[PDF] Life After Mississippi eBook

Author : James A. Autry
Publisher : Yoknapatawpha Press
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 30,32 MB
Release : 2018-03-30
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780916242848

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Mississippi Memories is a collection of 77 poems from Nights Under A Tin Roof and Life After Mississippi. The author, a former U.S. Air Force pilot, newspaper reporter, national magazine editor and Fortune 500 executive, returns to his Mississippi roots to examine the forces which shaped him. Autry's narrative verse focuses on the rhythms of rural southern life, an odyssey of country funerals, weddings, church revivals, family reunions, and courtships drawn from a unique American heritage. "The landscape of Autry's memories is familiar to anyone who has heard the voice of the whippoorwill or the baying of hounds in the night or who has savored the smell of fresh-turned earth." (The Atlanta Journal) "Autry writes of farm life, of revival meetings and teenage romance, of weddings and reunions and funerals, in vivid, sensuous detail. His sure hand moves with gentleness through his material." (The Richmond News Leader)

Author : Norma Watkins
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 30,4 MB
Release : 2011-05-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1604739789

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Raised under the racial segregation that kept her family's southern country hotel afloat, Norma Watkins grows up listening at doors, trying to penetrate the secrets and silences of the black help and of her parents' marriage. Groomed to be an ornament to white patriarchy, she sees herself failing at the ideal of becoming a southern lady. The Last Resort, her compelling memoir, begins in childhood at Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Life at the rambling hotel seems like paradise. Yet young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat. Once integration is court-mandated, her beloved father becomes a stalwart captain in defense of Jim Crow as a counselor to fiery, segregationist Governor Ross Barnett. His daughter flounders, looking for escape. A fine house, wonderful children, and a successful husband do not compensate for the shock of Mississippi's brutal response to change, daily made manifest by the men in her home. A sexually bleak marriage only emphasizes a growing emotional emptiness. When a civil rights lawyer offers love and escape, does a good southern lady dare leave her home state and closed society behind? With humor and heartbreak, The Last Resort conveys at once the idyllic charm and the impossible compromises of a lost way of life.

Author : John C. Willis
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 14,82 MB
Release : 2000
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813919713

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Examining the lives of individuals - freedmen, planters, and merchants - Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain.

Author : Philip R. Ratcliffe
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 35,60 MB
Release : 2011-06-06
Category : Music
ISBN : 162846979X

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Winner, Best History, 2012 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research When Mississippi John Hurt (1892-1966) was "rediscovered" by blues revivalists in 1963, his musicianship and recordings transformed popular notions of prewar country blues. At seventy-one he moved to Washington, D.C., from Avalon, Mississippi, and became a live-wire connection to a powerful, authentic past. His intricate and lively style made him the most sought after musician among the many talents the revival brought to light. Mississippi John Hurt provides this legendary creator's life story for the first time. Biographer Philip Ratcliffe traces Hurt's roots to the moment his mother Mary Jane McCain and his father Isom Hurt were freed from slavery. Anecdotes from Hurt's childhood and teenage years include the destiny-making moment when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50 when he was only nine years old. Stories from his neighbors and friends, from both of his wives, and from his extended family round out the community picture of Avalon. US census records, Hurt's first marriage record in 1916, images of his first autographed LP record, and excerpts from personal letters written in his own hand provide treasures for fans. Ratcliffe details Hurt's musical influences and the origins of his style and repertoire. The author also relates numerous stories from the time of his success, drawing on published sources and many hours of interviews with people who knew Hurt well, including the late Jerry Ricks, Pat Sky, Stefan Grossman and Max Ochs, Dick Spottswood, and the late Mike Stewart. In addition, some of the last photographs taken of the legendary musician are featured for the first time in Mississippi John Hurt.

Author : Thomas C. Buchanan
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 45,58 MB
Release : 2006-03-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0807876569

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All along the Mississippi--on country plantation landings, urban levees and quays, and the decks of steamboats--nineteenth-century African Americans worked and fought for their liberty amid the slave trade and the growth of the cotton South. Offering a counternarrative to Twain's well-known tale from the perspective of the pilothouse, Thomas C. Buchanan paints a more complete picture of the Mississippi, documenting the rich variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked on the lower decks and along the river during slavery, through the Civil War, and into emancipation. Buchanan explores the creative efforts of steamboat workers to link riverside African American communities in the North and South. The networks African Americans created allowed them to keep in touch with family members, help slaves escape, transfer stolen goods, and provide forms of income that were important to the survival of their communities. The author also details the struggles that took place within the steamboat work culture. Although the realities of white supremacy were still potent on the river, Buchanan shows how slaves, free blacks, and postemancipation freedpeople fought for better wages and treatment. By exploring the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, Buchanan sheds new light on the ways African Americans resisted slavery and developed a vibrant culture and economy up and down America's greatest river.

Author : Rinker Buck
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 31,62 MB
Release : 2015-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1451659164

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A new American journey.

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher :
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 22,96 MB
Release : 2009-07-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :

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?Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.? --William Faulkner A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain?s rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it. Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today?s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author?s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings, volume number 5 in the Library of America series. It is joined in the series by six companion volumes, gathering the collected works of Mark Twain.

Author : Natasha Trethewey
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 41,70 MB
Release : 2015-08-01
Category : Travel
ISBN : 082034902X

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Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of her natal Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home. In this new edition, Trethewey looks back on the ten years that have passed since Katrina in a new epilogue, outlining progress that has been made and the challenges that still exist.