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Rachel Evangeline Barham |
Amost seventy years ago, a Shakespeare professor at Ole Miss
named David Bishop was in trouble. The Governor of Mississippi was then Theodore Bilbo. He felt Bishop’s views were too radical to be heard in a public school. He had him fired. And so, needing a job, Dr. Bishop came to an oasis of education, where there was a tradition of unafraid, open-minded inquiry. He came to Millsaps. Students here thought he was great, including a young man from Jackson named William Ferris. Not me. I’m not that old. My father. My father had no idea what he was going to do after graduating from Millsaps. It turned out that he would fall in love with farming and run the family farm where I grew up. But all his life I would hear him talk about the people he met at Millsaps, the ideas he’d heard – and especially how a Shakespeare scholar could take an Elizabethan playwright and bring him to life – not by showing him making love with Gwyneth Paltrow. He did it simply by virtue of his own insight and intelligence. So it’s an honor for me to be here. I didn’t go to Millsaps but I’ve been influenced by this cam-pus in part because it influenced my dad.
But it wasn’t only in sixth grade that my crystal ball was cloudy. Even in graduate school, I didn’t know what I might do until I got a Rotary scholarship to study in Ireland for a year, and met a scholar in Dublin named Francis Utley, who recognized my interest in southern traditions, and said, “Why not study folklore?” It was a wonderful piece of advice. You know, there are those who think the study of culture only involves researching the great icons of the age. Hundreds of doctoral students, for example, write their dissertations on Wil- liam Faulkner. He is a great icon. But Faulkner didn’t write about the rich and famous. He once said he could write for a lifetime and never exhaust the material on his “postage stamp of native soil.” We Mississippians have a rich heritage on this postage stamp. Not just famous people, either. So, for example, I’ve been able to write a book about a Mississippi mule trader named Ray Lum. He wasn’t anybody famous. But he grew up on the Big Black River, traded horses and mules from the 1920’s to the 1970’s and just by listening to this prodigious storyteller and recording the stories he told in his booming voice, I captured at least a small part of our heritage.
Luckily, my own experience taught me different – even as a small boy. The first Sunday of each month I attended a church where black families had worshiped since before the Civil War. The church stands on a tall hill covered with hundreds of marked and unmarked graves. There were no hymnals in the pew. Each generation learned to sing from previous generations. After church, a communal lunch of fried chicken, biscuits and iced tea was served on the lawn. I learned from those families that at school I was only learning part of the story. Our heritage is much richer than – in Shelby Foote’s words – “moonlight and magnolias and pure blood lines.” Like one of Pecolia Warner’s quilts, our heritage is the stitched together tapestry of different colors, and of families that have come here from every place on the planet. In fact, the great story of the last four decades in Mississippi has been our official recognition that the South has been shaped by black people and white people – and by Jewish, Lebanese, Chinese, Irish, Italian and Greek. PAGE 2 OF 4 | NEXT PAGE |
Millsaps Magazine | Millsaps | Last Edited August 12, 1999 |
