photograph by w. ralph eubanks
“On these Mississippi roads, the past and the present exist side by side. The past is there for all to see, yet perhaps is only noticeable to those who still remember it. Perhaps it is not the past Mississippi is losing on this landscape. Instead we are witnessing how the past and future are slowly becoming knitted together into one seamless garment.” — W. Ralph Eubanks, A Place Like Mississippi
From a Yazoo City cemetery to Rowan Oak, on the banks of the Mississippi River and in the shade-dappled heart of Piney Woods, on the paper-scented shelves of Square Books and the sun-blasted dirt of the Delta, author W. Ralph Eubanks has searched for — and found — Mississippi. The author has confronted its myths and its most mundane realities, sought out its soul in story and song. The result of his work is a beautiful collection of musings on the Hospitality State as viewed through the lens of its literature, A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape (Timber Press).
photograph by ed croom
W. Ralph Eubanks
One Writer’s Beginnings
A native of Mount Olive, Mississippi, a small town in the Piney Woods region, author, editor, and professor W. Ralph Eubanks’ life has long been tangled up with letters.
“When I was a kid, one of the things that I looked forward to most was the arrival of the bookmobile. I lived on a blacktop highway in the middle of rural Mississippi,” Eubanks recalls. “Libraries at that time weren’t open to Black kids, but the bookmobile was, largely because they received federal funds.”
Eubanks remembers biweekly visits from the bookmobile, the freshness of the memory illustrating his long-lived love of stories. As a kid, he used to make his own magazines and books, he says, “so it would fit that eventually I would end up writing and working in book publishing for many years as well, and editing a literary magazine.”
If not for the intervention of one of his professors at the University of Mississippi, where Eubanks now teaches, the writer may have taken a different path entirely. He was on a pre-med track, studying psychology, until an essay he wrote on the subject of English Romantic poet John Keats prompted a professor to steer the young student toward literature.
“To understand Mississippi, you must probe the silences, because it is in the things people are reluctant to discuss that the truth lies.” — W. Ralph Eubanks
In the time since, Eubanks has held many roles — he has written for and been editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, written the books Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road, and worked alongside archivists at the Library of Congress. And of course, there’s his experience as a professor of English and Southern studies. It’s a professional c.v. that, along with his personal history as a Mississippian, ideally situates him to write about writing.
“I like to joke that I’ve worked both sides of the desk, being the writer and the editor,” he says. “There were probably two things that were crucial to my path as a writer. Not only that work as a copy editor, but also my years of working for the Library of Congress, where I had to do a lot of research. Years of doing research with them and working alongside them in archival collections has really influenced the writer that I’ve become, because I’m a writer who is very much a researcher as well.”
photograph by w. ralph eubanks
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
In one chapter, Eubanks remembers interviewing author Jesmyn Ward, whose award-winning novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing mark her as one of the South’s preeminent voices. Ward took Eubanks to one of her favorite spots, a grove of live oaks overlooking the bayou in DeLisle. Their conversation touched on the intermingling of different cultures — French, Spanish, Indigenous, African — along the Gulf Coast, an example that seems perfectly representative of the American ideal of the melting pot. They spoke of history and geography, and of how those things can shape a life. It’s a quiet moment, but one that speaks volumes about the way the literature and landscape of Mississippi resonate with two of its contemporary stars.
The author’s own history intersects with that of the civil rights movement and with several Mississippi writers when he visits the Jackson, Mississippi, neighborhood of novelist Angie Thomas.
On a trip to the Medgar Evers Home Museum, the site of the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Eubanks realized he had a personal connection to the neighborhood.
“I thought I was going to a new part of Jackson that I had not been to before,” he remembers, but “I learned that I had played across the street. I knew the family who lived across the street, and all the time of being a kid on that street, I never knew what happened in the house we walked past when we were playing our games.”
Evers’ murder in 1963 prompted Eudora Welty to confront the racism of her fellow white Mississippians, and to write the short story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” Margaret Walker, who knew Evers and even lived on the same street, wrote two poems, “Micha” and “Medgar Evers, 1925-1963: Arlington Cemetery,” about him. Angie Thomas and author Kiese Laymon also have connections to that neighborhood, and Eubanks also mentions investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell, whose 2020 book Race Against Time tells the story of his dogged reporting on civil rights-era cold cases — reporting that eventually led to the conviction of Evers’ murderer, Byron De La Beckwith. Eubanks writes that he “collided with my own past and how it can sometimes be caught between memory and forgetting.”
Though the silence of the adults on that street served to keep the young Eubanks and his friends from worrying about racial violence, it also denied them an understanding of the way the past inhabits and informs the present. “To understand Mississippi, you must probe the silences, because it is in the things people are reluctant to discuss that the truth lies,” Eubanks writes.
The Outsider
After seeing early drafts of the book, Eubanks’ editor told him he was keeping himself out of the narrative entirely too much, a problem that the author rectified to good result in the final version of the text. In A Place Like Mississippi, Eubanks uses archival and literary sources, the landscape itself, and his own lived experience to triangulate the true Mississippi. It is an act of discovery, one that utilizes all the tools at the author’s disposal, and his own narrative, interwoven with Mississippi literature of other eras, becomes a powerful tool for creating understanding.
“Reading Faulkner does take me back; it’s closer to the South of my youth,” Eubanks muses. “We like to think that his narrative tool was stream of consciousness, but it was really memory.” At the intersection of his own memory, the present, and the trapped-in-amber moments recorded in literature, Eubanks seeks out truths about his home state — and the rest of the world. “If you can find the past in the present on the landscape of Mississippi,” he says, “there’s so much it can tell you about the world.”
The author says he often reminds his Ole Miss students that they walk Oxford streets memorialized in fiction, and that contrasting their experience to that of the characters in the text can yield new perspectives. “Walking down Jackson Avenue — that’s the Joe Christmas walk,” Eubanks tells his students, referencing William Faulkner’s Light in August. “Jackson Avenue is historically the dividing line between Black and white Oxford, and to have Joe Christmas walk down that street is of tremendous significance because he’s divided between Black and white. He doesn’t know what he is.”
One question makes clear the motive for A Place Like Mississippi: “What does the South tell us about the rest of the country?”
In answering that question, Eubanks explains that he hopes people will see the connections between their place and this specific place. “I wanted to write a book that took you into the literary world of Mississippi through a lens of truth rather than mythology,” he says. “While at the same time, what I’d hoped we would begin to think about with respect to Mississippi is not seeing Mississippi as this place in itself, but as a representation of America.”
On the Come Up
Like the state it describes, A Place Like Mississippi is a complex and layered thing, and it may be that I have only hinted at its borders here. There is much more I would have liked to include here if not for the restrictions of word count — Richard Wright and the long reach of Memphis for starters. Of course, to grasp the full picture, one must read the book.
The landscape is well-represented in Eubanks’ book, not just in written descriptions, but in many beautifully rendered photographs. The distinctions between geographic regions are easily apprehended when viewed in full-color images. The photo of Oxford-based authors, taken by Langdon Clay, is a treat to view. There are moss-draped live oaks and beautiful Mississippi River sunsets. The photos, like Eubanks’ written word, are a testament to the variety in the landscape, underlining the author’s point that so much of the American landscape, both literal and figurative, can be seen in Mississippi.
“So often, we’re going through the motions and not paying attention,” Eubanks tells me, explaining that he wants his book to encourage readers to be intentional about the pieces of the past they carry with them into the future. “I want to understand the realities of this place, rather than a false idea of it that I may have created in my memory.”
