Mississippi Native: Ellen Ann Fentress

"Mississippi is a living organism, I think. It pulses with people I love, time, nature, community, hope, hurt, creativity and all the associated intersections."

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Today we hear from writer, journalist, and filmmaker Ellen Ann Fentress, whose memoir The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning comes out this fall.

Featured contributor Ellen Ann Fentress.

Where are you from?

Greenwood

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

Always. I grew up in the Delta, then Jackson since age 18, bisected by four years on the Gulf Coast in Pass Christian and Biloxi in my twenties.

What does home mean to you?

A space that you get, and it gets you—at least enough of the time. You know you’re home when your sense of being and insides exhale, and your body unthinkingly sinks into the moment. Home can happen inside your actual home or in the other ways too—being with your people, being outside or sometimes while being caught up inside your own head. 

How does Mississippi meet that definition?

There’s layered back story that comes with almost everything here, a reality that you and everyone around you realize. Mississippi is a living organism, I think. It pulses with people I love, time, nature, community, hope, hurt, creativity and all the associated intersections.

I love the cycle to how life happens here—like Joni Mitchell’s song “The Circle Game.” January starts with a pot of black-eyed peas while simultaneously holding vague hopes that somehow this will be the year the Mississippi Legislature does something humane and historical. Then comes February with lipstick-red camellias, an inevitable freeze and the outer bands of New Orleans Mardi Gras. Also by then the Legislature has broken your heart for yet another session and probably made national news over some grotesque bill plus the headline-making associated quotes. The quotes will come from a white lawmaker. Then comes March and the open-air magenta floor show of azaleas in every front yard and bank branch parking lot. Your heart breaks again, but this time it’s over the lavish casual beauty everywhere and not solely the lavish callousness of the majority at the Capitol. Then there’s spring and summer—you get the idea.

Fall goes fast: Mississippi football teams and the New Orleans Saints. Then Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur—I’m Episcopalian and my partner is Jewish—yellow slanted sunlight in October and piercing blue skies. Trick or Treaters on my block in Jackson’s Leftover neighborhood (named because we’re adjacent to top-drawer Eastover, but we’re so not Eastover). Going to Mistletoe Marketplace in early November and seeing people you haven’t seen in a minute along with pretty much every church bus with a working engine in the state. Then orchestrating Thanksgiving and Christmas, now more complicated since my two daughters, like so many other Mississippi-born millennials, left the state after college. That’s a hard part of Mississippi, to know what’s home for me doesn’t seem a fit nor even advisable for too many Mississippi-born millennials. Then back to the New Year’s black-eyed peas, and the cycle starts back around.  

Did that all that sound saccharine? Yes it did. I have digital backup, though. The FitBit says my pulse relaxes here at home on a plain old day in a way it doesn’t elsewhere. Also, last time I did a word cloud quiz on Facebook, my most frequent word was Mississippi.

Ellen Ann and Governor William Winter, signed by the governor.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi?

Mississippi is a good match for anyone like me who’s a sucker for community. I crave connection and always try for it in the sub-communities in my life: as a newspaper reporter, leading writing workshops through Mississippi University for Women and Millsaps College, as a parent, at my church, in Junior League (Eudora Welty was a member too) and in my recent idea The Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools. The nonprofit online truth-telling platform publishes first-person stories from all-white academies and public schools since 1970s integration. For me, it’s personal, since I’m an alum of Pillow Academy in Greenwood and participated in this history. It’s history that diminishes Mississippi public education to this day. The site accounts are primary documents of history, as well as serving as a public space to reflect on how three generations of too-often racially polarized schools damage our sense of community and state government’s willingness to fully funding public education. Check the stories out at www.admissionsprojects.com, and talk to me about writing your story for the site.

Awareness of others and questions about community are a point of my memoir, The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. The spine of the story is a running series of four essays on my life as a volunteer through eras of my life, starting as a Greenwood teenager. What did the jobs say about me and about what the culture at the time thought females should do as good deeds? In the book, I come to see I dealt with the low-hanging fruit of caring. Meanwhile, there was something more fundamental to Mississippi and to my own history that I could take on: talking about whiteness and the history that I had participated in, including the rise of the segregation academies. So, The Admissions Project.

Pre-order Ellen Ann’s forthcoming memoir here. She’ll also be doing a reading and signing at Lemuria on August 10, and will be on a memoir panel at the Mississippi Book Festival on August 19.

Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

I have my cousin Alice and friends who go back. Some of us met as fellow Jackson parents of preschoolers—preschoolers who are now adults. Four Greenwood friends since around age six get together multiple times a year. The Greenwood quartet represents 242 years of friendship. When the eight Jackson parent friends got together recently, I did the same calculator run, coming up with 272 years of friendship. That’s a humbling fact in this world, no matter where you live.

Also important, though, is getting to meet new arrivals, especially young ones who’ve moved here trying Mississippi on for size. They inspire me too—looking at you, Lauren Rhoades (creator of Rooted). Lauren and I first met through the Millsaps community writing workshop. Recent transplants find their way to every session of the workshop course, and hopefully we stay in touch.

My partner Myron is from the New Orleans area, in fact, so it’s also interesting seeing Mississippi through his impression. He loves the Mississippi energy, how it’s a few notches less hurried and people make more of a point to take time to get together with friends. You learn by seeing Mississippi through new eyes. That stimulates a root system, too.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

Smug comments from those outside the state about how Mississippi and Mississippians deserve everything bad coming to them because hard-right elected Mississippi white leaders fight federal assistance programs and foster fake culture wars instead. That disdain is as cruel as the agendas of the politicians they condemn. It also erases the existence of the forty-six percent or so of Mississippians who vote against candidates like those Every. Single. Election. If snide non-Mississippi critics want to be constructive, support the many Mississippians working for better on the ground. And consider moving your progressive selves here where your vote and efforts will make a difference. 

Ellen Ann with Bill Minor (center) and fellow Capitol Reporter staff in the late 1970s.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

You are simply drawn into community in Mississippi, like it or not. It comes out of the agrarian DNA, I think, the expectation of getting to know those around you. In a rural place, a neighbor support system could be a life or crop saver, besides companionship. In the present, that Mississippi urge to connect lingers as muscle memory. I’m Pavlov’s dog that way. As much as I’m happy in my own head and a basic introvert, you can’t live in Mississippi long before you get that you are part of a wider web. That said, the failure to take the idea of community to its widest level in public policy is the ironic Mississippi failure. The Hospitality State can be so un-hospitable to its own. 

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here?

That a defining but overlooked trait of how things unfold here comes from how relatively small the state is. If you are a lifer like me, you will run into acquaintance interconnections in lots of events. Things can turn due to personal relationships. Don’t burn a bridge, not just because it’s uncalled-for bad karma, but because, pragmatically, you likely will come across any person again in another capacity. I started thinking about the interconnected life here when listening to my dear hero the late journalist Bill Minor tell his stories.

Here’s a pivotal example: After jury selection at the trial for the Neshoba County civil rights workers’ 1964 murders, Bill was eating at a table of other reporters at Weidmann’s Restaurant in Meridian. Judge Harold Cox was eating at another table. Cox called Bill over. “Do you know anyone on the jury?” the judge asked Bill. Langdon Anderson, Bill told him. The Lumberton oil man was on the state industrial development board. Bill had spotted him on the panel.

Next morning, Cox picked Anderson as jury foreman. National eyes were on the trial, and the notoriously racist and irritable Cox was actually conducting the trial by the book. The eventual guilty verdict marked a milestone in state history with white men convicted in the death of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Eventually, the workings inside the jury came out publicly. Anderson’s insistence during the deliberations likely made the difference in persuading jurors to bring the guilty vote.

What if Weidmann’s wasn’t the one spot in Meridian both Cox and Bill picked for lunch? What if Bill hadn’t remembered Anderson and had watched him closely enough to sense that with Anderson’s New England family background and Episcopal layman views that he just might do the right thing? What if Anderson hadn’t argued so hard for other jurors to make a guilty vote? History hinged on one person’s connection to another.

 In my own experience, whether doing a cold call to research a story or navigate life admin, I’ll realize I actually do have a connection to the person on the other end of the telephone. It’s standard operating procedure to engage in the Do You Know So-and-So? drill when meeting someone from a town or organization where you have a friend or great aunt. It will make a difference if you bingo on a mutual friend or in-law.

Right: The Washington Post profiled Ellen Ann and The Admissions Projects. Right: Ellen Ann unboxes her debut memoir, which reckons with the South's history as well as her own.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here?  Do you have a “tipping point”?

If I felt the time had come, I’d consider moving, but it hasn’t yet. My life, including as a writer, has always been based here. Confession: I do that time-tested Mississippi practice of heading to New Orleans to blow off steam. I think Tennessee Williams said he felt like a bird released from his cage there. Welty wrote about that suspension of regular behavior that happens on New Orleans visits in her short story “No Place For You, My Love.” Hiding out a little in New Orleans from time to time is a Mississippi tradition when you have a tank of gas.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

That the rest of the country is Mississippi too. It’s just that everything American is easy to see here, both the good, the callous and what whiteness looks like. Mississippi’s superpower is being an easy-read of most aspects of the country. That means you see America at its worst in Mississippi’s legacy of racism and white supremacy. You also see the nation at its best through Mississippi-born leaders for justice like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar and Myrlie Evers. Medgar Evers said, "I love Mississippi, and one day not only will it be a better place in which to live, but it will be the best place in America to live." Mississippians like Macarthur geniuses Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward and Pulitzer winner Natasha Trethewey are at the current height of U.S. literature, writing modern classics about what being human means.

The plaque outside the building in Paris where Richard Wright lived from 1948 to 1959.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

Richard Wright and his 1945 memoir Black Boy. Not that the work isn’t regarded as one of the world’s great memoirs, but I think about how the boyhood he describes happened in Jackson about six miles from my house. I wrote a piece for Oxford American magazine in 2010 about how he and Welty never met, yet were born within twelve months of each other and grew up only blocks apart in Jackson. The parallels continued when both were U.S. literary stars by 1940. Wright’s family’s house in Jackson is no longer standing, unlike Welty’s. Wright left the U.S. for Paris in 1946 and died there in late 1960. When his daughter came to Mississippi for the centennial of his birth in 2008, she said that when she was growing up, he didn’t talk much about his life in Mississippi. He moved to Memphis when he was seventeen, then Chicago and then New York. Yet in the eighteen months before his death in Paris in late 1960, as he obsessively wrote about four thousand haikus, he marshalled Mississippi imagery for many: cockleburs in a young boy’s hair and the juice of a green melon when it breaks open, for example. There’s no Wright home to visit in Jackson, but you can stand outside his apartment building at 14 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince on the Left Bank in Paris. There’s a plaque to him on the building: THE BLACK AMERICAN MAN OF LETTERS RICHARD WRIGHT LIVED IN THIS BUILDING FROM 1948 UNTIL 1959. 

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

As with pretty much everyone else you’ve asked, it would go to strengthening public schools and public school children, giving the message that their education and well-being are our top concern, our resources spent accordingly. While we’re at it, if I had two billion, I’d put another billion toward every town in Mississippi having a vibrant first-rate library with internet capacity for everyone who wants it, spreading the same message of support about learning and flourishing at all ages.

Mississippi’s superpower is being an easy-read of most aspects of the country. That means you see America at its worst in Mississippi’s legacy of racism and white supremacy. You also see the nation at its best through Mississippi-born leaders for justice like Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar and Myrlie Evers.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

If I can be shameless, then I’ll talk about two: The Admissions Projects (www.admissionsprojects.com) and my memoir The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. If you don’t want to read The Steps We Take, consider buying it for the beautiful stunning cover: a 1943 self-portrait by Mississippi expressionist Dusti Bongé, who showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York at mid-century as did Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. She resisted pressure from Betty Parsons to paint from a New York base for more public visibility. Bongé cared about her art, not fame, so she chose to paint from Biloxi from the 1930s until near her death in 1993. 

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Ellen Ann Fentress is a journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster. She produced and directed Eyes on Mississippi, a 2016 documentary on iconic civil rights journalist Wilson F. Minor that has screened at universities and institutions across the country. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, Scalawag, storySouth, and New Madrid, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where she was a reporter.