Adding to the reading list

Richard Grant's Dispatches From Pluto is a well written attempt to understand the South. I will add it to the stack of helpful tomes that don't exactly explain so much as examine this paradoxical land. I don't know that anyone under age 50 from here (or under 100 from elsewhere) can comprehend that William Faulkner wrote about a real-ish place that once existed on Planet Earth. The social media generation does not have time for W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South or Wm.Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee. And that's a shame.

Some years ago, I heard a person in the tourism business here mistake Lt. George W. Lee for Gen. Robert E. Lee and that is a downright tragedy. Those are two rich and wonderfully instructive life stories which warrant study, not tossing in a dustbin of history.

More recently I heard a young lady in an elevator talk about being from the Delta. I asked where she was from. She said Memphis. I sighed. Memphis is the capital of north Mississippi to be sure, but of the hill country part; we are far more rough & ready than genteel.

Did you know that Theodore Roosevelt shut down the post office in Indianola, MS? That the Klondike neighborhood was once a bastion of upper middle  class African-Americans? That Whitehaven, TN -- annexed into Memphis in 1968 -- was named for Col. Frank White, founder of the Grenada-Memphis Railroad in 1846? The first radio station in Memphis was not in Memphis but in Whitehaven in 1926. Did you know that a platform plank of the Populist Party in the 1892 presidential election was the abolition of the electoral college in favor of popular vote? That the 1927 flood sent over 100,000 Mid-South refugees to the high ground of Memphis? That Memphis was the center of the world mule trading market from 1880-1920 and British Army buyers came here to buy mules? That Memphis remains the world center for spot cotton trading? Did you know that Zion Cemetery on South Parkway was founded by former slaves in 1876 and contains between 22,000-30,000 African -American graves?

Well, I can ramble on with this for a bit and still not hold a candle to John Harkins, Perre Magness, Jimmy Ogle, and others. My point is that if you have not yet decided on your beach reading for this summer, you could do worse that Willie Morris or Richard Wright, William Styron or Shelby Foote...of course if you take on the challenge of Foote's three volume, 2,000,000 word  The Civil War, then that might be summer and winter vacation plus next spring break too. But it will worth it; Foote was a fine writer of both history and novels.

At any rate, I am glad that you moved here or if a native, did not move away permanently. This lovely pile of books is just a way to be present. Be here now. Bless your heart.