledges and clearly documents the times that our core has responded to its dark side, when the nation as a body acted primarily out of fear, anger, and or even hatred. but he also revels in the many, and more frequent, examples of how the core–the soul–of America responded to our better angels and moved forward into improved human relations and quality of life, and devotion to causes higher than self-interest.

Often, he notes, significant steps toward the light have resulted directly from the nation’s revulsion at seeing itself at its darkest.

We conducted the affairs of our nation for a century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence as if it were not imprinted on our corporate soul that all men are created equal. To our shame, and as Meacham painfully reminds us, we conducted the affairs of our state for yet another century still ignoring that soul-stirring promise of our nation’s founding.

Now, at the beginning of our third century as a state, may the soul that Jon Meacham also reminds us has responded so often and in so many ways to our better angels be the one that marks our identity as Americans and as Mississippians. And what better way to start on the path of a new century than with a new state flag?

Andy Taggart is CEO of the law firm of Taggart, Rimes and Graham, PLLC in Ridgeland and co-author of Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008 (University Press of Mississippi 2009). His public service has included roles as chief of staff to Gov. Kirk Fordice, president of the Madison County Board of Supervisors and the chairman of the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership.

Author Q & A with T.R. Hummer

By Guest Author

On July 2, 2018

In Poetry

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

For Mississippi native T.R. Hummer, 2018 is turning out to be a year of life and death–and beyond–speaking in literary terms.

The poet, editor and essayist who grew up on a farm near Macon now has 14 books of poetry and essays to his credit–two of which he added just this year and that challenge the reader to consider, on a deeper level, what happens at death and afterward.

Hummer’s 2018 release are Eon (the third volume in his LSU Press trilogy that includes Ephemeron, 2012, and Skandalon 2014); and After the Afterlife (Acre Books), which carries his trilogy on birth, life, and death to the next “logical” step: examining what consciousness comes even after one’s demise.

His honors include a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant in Poetry, the Richard Wright Award for Artistic Excellence, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and the Donald Justice Award in Poetry.

Hiw work has also been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The Literati Review, Paris Review, and Georgia Review.

Hummer holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi; and a doctorate degree from the University of Utah.

He has also enjoyed a long career teaching poetry and creative writing at several colleges and universities throughout the country, most recently at Arizona State University.

Hummer’s lengthy involvement with literary publishing includes serving as editor of Quarterly West magazine at the University of Utah; then poetry editor of Cimarron Review at Oklahoma State University; editor-in-chief of The Kenyon Review, later of the New England Review, and then The Georgia Review.

He now lives in Cold Spring, New York, and is married to the writer Elizabeth Cody Kimmel, about whom he advises: “Look her up; her track record is very impressive.”

Please tell me about your new release Eon–a study of death, the eternal, and what lies beyond. Why this topic, and why now? How does Eon fit into the context of the trilogy that includes Ephemeron and Skandalon.

T.R. (Terry) Hummer

Well, the eternal is always timely, don’t you think? Eon, though it works just as fine as a stand-alone volume, is as you say part of a trilogy of poetry volumes written over eight years or so.

The originating impulse was the birth of my child in 2002–the turn of the millennium, and also the year in which I was 50. The arrival of that child –my second; my first was born in 1977, so there is rather a large gap between my kids, which has interesting effects on such matters as sibling rivalry–had enormous emotional repercussions for me, which I expected going in.

I fell in love with her before she was born, as one will, but as soon as she was in the world, I also felt–to my surprise–that her arrival revealed to me more than anything else ever had the certainty of my own mortality. The title poem of the first volume is about that, and the whole trilogy unfolds from there.

So, it’s a natural part of the progression for the last volume–culminating when I was 60–should take on mortality head-on. Insofar as that is possible.

The cover of the book is a stunning work of imagery by German surreal artist Michael Hutter. How does the scene of this work fit with the poetry in Eon?

All three volumes in the trilogy have cover art by Michael Hutter–partly to provide visual unity among the three, but also because there is something about his work that, to my mind at least, suits the poetry perfectly. His painting is timeless, and yet it continually alludes to, and plays games with, tradition, both in terms of technique and of subject. It’s often very witty also–certainly the cover of Ephemeron has that quality, and of Skandalon also, through in a more muted way. The cover of Eon is the most somber of the three–appropriately, given the subject.

I’ve read that you are a jazz buff, a blues fan, and a saxophonist. With its distinctive rhythm and tempo, do you think your music style has rubbed off onto your writing style?

This a very complicated question. The relationship between music and language is vital, and mysterious. I have spent decades trying to unpack it, and really have no even scratched the surface. However, I can say two things briefly: first, that I found music a long time before I found poetry, but that the one led me to the other; and second, that the example of many musicians whose work I admired and admire taught me how to be an artist.

Growing up in the small town of Macon, in what ways would you say your Mississippi heritage influenced your writing?

Actually, I didn’t grow up in Macon. We were 15 miles outside Macon, and in those days 15 miles was a very long way. I grew up on a farm in a very remote part of the state–far more remote in the 1950s when I was a child than now.

On the one hand, I grew up among animals and plants and all the elemental things one encounters and learns about on a farm–especially on the kind of farm that was then, not a mono-crop agribusiness outlet, but a diverse subsistence farm that was an ecosystem and, in a sense, a society. The farm turned, in the 60s, to a different model and became a different place, but I was already leaving by then. So, I received that kind of education from the people and from the creatures who surrounded me. At the same time, I grew up in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s: the bad old days of Jim Crow and the arrival full-bore of the civil rights movement. It was a quiet rural life, but we also lived in a war zone. Everything was changing, and it had to change. Everything about our old life for good reason was dying and it had to die.

None of that is easy for a young person to digest, but there it was. There is an enormous amount more to say on the subject, too much for this format. I will leave it at this: growing up white in the Jim Crow South had consequences. Growing up black there had worse ones. I have spent decades trying to sort these matters out in my own mind, and being a poet is part of the process.

You have another new book out this year: After the Afterlife, from Acre Books. Why two in one year?

It’s really an accident of publishers’ schedules. Eon was finished several years ago, but took a long time to see print. The work in After the Afterlife is newer, but Acre Books worked faster, so here they both are.

The title After the Afterlife suggests a connection, a continuity, with Eon. Is that the case?

Definitely. The newer work is different, of course, partly because After the Afterlife arrives as sort of liberation from the labor of writing a trilogy. But it all comes from one mind, and I only have two and a half ideas total, so of course it’s connected.

During your years as a professor, if there a defining lesson or message about writing poetry that you have tried to instill in your students?

I retired a couple of years ago, so my relationship with the classroom has changed, but it hasn’t vanished. The one thing I always wanted students to understand about writing–and this is true of any kind of writing, not only the writing of poetry–is that it is always all about consciousness. No matter what the overt subject of style of a poem, its subject is consciousness, and its material is consciousness. A writer creates a score for consciousness, the way a composer creates a score for orchestra or jazz band. The reader’s job is to play the instrument of consciousness in response. Reading and writing obviously are complementary in that way, and both the writer and the readers have to be, dare I say, conscious of that fact.

T.R. Hummer will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Waxing Poetic with the Pros” poetry panel at 9:30 a.m. in the State Capitol Room 201 A.

Lauren Groff writes elegant, graceful prose again in ‘Florida’

By Guest Author

On June 26, 2018

In Fiction

By Courtney McCreary. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 24)

“Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning.” So begins “Yport,” the last story in Lauren Groff’s new collection.

In Florida, Groff, the New York Times-bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds, delivers a vivid character study. Characters include a homeless TA, a woman whose anxieties have driven away her best friend, a woman caring for her mother, and a young math whiz, but the stories tend to focus on women—mothers, in particular.

The stories are set in various locales—on an island in the middle of the ocean, a hunting cabin in a swamp, a house slammed by hurricane winds, and countries like France and Brazil, but the state of Florida ties them together. Many stories focus on nature, set outside on beaches or swamps, using the Florida backdrop to strengthen the story.

The setting feels both natural and supernatural, perfect for characters fighting internal and external storms. Characters face snakes, panthers, and the lonely, swampy heat of Florida. And then there are the hurricanes. Bad things happen during hurricanes, but these bad things show there is strength in survival.

In an effort to prove herself to her a husband, the mother in “The Midnight Zone” and her two sons are left alone in a hunting camp, without a car, miles from the closest neighbor. The first day goes well, full of fun and adventures for the mother and sons, but that evening she falls from a stool and hits her head on the ground. Groff captures perfectly the quiet, uncertain panic of surviving through the night.

But not every story in the collection feels so grounded in reality. “Dogs Go Wolf” feels very much like a fairy tale. Two sisters are abandoned by first their mother, and then their caretakers, when a storm hits the tiny island where they live. The girls survive together, the older leading the younger, through every obstacle: bad weather, lack of food and water, the swampy Florida heat, wild animals, and the angry dog who hates them, but they refuse to let starve.

Of all the disasters characters face in these stories, loneliness seems to take the greatest toll. In “Ghosts and Empties” a woman explores her neighborhood, escaping from the woman she fears she has become, noting the changes of those in the houses she passes as well as in herself.

The past often bears itself in the shape of lost family members, ghosts appearing to characters alone and disconnected, forcing them to face something they’ve run away from. Jude, the central character in “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” is left behind by his mother and loses his unforgiving, snake-wrangling father to one of the snakes he captured. Jude moves away from the Florida swamp, but returns to grow old in the same home he was raised. He is lost on the lake, and there, sunbattered and dehydrated, sees his father.

In a sort of twisted Christmas Carol, the main character of “Eyewall” is visited by the absent men in her life as she is hunkered down, trying to survive the night during a devastating hurricane. It becomes apparent quickly how deeply each one has affected her.

The stories in this collection are beautiful and wild. Characters are neglected, alone in perilous situations, focused on their pasts and the anxieties of their futures, but Groff tells their stories with an elegant grace.

Courtney McCreary is the Publicity and Promotions manager at the University Press of Mississippi. She lives and writes in Jackson, Mississippi.

Signed first editions of Florida by Lauren Groff are still available at Lemuria.

Author Q & A with Jane Hearn (A Past That Won’t Rest)

By Guest Author

On June 25, 2018

In Civil Rights, Photography

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 24)

Jane Hearn shares the remarkable legacy of photographer Jim Lucas, who began shooting scenes of 1960s civil rights activism while a college student at Millsaps, in A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.

The University Press of Mississippi publication features more than 100 never-before-seen photographs taken by Lucas from 1964 to 1968 that focus on four Mississippi historic events, with a fifth chapter putting recent national episodes of activist violence into historical perspective. These chapters are bolstered with narratives contributed by Dr. Howard Ball, Peter Edelman, Aram Goudsouzian, Robert E. Luckett Jr., Ellen B. Meacham, and Stanley Nelson, with a foreword by Charles L. Overby.

Tragically, Lucas was killed in a car accident in 1980, while still in his mid-30s. His striking black-and-white images have been edited and restored by Hearn, who was married to Lucas at the time.

Could you share some of your background that is relevant to your relationship with photographer Jim Lucas, to put A Past That Won’t Rest into context?

Jane Hearn

I grew up in the Fondren neighborhood where my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had a service station until 1960 on the corner of North State Street and Fondren Place. That’s back when Duling was our elementary school and all the kids in that neighborhood went to Bailey and Murrah. Our family all grew up in St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, so I am still quite attached to that area and love the resurgence that is happening there.

When my husband, Terry Stone, retired from state government about 10 years ago, we moved to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and have made that our new home. I had earlier retired from my interior design and furniture business, but continued my interest in arts advocacy and worked on projects at Tougaloo College where I served as a trustee. I was most proud of the Tougaloo Art Colony which I founded and ran for many years.

Jim Lucas and I me in 1973 when he returned to Jackson from his tour in the Army and I had just returned to Jackson after having worked a few years in New York City after college at Delta State. At the time, Jim was intent on pursuing a career as a film cameraman, which he had done during his deployment in Southeast Asia. AS a freelance film photographer, he shot advertising, football films, and news and documentary assignments for NBC and UPI. Eventually, he was able to break into his real love, feature films, and was becoming known for his exceptional technical skills as a camera operator and director of photography. He was on location for the 20th Century Fox film Barbarosa, starring Willie Nelson, when he was killed in an automobile accident.

You were married to Jim Lucas at the time of his death in 1980. Why did you decide to put this collection of his photographs, along with pertinent narratives, together to create A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi at this time?

This project began over five years ago with the original intent of finding a home for Jim’s extensive collection of negatives, prints, and ephemera before we moved out of state. I had kept the collection as he had stored it for over 30 years, but I felt the need to look at the images myself before I let them go. Many of the images are of high school and college life, sports, and friends, but peppered in were also newsworthy local events and images depicting historic civil rights events. Jim had always told me that there was history in his collection. I realized just how exceptional these images were and decided that it was fitting that Jim’s work should be shown to a wider audience.

I began the project with an exhibit of 35 images which previewed in June 2014 at the 50th Mississippi Freedom Summer Anniversary Conference at Tougaloo College. With support from the Mississippi Humanities Council, I was able to tour the exhibit through Mississippi for another 18 months. The book was an outgrowth of that exhibit.

Please tell me about the task that you and photojournalist Red Morgan shared in restoring these photos. Where had these photos been kept through the years, and what shape were they in? How long did this process take?

I would not have been able to do this project without Red Morgan. Red and I had only been acquaintances in high school. A mutual friend suggested I call him for help. A photojournalist and freelance photographer in Florida, Red reviewed some of Jim’s images and was excited by them. We worked together to scan, sort, edit, and produce digitalized images from over 5,000 vintage negatives. These negatives had been meticulously packaged, labeled, and documented by Jim. Our partnership in this project, along with Craig Gill and book designer Peter Halverson at the University Press of Misssissippi, has resulted in a book of 108 never-before- published photographs For all of us, this book has been a joy to produce.

Explain the process of putting this book together. How did you decide to organize it around the five narratives included? How did you choose the contributing writers? How did you narrow the selection of photographs?

As we continued to mine the collection for more photographs, we developed a website and doubled the touring exhibit. Suddenly, there were enough images for a book. The University Press of Mississippi saw the images and agreed.

The book is organized like the exhibit into four main events: the search for (civil rights workers) Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney (who were murdered in Mississippi) during Freedom Summer, 1964; the Meredith March Against Fear in 1966; the funeral of Wharlest Jackson in Natchez in 1967; and the U.S. Hearings on Poverty in Mississippi and Robert Kennedy’s subsequent trip to the Mississippi Delta in 1967.

In researching the history of these events, I was fortunate to find writers who had authored books on each. Once these scholars saw Jim’s amazing photos, they each agreed to lend their expertise with an introductory essay. Their variety of writing styles and intricate knowledge of the subject give the chapters context and lend a verbal narrative to Jim’s visual one.

The preface was written by Charles Overby, who in the mid-1960s was reporting from The Jackson Daily News while has in high school at Provine. Like Jim, Charles’ early passion and talent set him on a course for an outstanding career in journalism.

Please tell me about the touring exhibition and the website.

The early exhibit toured Mississippi in 13 venues across the state. The expanded exhibit showed last summer at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and recently at the Brown v. Board of Education Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas.

In February, it will show at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. The book will now be a companion catalog for the exhibit which is also called “A Past That Won’t Rest.”

An interesting thing that struck me about the book was the point that Aram Goudsouzian made about Jim capturing photos of not only the leaders, the famous people, and the drama, but also the ordinary people and events–the ones who would perform everyday tasks that would ultimately contribute to changing history, as has always been the case. Why do you think this was important to Jim?

Jim had a talent for capturing the story playing in front of his camera. He had an artistic sensibility, first to recognize the “moment,” to choose his subject, then to frame it with a discernment for good composition. His images rarely needed cropping. He shot black and white with multiple cameras (lenses), used wide angle photography and lighting with technical precision. His images reveal the emotion of the moment and the dignity and humanity of his subjects.

That day (in Yazoo County) in June 1966 on the Meredith March was hot and dusty. It was tough to walk that highway, yet through Jim’s lens we see the determination and cooperation that unified marchers of all different backgrounds who came to make sure that Meredith’s march did not fail.

Could you put the historical significance of these photos into context, especially for young people?

All of these photos and the accompanying essays depict iconic stories of Mississippians and those came to Mississippi to help in the long and arduous struggle to end violence and discrimination of black citizens.

Howard Ball’s essay on the murder of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney tells not only this terrible tale of Klan brutality, but explains the origination of the Freedom Summer project. From 1964 through 1968, Jim’s lens allows us to see the palpable tension in the square in Philadelphia, the encouragement and pride of the marchers who rallied to assure that James Meredith’s march would meet its goal of registering people to vote, and the heartbreak and ultimate provocation of the black citizens in Natchez for the murder of a father of five whose truck was bombed for taking a job promotion that paid an additional 16 cents per hour. Peter Edelman and Ellen Meacham explain the fight over funding for the War on Poverty, a fight that continues today, and Robert Luckett draws a parallel to the grassroots organization against institutionalized violence of the 60s and that of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jim Lucas

It’s rare that someone discovers his or her passion and future career at such a young age, but Jim was freelancing for The Jackson Daily News at age 14! Tell me about Jim–his talent, his drive, his personality.

Jim was a very humble person, almost shy, but never shy behind the camera or talking subjects photographic. The camera gave him entrance to all kinds of happenings and he had a curiosity and sensitivity for people and for animals. He was studied, measured, and loved the technical. Friends thought him the true camera nerd–in a good way! He had resolve from an early age to excel and make a mark. His work can now be included among other courageous and dedicated photojournalists of that era.

Signed copies of A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi are available from Lemuria.

Jane Hearn will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the Mississippi Civil Rights panel panel at 12:00 p.m. at the C-SPAN room in Old Supreme Court Room at the State Capitol.

‘Sweet & Low’ is newest book from emerging southern writer Nick White

By Guest Author

On June 22, 2018

In Short Stories, Southern Fiction

By Bryce Upholt. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 17)

Sweet & Low, the new collection of stories by rising young writer Nick White, revives an old tradition: its pages are filled with exiled Southerners and new arrivals trying to grapple with what to make of this strange place.

The plots of White’s stories, when summarized, sound like the standard fare of short literary fiction. Lovers endure a strained vacation in the touristy Tennessee mountains; an angry father stares down his impending death; a young boy makes a brave choice that results in an uncomfortable coming of age. But in White’s hands, these small personal dramas are spiked with edgy hilarity.

The book’s first section, “Heavenly Bodies,” is a tour-de-force quartet. The four stories together showing that a singular, distinct voice can nonetheless span a range of settings and tones.

White delights in unexpected turns and outsize characters. “These Heavenly Bodies,” a highlight story, features an unexpected set of stars: drop-dead gorgeous Siamese twin teenagers who strut about in a bikini at the local pool. They are at once mythical and absolutely real.

The second, longer section is really a short novel in stories. The stories are connected by Forney Culpepper, whose family arrived in the Delta three generations back. That’s not long enough to be deemed true locals by their neighbors, he says—though it seems just as likely that the trouble is the family’s atheism and its unorthodox living arrangements.

We first meet Forney as a troubled child and see him through to his still-troubled old age. An aspiring writer, a rakish lover, a frequent failure, Forney contains multitudes. The stories’ different narrators offer such different visions of Forney that at times it took a few pages before I recognized the man.

Forney is sometimes charming, sometimes sympathetic—and often an unrepentant jerk. Those shifts can be frustrating, but they are the point. There are so many versions of each of us, known by the many people we have met.

The title of this section, “The Exaggerations,” references an uncle of Forney’s who likes to whip up tales—not for the sake of conveying morals or lessons, Forney tells us, but because he wants “to shape the world into something better than it [is].”

White, in the tradition of the great Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan, is attempting the same. Not that he avoids the harsh truths of the world. His exaggerations—his over-the-top humor, his eccentric characters—function like the sunglasses we wear to look at a solar eclipse. White’s South is complex, hard to square, and full of pain. You’ve got to shield yourself before you can look at the blaze of that truth.

White’s warmly reviewed debut novel, How to Survive a Summer, depicted the traumatic consequences of a young man’s summer at a conversion-therapy camp in the Mississippi Delta, which aimed to cure its campers of their gayness.

In this collection, too, characters in every story are—to use the word that White embraces—queer. Which is an important and fresh addition to the Southern canon.
Queer need not mean the characters are gay, necessarily. It’s just that his or her notions, from what bodies he finds alluring to how she wants to live her life, don’t find into simple constraints.

But whose notions do? We’re all queer in our own ways, even if the label might make some of us squirm. White is often praised as an important, emerging queer writer, and as evidence the emergence of the New South. But with stories this strong, it’s just as fair to call him one of the country’s most promising young fiction writers, too.

Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer based in the Mississippi Delta. His journalism and fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and the Sewanee Review, among other publications.

Nick White will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “LBGTQ+: Southern Perspectives” panel at 2:45 p.m. in State Capitol Room 113.

Join in on ‘The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson’ by Steven Loza

By Guest Author

On June 20, 2018

In Music, Southern Culture

By Jordan Nettles. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 10)

Mississippi is often seen as the birthplace of American music. Many Mississippi musicians have achieved international fame, while others remain well-kept and beloved secrets. Regardless, each musician enriches the cultural heritage of the state while leaving a mark on genres like the blues, jazz, country, rock, and more.

The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson (University Press of Mississippi) by Steven Loza features a Shelby native who made immense contributions to jazz. Part biography and part musical analysis, this book explores the robust life and work of a jazz legend who has, up until now, been largely overlooked. The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson is an essential step in recognizing this master musician, arranger, composer, educator, and bandleader.

Gerald Wilson (1918-2014) was born in a region of the United States that is well-known for its music: the Mississippi Delta. Wilson became “very obsessed with jazz” at a young age and embarked on a self-described “jazz pilgrimage.” This artistic journey took him around the world and brought him into the same circle as influential jazz figures like Jimmie Lunceford, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Sources for this book range from liner notes and essays to interviews and a spoken word CD. Loza weaves all of these into a seamless narrative, creating a vivid picture of Wilson’s life. The book includes stories from every stage of Wilson’s career, from his time playing in the Navy Band to his ten albums with Pacific Jazz Records.

The interviews between Loza and Wilson are engaging for any general reader. In the interview chapters, Wilson describes his life in his own words and Loza adds poignant context. Later in the book, Loza offers detailed analyses of some of Wilson’s compositions, which will especially appeal to jazz scholars and students.

In his life and work, Wilson searched for “new ideas” and challenged the boundaries around him. Stylistically, Wilson incorporated musical progressions that no jazz musician had used before. Wilson’s unique sound was partly inspired by his Mexican-American wife and partly inspired by the bullfighters that fascinated him. He blended traditional jazz and Latin American music styles to create a sound that inspired listeners—and musicians—regardless of their race or music genre. One of Wilson’s most well-known pieces, “Viva Tirado,” was eventually recorded by the Latin rock group El Chicano and later adapted into a rap by Kid Frost.

Wilson’s desire for progress was not restricted to his music. He pushed against racial segregation around the country, once telling his band, “Tonight, we’re going to break the color line,” before leading them into a Las Vegas casino in the 1950s. At the conclusion of the book, Jeri Wilson, one of Gerald Wilson’s daughters, describes her father’s pride in being a jazz musician and an African American. His pride and passion for both are impossible to miss in The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson.

Gerald Wilson believed in the power of jazz music, and music in general, to connect people. Wilson’s music certainly brought people together in many different ways. If you are not currently familiar with Gerald Wilson, get ready. This book will likely make you a fan.

Jordan Nettles is a graduate of The University of Southern Mississippi and the Columbia Publishing Course in New York.

Author Q & A with Silas House

By Guest Author

On June 18, 2018

In LGBTQIA+, Southern Fiction

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

As the nationally bestselling author of five novels who holds a coveted membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Silas House shares what may be his most personal story yet with the recent release of Southernmost.

His new novel chronicles the path of Asher Sharp, a Tennessee minister whose struggle with his brother’s “coming out” finally forces a decision for the small-town preacher that results in chaotic consequences for his congregation and his marriage–and threatens his relationship with son. Sharp spontaneously decides to head to Key West, the southernmost point in the country, to search for his brother and seek a long-awaited resolution.

A former commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, House is the recipient of three honorary doctorates, and is the winner of the Nautilus Award, an E. B. White Award, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Hobson Medal for Literature, and many other honors.

He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and his work has appeared in the Oxford American, Narrative, Blackbird, Newsday and other publications.

Tell me, briefly, what your childhood in Appalachia was like, and how it affected your writing.

Silas House

I grew up in a really tight-knit family and we were taught to wear our Southernness–our ruralness–as a badge of honor. In many ways it was a pretty romantic childhood because I was able to roam the woods and I knew everyone in my community really well. I was always surrounded by family or people who loved me like family.

But my father was a Vietnam vet with PTSD and we were very immersed in the evangelical church, and both of those things were instrumental in shaping my worldview. Not to mention that I was a really sensitive boy who loved to read. I loved basketball, too, but my big secret was that I loved books more.

You are the recipient of many writing awards, some of which are mentioned above. What did it mean to you to be inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers last fall?

To be welcomed in amongst some of the people who influenced me the most was really humbling, and especially to know how amazing it is to be a part of such a literary tradition. I’m really proud to say I’m a Southern writer. To me that always has only a good connotation, and one reason is because I really do believe we fellowship in a different way than other regions of the country. I don’t mean to generalize, but there is a generosity and a spirit of encouragement that exists among Southern writers that is special.

You new novel, Southernmost, is set in the South, and in an essay that you wrote about this book, you state that the South is “a whole lot like the rest of the country. Injustice and intolerance exist here, and everywhere.” You go on to say that “By looking at this microcosm of America called the South with such focus, we can more clearly see our whole nation in a moment when we are in dire need of understanding one another.” Explain how this is so.

I think people think of things like homophobia, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and the like, and they think that’s more rampant in the South or among rural people. I don’t think it is. I think it’s exhibited in a different way. And this idea that country people, or Southerners, or more prejudiced lets the rest of the country off the hook.

Injustice exists everywhere in this country and I get tired of it all being blamed on us. It’s a national problem, not a regional one, and I think we’d be better served to look at it that way instead of always just shifting blame. I’ve lived in the South my whole life but the worst physical homophobia I’ve suffered has been in New York City and Chicago.

In Southernmost, main character Asher Sharp is a minister struggling to come to grips with where he stands on issues of sexuality, as a church leader, father, husband–and brother to Luke, who had come out as a gay man 10 years earlier. It seems the reactions of his wife and church members, compared with others, depict two strong reactions to a gay lifestyle: those who are either fully accepting or strongly opposed. Have you found, though, that there is somewhat of a middle ground in which many are wrestling with aligning their faith with such an acceptance?

I would say that most people are in that middle ground, and that’s one reason I wrote the book from a straight person’s point of view, instead of writing another coming out story. The main character, Asher, is often questioning just how prepared he is to be totally accepting of gay lives, although he is definitely far more evolved on the issue than his wife, who is totally opposed.

To me, he’s representative of a whole lot of people right now who want very badly to fully embrace everything about a family member, but still have that little nagging voice in the backs of their minds saying, “But what if they kiss?”

One of the things I enjoyed most was working on Asher’s interiority where he’s struggling with things like that. His mother-in-law, Zelda, is probably the best representative of that middle, though–she’s been taught to shun gay people her whole life, yet her natural inclination is to be good to everyone. And her wishy-washiness really costs her an important relationship in the book.

Tell me about your decision to write this book now. How long was it in the making, and what did you want it to convey?

I worked on this book off and on for about eight or nine years. During that time, I wrote a short middle grade novel, Same Sun Here, but for almost the last decade this has been the most important thing to me. It’s a book that I really felt compelled to write. I couldn’t stop thinking about these characters. Over that time the issue really evolved. For example, in 2015, when marriage equality passed, I had to re-write the entire book.

So now it is set mostly during the summers of 2015 and 2016. It’s about as contemporary as you can get in a novel. And in a way I think the book is far more relevant now than when I was writing it. Since the election a lot of Americans have had to think about how fundamentally they disagree with the very people they love the most. LGBTQ people have been dealing with that issue forever. And that’s one of the themes in the book, the ability to love one another despite strongly disagreeing.

Growing up as a gay person, your Pentecostal parents accepted your sexuality even though it was opposed to their church’s teaching. Did that surprise you–and would you explain how this spiritual influence affected you?

Well, that was a very long process. It was about 10 years after I came out before my parents and I were on the same page. I really admire their ability to grow and think outside the box of their own church on this issue. To me, it’s a real testament to someone’s character when they’re able to do that kind of self-examination and question themselves on whether they believe something in their hearts or if they just believe something because they’ve been taught that by others their whole lives.

Water seems to be a theme in Southernmost, with destructive flooding, rain, the Gulf of Mexico, and the ocean off the Florida Keys serving as important elements to the story. Is there a symbolism here that you could explain?

I never really think about symbolism when I’m writing at all. To me, that has to be something that is completely organic. So, when a novel is finished, those symbols and metaphors start to show themselves and water is definitely omnipresent in the book. I think the main reason is because water is absolutely the essence of life. If any tangible thing on earth could represent the Divine, I guess water would be the best. And that goes hand in hand with these characters who are all thinking about the Divine in one way or another, either struggling against belief or doubt.

Is there anything else you’d like to include, about the book or your own personal life?

One thing I love about the book is that I got to capture the act of driving across the South. One of my favorite sections in the book is when Asher and (his son) Justin are driving from Tennessee to Florida. I made that drive a couple times while writing and I was so happy to preserve so many of the church signs and roadside stands selling peaches and watermelons, and even people I saw along the way–the homeless man holding a ‘hungry” sign, the Cherokee woman being harassed as she walked into a truck stop, the children catching a fish on the pier, a wealth of friendly cashiers. I love driving in the South in the summertime; it’s like a meditation. To me, that’s when I love it the most.

Are you already working on another writing project at this time?

I always have a few projects going at once. Right now, I’m toying with the idea of a big family epic, which I’ve always wanted to write, and I’m trying to wrangle a play about Mary Todd Lincoln.

Silas House will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, June 19, at 5:00, to sign and read from Southermost.

Author Q & A with Andrew Lawler

By Guest Author

On June 12, 2018

In History, Nonfiction

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

Author and journalist Andrew Lawler admits that, from the beginning, he was warned.

Because he had grown up immersed in the story of the lost colony of Roanoke, he expected immunity to the possibility he would get “sucked in,” as a friend put it, to the mystery of what happened to the 115 men, women, and children who landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, in 1587.

Although the settlers were on a mission to establish the first English colony in the New World, they disappeared without a trace while their leader was away on a six-month resupply trip that had stretched into three years. They left only one clue–a “secret token” carved on a tree.

The question of their fate still haunts historians and archaeologists, and Lawler’s own literal journey to examine the ominous expedition resulted in his new book, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. What he found, he concludes, offers fresh understanding as to why this mystery is relevant in today’s America.

Lawler is also the author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? and is a contributing writer for Science magazine and a contributing editor for Archaeology magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and other publications.

When did you first develop an interest in the lost colony of Roanoke?

Let’s just say that I had no choice. As a child growing up in southeastern Virginia, not far from Jamestown, there was no escaping history. Figures like John Smith and Thomas Jefferson were regularly mentioned at the dinner table.

On our annual beach trip, my family went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This was back in the days when the only nightly entertainment was bingo and a dance hall. The third option was to see The Lost Colony, the three-plus-hour outdoor drama in the buggy woods of nearby Roanoke Island. We sat on hard wooden benches amid the mosquitoes as the organ blared, Indians danced, and sweating English soldiers marched around in breastplates.

It is one of the longest-running plays in American history, and it certainly seemed never-ending to me as a child. Written in the 1930s and performed ever since, it told teh story of the three voyages to the Outer Banks by the English in the 1580s, culminating in the arrival of the final group that today we call the “Lost Colonists.”

There was just enough action to keep a kid interested–plenty of sword fights, fireworks, and firearms going off. But what really fascinated me was the end, when all the settlers go marching off into the woods, hungry and ragged but singing bravely. Then it was our turn, as the audience filed out down the dark path to the parking lot. This was the very place where the Roanoke colonists vanished, and when I was small, that visceral quality of getting lost here struck me with terror. I was relieved to crawl into the back of the station wagon.

As a teenager, fascination replaced the terror. I devoured everything I could find about the colony, reading first-hand accounts and poring over John White’s beautiful watercolors of the Native Americans. But since there was no new evidence to solve the mystery, there seemed nothing fresh to say. Then a few years ago I ran into a British archaeologist while covering a conference at (The University of) Oxford for a magazine. When he told me that he was digging on Hatteras Island, I knew immediately what he was after. Then I found out another team was hard at work digging at another site where the colonists may have gone. Finally, there were new clues emerging. It was a chance to see a childhood mystery solved. Once again, I was hooked.

It seems, from some things mentioned in your book, that you took somewhat of a literary risk by writing The Secret Token. Did you ever doubt that you were doing the right thing?

Andrew Lawler

At first, I was plain embarrassed. I’d spent more than a decade covering the devastating cultural heritage tragedy still unfolding in the Middle East–the looting of the Iraq Museum, the Taliban efforts to wreck Afghan statues, and the ongoing destruction of ancient sites in Syria. Writing about a few dead Elizabethans seemed almost absurdly irrelevant. And when I brought up the “Lost Colony,” more than one historian smirked. It was all so wrapped up in cheesy pop culture, and most serious academics gave the entire episode a wide berth.

I thought I would just do a quick online story, but then it turned into a full-fledged magazine story. Then I realized that I was amassing so much material that it had to be a book. I’ve learned that when I have sinking feeling in my gut–the “Oh, no, anything but that” feeling, then I have hit on the story that I have to tell.

There are many theories about the fate of the English colonists who were never found. In your opinion, which one is the most outlandish? Most reasonable?

My personal favorite is that the colonists turned into zombies that are still out there in those spooky Roanoke woods. Alien abduction is another. Of course, there are can’t -be-proven theories–that they sailed away on their small ship and drowned. We know now that a severe drought afflicted that time period, and some argued they starved to death. But when you look at later “lost” Europeans, most of them simply deserted to or were captured by Native Americans. As Benjamin Franklin noted, few wanted to return, even if they were taken by force. This was what I call colonial America’s dirty little secret.

So, it seems pretty obvious that if you are hungry and don’t know how to survive in a strange environment, you will find people who know what they are doing–and in this case, that was the local Native American population. Eastern North Carolina was filled with thousands of people who thrived in villages and towns, planting crops while also gathering plants and hunting animals. The English didn’t land in a wilderness. So, most historians who have studied the Roanoke voyages agree they did what most of us likely would do–hang out with the people who could make sure you were fed, kept warm, and protected from enemies. In return, they had skills the Indians wanted, like how to make metal implements.

You traveled to Portugal to research the life of the pilot Fernandes. What was the most important thing you learned on this trip, and did you travel to other places for research?

This was a crazy effort to track down a bizarre rumor. The private papers of the Roanoke navigator Simao Fernandes were said to have surfaced in Portugal. A couple of American historians had tried and failed to verify the story, which promised to rewrite our entire understanding of the voyages, and I couldn’t resist the challenge. After running around Portugal and Spain pursuing every lead, I came up empty-handed. But as was always the case with following what seemed a dead end in this tale, I stumbled into something unexpected and important.

In this case, I found that Fernandes was not the villain he was portrayed to be, and that, in fact, he was quite possibly the real mind behind the entire project. He knew and understood the emerging global economy better than any Englishman of his day. And since Roanoke laid the foundation for Jamestown and all other English efforts that followed, you could say this obscure Portuguese pirate played a central role in launching both the United States and the British Empire.

You wrote that “In a nation fractured by views on race, gender, and immigration, we are still struggling with what it means to be American.” Explain in what ways gender issues are tied to this story.

A woman writer named Eliza Lanesford Cushing coined the term “Lost Colony” and made Virginia Dare a folk sensation in the 1830s. This was a moment when women’s magazines first appeared, and women writers like Cushing finally had outlets for their work. But American history at that time was exclusively about men, Betsy Ross being the exception proving the rule. Women were portrayed as bit players in Jamestown and Plymouth when they appeared at all. Men got the credit for “taming the wilderness.”

All we know about Virginia Dare was her name and when she was born and baptized, but her status as the first English child born in the Americas gave women a stake in the origin story of the United States. The Virginia Dare stories, though almost wholly fabricated, became wildly popular among women in the 19th century. They finally could see themselves in the drama that led to the nation’s founding.

Is there any hard evidence that the English settlers “chose” to adopt the Native American lifestyle, as some have suggested?

If they wanted to live, the settlers had to become Native Americans. When Europeans first arrived on the North American coast, they didn’t have the skills to survive, even when their ships regularly brought supplies. They depended on trading their goods with the locals for food. Without the indigenous peoples, all the early European settlements almost certainly would have failed.

Finding hard evidence for Lost Colony assimilation, however, is tricky. If they became Native American, would Jamestown settlers 20 years later have recognized them? Probably not. There certainly are hints that when John White came back in 1590, three years after leaving for England to get supplies, he was watched by people–perhaps including assimilated Lost Colonists who dreaded boarding a cramped and stinking ship for a long passage back to gloomy and plague-ridden London. But I pieced together circumstantial bits of evidence to make a what I think is a compelling case that the Elizabethans became Algonquian speakers–and that their most likely descendants ended up in a most surprising place.

Why is the story of the Lost Colony relevant today?

There are moments in the life of our nation when what it means to be American becomes hotly contested. This was true in the 1830s, when an influx of German and Irish shook up the majority Anglo-Americans. Certainly, during and after the Civil War we differed on whether African Americans could or should be full citizens.

A century ago, we decided women should be able to vote, though at the same time we didn’t generally considers of Italians or Jews to be “white.” In each of these periods, the story of the Lost Colony served as a fable reflecting these tensions. So it is today, with groups like Vdare Foundation warning whites about the dangers of being outnumbered by non-European immigrants. So, I can’t think of a more relevant story in today’s climate.

Do you have ideas in the works for an upcoming book?

I’m drawn to the ancient tales that seem to define how we see the world today. Right now, I’m spending time in the Middle East exploring the source of religious tension there. Few places on Earth are so driven by old stories, particularly those that many see as God-given.

Andrew Lawler will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 13, to sign and read from The Secret Token. The Secret Token is Lemuria’s July 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author: Guest Author (Page 16 of 28)

New ‘Charley Patton’ book is a study of the Father of the Delta Blues

Author Q & A with Sonny Brewer about William Gay

Jon Meacham reviews national turmoil in ‘The Soul of America’

Author Q & A with T.R. Hummer

Lauren Groff writes elegant, graceful prose again in ‘Florida’

Author Q & A with Jane Hearn (A Past That Won’t Rest)

‘Sweet & Low’ is newest book from emerging southern writer Nick White

Join in on ‘The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson’ by Steven Loza

Author Q & A with Silas House

Author Q & A with Andrew Lawler

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