Mississippi, First in Literature Once Again

~Post by Brian C.

There’s this saying, “Mississippi, first in Literature, last in literacy”. It’s an odd saying, and while the second part is full of old style, anti-Southern resentment and bigotry, the first part is perplexing to many. How could one of the poorest, sparsest states in the union, almost known for reluctance to changing and adapting to a modern world also produce the best this country has to offer in terms of Literature?  Examples of Mississippi’s Literary potency include Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Larry Brown, Shelby Foote, Richard Ford, Tom Franklin, Ellen Gilchrist, and now Jesmyn Ward who just won the National Book Award for her novel Salvage the Bones.

Maybe it’s the marshy slowness of the Delta, combined with the fact that if you stand still for very long the kudzu will cover you up in a blanket of green leaves and humidity, that make Mississippi writers create swift paced books that are sweaty, and heavy with Southern fleshiness. Whatever it is that makes Mississippi writers better than everybody else is debatable, what isn’t debatable is that they are better. Take for example this quote from the First Lady of American Letters, Eudora Welty, in the last truly great Modernist novel The Optimist’s Daughter,

“Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?”

This is a sentence about watching somebody sleep. It’s intimate, but points to the utter silliness of perceived intimacy. It’s heavily punctuated, which adds quickness to a long thought by performing that thought in bursts, but it also has a colon, which marks a hard stop, but not an end to a thought. The colon is the most Southern of all punctuation marks. It’s slow, but thoughtful, it gets to a point in a way that may not always be direct, but always informs. I love this sentence, and I think it is the epitome of Mississippi writing.

Ward takes on this lineage of Mississippi writers, and it’s a blessing and a curse. I expect more of her because of where she is from, and I think that’s ok. Winning the National Book Award is great, and it’ll help propel her into a different stratosphere of the book world, but that shiny sticker on her book should be the second thing your bookseller tells you about the author. The conversation should go like this, “You should check this book out, Ward is a Mississippi writer, and she also won the National Book Award.”