Mississippi Towns

Posting again from the Waynesboro-Wayne County Library, Ground Zero in Mississippi's ongoing battle against treason and subversion.

I saw something yesterday that I never though I would see: a scholarly book about my hometown. It's called Life and Death in a Small Southern Town: Memories of Shubuta, Mississippi (2004) by Gayle Graham Yates. And it led to another experience. I was looking for a copy in the excellent (near-legendary, actually) Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson. I told one of the bookstore clerks what the name was, and he asked, "Is that a book about Shubuta?" That is probably the first time in history that those words have ever been uttered in a bookstore anywhere.

Yates has actually done a scholarly history of Shubuta, whose peak population in the past half century would have been around 750 or so. She taped extensive oral interviews in 1993 with follow-up interviews several years later, and consulted various archival resources for original material.

It seems that she has been very careful with her sources. Although I should add that the folklore about the book in Shubuta is already running wild. I haven't yet found any of the stories that rumor is circulating about what is in there. I'm tempted to stay around here for another week to make a record of the rumors about the book.

After I've had a chance to read it, I'll do a review here. But I might as well say now that I can't be entirely impartial about this one. My father, Alton B. Miller, is mentioned by name in the book, where the author saw him at the senior center in town having lunch one day in 1997. That alone is worth several generations of prestige in Shubuta!

The blurb linked above says of Yates' book:

Ultimately, she shows us Small Town southern America: a strong, frail, fascinating, and complex human community.

So, just to be clear, I'm not just from the South, I'm from the archetypal Southern Small Town. (Well, okay, there's Jefferson in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, but that's meta-reality.)