It was hot. Lord it was hot. It felt like it was never wintertime when we traveled to see our relatives in the Delta. I would press my forehead against the glass of the car windows and watch the fields rush past like pages turning in a book and then get carsick. Every time, I would pull my head away from the window with a churning belly and a headache from the setting sun and I would wish, oh I would wish hard, that the Delta wasn’t so terribly and inexcusably boring.

My mother, born and raised in Greenville, obviously disagreed with me. She would point out flocks of nesting blackbirds that would rise as one out of a field of cotton into a swirling mass hovering just above the snowy tops of the plants. Once, she stopped the car and let us sneak up on a flock of geese in a field so that we could startle them and listen to them rustle up into the sky. Looking back, those were some of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever been on.

Because of our (often) vocal reluctance to enjoy the sights of the Delta and our inability to quit messing with each other in the car, we would pass a lot of the time listening to audio books. I will never forget the first time my mother popped in the cassette tape of Eudora Welty reading “Why I live at the P.O.”, all of us sticky from gas station Sprites and Skittles, pausing our fighting to listen to the old voice draaaaaawing out the vowels.

“Papa-Daddy,” she says. He was trying to cut up his meat. “Papa-Daddy!” I was taken completely by surprise. Papa-Daddy is about a million years old and’s got this long-long beard. “Papa-Daddy, Sister says she fails to understand why you don’t cut off your beard.”

So Papa-Daddy l-a-y-s down his knife and fork! He’s real rich. Mama says he is, he says he isn’t. So he says, “Have I heard correctly? You don’t understand why I don’t cut off my beard?”

“Why,” I says, “Papa-Daddy, of course I understand, I did not say any such of a thing, the idea!”

He says, “Hussy!”

I says, “Papa-Daddy, you know I wouldn’t any more want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon. It was the farthest thing from my mind! Stella-Rondo sat there and made that up while she was eating breast of chicken.”

But he says, “So the postmistress fails to understand why I don’t cut off my beard. Which job I got you through my influence with the government. ‘Birds nest’- is that what you call it?”

Not that it isn’t the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi.

I says, “Oh, Papa-Daddy,” I says, “I didn’t say any such of a thing, I never dreamed it was a bird’s nest, I have always been grateful though this is the next to smallest P.O. in the state of Mississippi, and I do not enjoy being referred to as a hussy by my own grandfather.”

But Stella-Rondo says, “Yes, you did say it too. Anybody in the world could of heard you, that had ears.”

“Stop right there,” says Mama, looking at me.

So I pulled my napkin straight back through the napkin ring and left the table.

So sassy. Oh man, she was the sassiest! We learned quickly that our parents thought it was extra funny when Papa-Daddy said, “Hussy!” so we took to that word pretty quickly, for better or worse. Eudora was a hit.

That was the first time I ever remember hearing the name Eudora Welty, and I immediately felt at home with her. She talked the same way my Grand-daddy talked, slow and looping, like did they care if you were in a hurry to get somewhere? Well, too bad. She was one of our people, not particularly unique for having so many stories to tell; but utterly like no one else in her ability to put those stories to paper.

I never got to meet her, which is a pity as it seems that Grand-daddy knew practically everyone in the state of Mississippi and I feel that he should have introduced us. She would have gotten quite a kick out of him and me, us prank calling each other and poking fun at everyone around us. For years and years he would call me on the phone every single day and would make me pick up my violin and play him “Ashokan Farewell” from Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary. I really learned to hate that song, and years later, I would do almost anything for a chance to play it again for him, at least once more.

See, the thing about Eudora Welty is that you can’t help but think about your people when you listen to her speak or read her stories. This blog was supposed to be about her, and in the end it was about my mother and her father. I cannot separate my connection to her writing from my connection to my Mississippi roots.

I think she would have liked that, and I think she would be proud that I grew up and went to work in her favorite bookstore.

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. 

Jim PathFinder Ewing has written six books, published in English, French, German, Russian and Japanese. His latest is “Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating” (Findhorn Press, 2012). His next book — about which he is mysteriously silent — is scheduled to be released in Spring, 2015. Find him on Facebook, join him on Twitter @EdiblePrayers, or see his website,www.blueskywaters.com

It’s huge now, but back in ‘82 or thereabouts, the germ of what would become Mal’s St. Paddy’s Parade had an unlikely start as the brainstorm of, um, shall we say, a handful of “happy” people at the old George Street Grocery. A bunch of Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News folk were sitting around and somebody – Orley Hood? Lolo Pendergrast? Raad Cawthon? — said: “You know, we ought to have a parade.”

Everybody thought that was a swell idea to just jump into their cars and go downtown whooping and hollering. Since at the time I had an MG convertible, they tried to get me to join the “parade,” so they could sit on the back with the top down and wave at people, but I had been “visiting” there for a while and didn’t want to get pulled over by police. They went on without me, circling the Governor’s Mansion, the Clarion-Ledger building, and other sites of interest, and came back all happy and boisterous — and thirsty for more liquid inspiration.

I don’t know if Malcolm White counts that as the first parade or not. But after that, the parade became a real event with several of the same characters involved. By the way, the chief of security at the bar was none other than longtime sheriff Malcolm McMillin, who was a moonlighting Jackson police officer at the time; so I guess you could say, he was in on it, too.

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. 

When I drove across Montana, the landscape lingered long after I crossed the border. Elegant and gritty; it is a country requiring hard work. Even with towering trees, and grass up to my knees, I was always aware that underneath all the growth was rock; the edges were softened only on the surface. I could never crack the crust.

Smith Henderson captures this hardness in his debut novel, Fourth of July Creek. His characters are as pitted and solid as the ground they walk, broken along fault lines difficult to map. Henderson plumbs human dysfunction, measuring not only what makes us fail, but how we succeed; what we overcome in order to accomplish seemingly mundane things.

The novel follows Pete, a social worker with troubles of his own—divorced, missing daughter, borderline alcoholism—and the families he tries to help. His job takes him to the edges of human experience, to what we are all capable of. Kindness and gentleness spring from surprising hosts; violence and hate roil under the surface of us all.

The cop flicked his cigarette to the dirt and gravel road in front of the house, and touched back his hat over his hairline as the social worker drove up in a dusty Toyota Corolla. Through the dirty window, he spotted some blond hair falling, and he hiked in his gut, hoping that the woman in there would be something to have a look at. Which is to say he did not expect what got out: a guy in his late twenties, maybe thirty, pulling on a denim coat against the cold morning air blowing down the mountain, ducking back in to the car for a moment, reemerging with paperwork. His brown corduroy pants faded out over his skinny ass, the knees too. He pulled that long hair behind his ears with his free hand and sauntered over.

Henderson captures the spirit of the West in Fourth of July Creek. A land uninhibited by its human residents, a spirit unbridled, an unbroken horizon that gives human struggles their proper scope. But under Henderson’s deft hand, a sensitivity to the human condition pulls to the surface. Hope does prevail; a small dose is often enough.

As I thumbed through Ken Murphy’s Jackson book, I was initially confused at the photo for Millsaps.  While I was a student there, the observatory wasn’t used often.  Occasionally, a campus-wide email would announce that the observatory would be open for viewing some lunar/ stellar/ otherwise spacey event, but I never managed to show up.  And when I think of Millsaps, my iconography of the college revolves around other structures:  the Christian Center, the Academic Complex, the bell tower.

I didn’t understand Ken’s reasoning behind the observatory being the representative image of the college.  But, since I have an English degree from Millsaps, I thought.

At the risk of sounding too metacognative, I thought about all of the thinking I did while I was there.  [Metacognative:  thinking about one’s thinking.  A word I learned at Millsaps.]  One of the texts I read my freshman year was Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (thank you, Dr. Wilson) in which the philosopher challenges the idea that seeing something means it is absolutely true.  When the poet John Milton met Gallieo, Milton’s understanding of what is versus what he could see was expanded beyond his own failing eyesight (thank you, Dr. Page).   Despite my status as a WASP male, I was able to read and understand writers like Alain Locke (thank you, Dr. Smith) and Toni Morrison (thank you, Dr. MacMaster) and Palo Frerie (thank you, Dr. Middleton).  I was introduced to Eudora Welty’s writing, and her stories have stuck with me like a kind memory (thank you, Dr. Marrs).  With my minor in secondary education, I was given insight into the way students learn best (thank you, Dr. Schimmel, Dr. McCarty) and how to effectively transmit instruction to them (thank you, Dr. Vaughn, Dr. Garrett).  I learned to see both broadly and tightly, to make connections between ideas and people that, at first glance, might be worlds apart.  There is only one story that’s been written over and over and over again, and that story is the weird journey of humanity (thank you, Dr. Miller).  So many of my professors forced me to think about things I had never considered, to look at things in a way that wasn’t easy or natural for me, and to understand that my view of the world isn’t the only way of seeing things.

It turns out, Ken was right.  Observatories allow us to look beyond ourselves, to see what we normally wouldn’t be able to, just like Millsaps did for me.

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. 

Written by Richard D. deShazo, MD, a Billy S. Guyton Distringuished Professor, and professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the University Medical Center. Dr. deShazo hosts a weekly radio health and wellness show on MPB stations throughout the state called “Southern Remedy”. 

We came to Jackson and the University of Mississippi Medical Center after having lived in many other locations; including Washington, DC, Denver, CO, Birmingham and Mobile, AL, as part of my career as a physician educator, administrator, and researcher. The first thing we noticed about Jackson was the extraordinary hospitality of strangers we received at almost every turn. My wife was startled when she was tapped on the back by a stranger in the grocery store while she was searching for a grocery item. When she turned, fearing she was going to be accosted as would have been the case in other locations, she was met with a big smile from another customer who said, “Honey, can I help you find something? I have been shopping here forever.” This was something we had never experienced. When we visited churches, we felt welcome in every one immediately.

One of our initial roles was to recruit new faculty to UMC, and during the time I was a department chair here, we assisted over 60 new families in coming to Jackson to serve in various medical roles at UMMC. Their experiences were always similar to ours, and we never feared sending them into the community for a sampling of what life was like here because they were always pleasantly surprised.  It was easy to recruit people to jobs at UMMC once we got them here to see what a great place Jackson is to live.

As each day goes by, we discover new, interesting things about Mississippi. The convenient location and the hospitality and diversity of folks in the Delta, the pinelands, the coast, and of course, the greater Ole Miss community in the northeast are unique to our state. As the saying goes, our family was not born in Mississippi, but we got here as soon as we could.

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com.