Pictured above, top, from left: Matthew Guinn, author; author Greg Iles and his wife, Caroline, and John Evans, owner of Lemuria Books.
Bottom photo, from left: Jerry Mitchell, investigative reporter at The Clarion-Ledger, Mississippi’s statewide newspaper, and Greg Iles, author of The Bone Tree, Natchez Burning, and others.
I can’t tell you everything we discussed, but it was lively. Guinn is an up-and-coming Jackson author whose latest book is The Resurrectionist (W.W. Norton and Company), a great piece of fiction that dips deep into Southern mores before and after the Civil War.
It revolves around the practice of medical schools using cadavers for research that, as Guinn tells, had a darker side: that those bodies used for lofty goals frequently came from slave families before the war and, afterwards, the victimized blacks under Jim Crow. The practice was as brutal and mean as before the war but with a twist: those who traded in the corpses obtained money and power, while the schools that kept their hands clean willfully looked the other way, their reputations intact, while fueling an evil.
If you think your local medical school wouldn’t do such a thing, think again. The truth lies buried in the unmarked pauper’s graves that line many a campus or slumber beneath parking lots and administration buildings.
Guinn does a marvelous job trading between the past and the present in his book, resurrecting the past in all its horror, while portraying the present rarified life of academia in all its superficial glory. A good read. Check it out!
Guinn has new book coming out in August, titled The Scribe. Can’t wait to read it!
Moving to the second photo: I’ve known Jerry Mitchell many years. He has doggedly investigated cold cases from the civil rights era for the past couple of decades. It was his reporting that led to the 1994 trial and conviction of Byron De La Beckwith, the assassin of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963.
Mitchell’s investigative work has also helped put three other klansmen behind bars: Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966, Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls and, most recently, Edgar Ray Killen, for helping orchestrate the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
Mitchell shows up as a character in Iles’ books, Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree, but he’s a real-life person, and a rather low-key, down-to-earth kind of guy. Maybe that’s just the way real-life heroes are; they live next door to you; you see them at the grocery; you bump into them at Lemuria Books. You would never know he’s such a dogged individual, but once he starts looking into something, he doesn’t quit. And the man is fearless.
Mitchell is coming out with a book, soon, too. I look forward to reading it.
Written by Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating, and the forthcoming Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in bookstores now.
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