Fenian's Pub: A Eulogy by Two Friends
Fenian's Pub: A Eulogy by Two Friends
Devna Bose and Alex Melnick on what is lost in the closing of Fenian's Pub, one of Jackson's most treasured community spots.
Last week, Jackson’s Fenian’s Pub closed after twenty-eight years in operation in the Belhaven Heights neighborhood. Since news broke of its closing, there has been an outpouring of Fenian’s memories, photos, and stories. Do you have a favorite memory from Fenian’s Pub? What does a community lose when its beloved watering hole closes? Let’s talk in the comments.
It’s 5 p.m. in Jackson, Mississippi, but the beer is already flowing behind the bar at Fenian’s Pub.
In a few hours, someone will be screaming an off-key version of a Taylor Swift song in the back room, and the bathrooms will look worse than they smell. The motley crew drinking at Fenian’s won’t care. They’ve seen worse.
The day of the week doesn’t matter—mosquito-bitten summer and tepid winter are all the same. Any night, Fenian’s is this: grimy meeting point for all, beloved watering hole, place to get a cheap drink after a long, hard day, of which there are too many in the state’s capital city.
Fenian’s is more than a bar. It has served as a backdrop to life in Jackson for nearly three decades.
And now, it’s closing.
DEVNA: On Returning
When I returned home last January, I found Mississippi a much weirder place than I left it.
Jackson, I quickly learned, is a town that makes no sense. When I’d describe my new city to out-of-town friends on lengthy Facetime calls, it sometimes sounded like I was just stringing random verbs and nouns together, like a bizarre Mississippi-themed mad lib.
“You did what, with who? Where? And you only drink bottled water?” they’d ask, with incredulous expressions on their faces.
Jackson, my local friends and I say with equal parts fondness and exasperation, just isn’t a real place. And Fenian’s, I’ve found, fits perfectly into this strange world.
Over greasy pub food and sweating beers and the occasional cigarette, my friends and I shared frustrations about politics, about friends leaving, about what Jackson and Mississippi could be, and the perpetual squandering of that priceless potential.
An Irish pub in the middle of town with the most precarious-looking staircase you’ve ever seen is, bizarrely, one of the most democratizing spaces in Mississippi. It’s where I’ve found community in a state I have only learned to love after leaving.
It is hard to grow up in Neshoba County, in Mississippi, when you’re anything other than a straight, white man. That heaviness weighs on you—weighed on me for two decades—in every time you are passed over, sneered at, made to feel small. It’s impossible for those moments not to influence the person you become.
I became a reporter. And when I returned here and found myself in the middle of a legislative session that required constant interaction with the power brokers of this state, I sought solace in friends, in community, in people who looked and thought like me and made me feel less alone.
Over greasy pub food and sweating beers and the occasional cigarette, my friends and I shared frustrations about politics, about friends leaving, about what Jackson and Mississippi could be, and the perpetual squandering of that priceless potential.
The food is great and the greenery is, too, but more importantly, Jackson is rooted in community. You live here for the ease of walking to your friend’s house down the street for a forgotten baking ingredient, for the neighborhood garden club, for the chorus of hellos when you walk into Elvie’s, for the realization that the person you just met actually grew up fifteen minutes down the road.
But community is about more than those warm, cozy moments. Community is also walking into Fenian’s and seeing the people you were just talking shit about.
This is the nature of Fenian’s, where it’s possible to find solidarity in the shadow of power, and where those in power seek anonymity in a shadowy bar. It’s also where both might find common ground long enough to share a drink. This is the precious no-man’s land that we’re losing.
This is the nature of Fenian’s, where it’s possible to find solidarity in the shadow of power, and where those in power seek anonymity in a shadowy bar.
How many times have I come to the bar, and seen someone—a coworker, a friend, a person I went on a single bad date with, a local leader I just criticized in an article—at this crazy place? How many times has it just not mattered? How beautiful is that?
A few months in, I started to expect running into other regulars at Fenian’s. I started to build a visit into my routine. What’s a week in Jackson without a whiskey-soaked Fenian’s night? I started to figure out where my favorite seat was, which singer was least likely to make my ears bleed at open mic night, and who I could bum a cigarette from on the balcony. Without my saying a word, the bartenders started putting a PBR on my tab when I walked in, and shots when the night started to devolve.
None of this may seem like much. But some days (most days) that familiarity, that community, that feeling of being known has been enough to keep going.
ALEX: On Staying
I often explain to my college students that part of living here is loving the “nothing” that is going on in our city—or more accurately, how the “nothing” is really having everything to do as soon as you have the initiative to do it. I love this city and its possibilities, and all the horrible-ugly-beautiful-exciting parts that come with it.
Fenian’s is just like that.
It’s the place I go when I have nothing to do in order to make it so that I have everything to do and everyone to see. I walk in and I am known (at least I pretend) by the bartenders, the same way it has been since I was eighteen, when I moved here a decade ago trying to find a home. (Let’s not dwell on what every underage person at my college knew: it’s incredibly easy to drink under twenty-one in our city when most places don’t ever card.)
Jackson is Fenian’s, and Fenian’s is Jackson—I know there are a million great bars in the world, but this one is special because it's ours. That’s why my husband not so jokingly said the news felt like one of his close family members had died, and why countless phone calls and texts poured in when Fenian’s made the announcement it was closing.
Jackson is Fenian’s, and Fenian’s is Jackson—I know there are a million great bars in the world, but this one is special because it's ours.
Fenian’s is the type of bar you grow into and add onto, a treasure trove of whispered rumors and stories whose significance is still yet to be revealed. What was the name of the liquor store that used to be below? Who was that strange man who came in and tried to kiss me, and more importantly: why did my former professor kiss me in the parking lot? Do the trains really only run on Christmas? Why, no matter how hard they try, does that spot right next to the bar always stink?
I have thrown up, laughed, and cried harder at Fenian’s than I have at most places in my life, and sometimes even in that order. I didn’t have a roadmap to follow to get to where I am now in my life—I just kept doing what made sense at the time to build a “here” I wanted to be in. Fenian’s is where I paused on that journey and had a drink.
Between friendly and unfriendly bartenders (sometimes the same people) and patrons you might have only known when you were drunk and people you’ve only met when you’re sober, the wood walls of Fenian’s hold us all together; they track the time. I can find meaning and memory in every corner of this bar: the stairs where a friend fell and got a traumatic brain injury, the table where I sat with my little sister, the table my best friend always gets mad at, and the place where I hate to sit if there’s karaoke. You can build your entire life based on the events that happen at this bar, and while you do it you can catch shadows of yourself in constant states of becoming.
This bar is our home, just like Jackson is our home. Our community is never about the buildings or what we call whatever iteration of a business or what’s an appropriate time to meet for a drink. It’s about the people who make up the spaces, and at Fenian’s, those are the people from all different walks of life who came together for twenty-eight brief years to make something bigger than us, something close to what our community can and should be.
I know this eulogy may sound corny. And why shouldn’t it be? I’m talking about the death of a bar that serves Irish food, chicken wings, and three dollar PBRs. Things can be both corny and important, just like things can be structurally unsound, have awful décor, and still be a nice place to be.
I know this eulogy may sound corny. And why shouldn’t it be? I’m talking about the death of a bar that serves Irish food, chicken wings, and three dollar PBRs. Things can be both corny and important, just like things can be structurally unsound, have awful décor, and still be a nice place to be.
Fenian's death has inspired in us a gratitude for Fenian's life. Fenian's has been a mirror, a frame of reference, a looking glass for us to step through. I will always love this bar. I will always love Jackson. If I’ve learned anything Fenian’s, it's that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I will always drive the wrong way out of their parking lot, I will always know someone when I walk into Fenian’s, whether it's a tangible place, a remodeled business, or the stuff of my memories. This is the place we’ve been looking for, because what is a community if not the places we make to gather? How do you tell someone who has never been to Fenian’s or Jackson what we have lost and what we have built?
Fenian’s has never been a place—it’s been a state of mind, and the community ethos we’ve cherished will build and bloom out long after the balcony light has been turned off for the last time.
So, all together now: A toast to Fenian’s, your favorite bartender’s favorite bar. You will live on in every Guinness downed in Belhaven, every Mississippi four-leaf clover, every time someone passes the building and goes “how the hell is that staircase still standing?”
We will find community again in our collective heartbreak. Every time we drink an Irish car bomb, we’ll think of what we had, what we lost, and what we will create again.
Rest in peace, you perfect purgatory, Friday night fever dream, absurd home.
Beautifully written. Fenian's was so much more than a pub. Thank you for memorializing that space for our city.
When I moved away from Jackson 3 years ago, I understood, all-too-well, that one of Jackson’s features is “things leaving.”
But even still, especially with my heart fully geared toward returning, I never imagined Jackson without Fenians. Pouring one out for all of y’all from Virginia.