Reading THE ROAD in South Mississippi
An essay by Joseph Peterson on what leading a prison book club has taught him about guilt, gratitude, and humanities education
“I like how they use food to create home,” says one reader, named Terrance. Heads nod, throughout the room we murmur our agreement. The nameless father and child in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—the father and son who try to “carry the flame” in an apocalyptic future of barren ash, even as other survivors descend into anarchy and cannibalism—they do have a way of creating home, of recreating human civilization wherever they go. And not just with food, but with games, toys, stories, and rituals. One of the novel’s most poignant scenes involves the man and the boy’s discovery, near starvation, of an underground shelter filled to the brim with boxes and cans of shelf-stable food: the carefully laid plans of some past doomsday prepper now long dead and gone. The man patiently prepares a hot breakfast—scrambled eggs, ham, coffee, and biscuits—and explains to the boy how to eat food he has never seen before: “Here. You put your butter on the biscuits. Like this....” The characters practice generosity even in their scarcity. In an earlier scene, discovering what may be civilization’s very last, dusty can of coke, which previous scavengers had overlooked within the labyrinthine workings of a vending machine, the man insists the child drink all of it, but the child insists on sharing. “You have some, Papa. I want you to drink it. You have some.”
I’ve driven about an hour away from my university, past timber trucks, a peanut processing plant, and the occasional Dollar General, into Southeastern Mississippi’s rural Pine Belt. I’ve left my phone and keys behind, and traversed a series of razor-wired fences, walls, and security gates to be here, in this classroom. Over the last several weeks, we’ve been reading The Road—Cormac McCarthy’s brutal but beautiful elegy for our future burned-out world—and meeting to share our insights and observations. The conversation pings back and forth throughout the room, men agreeing, picking up threads, adding nuance. But life on the zone is nothing like the calm of this classroom, the men have told me. There, they do sometimes see the worst of human nature, the scarcity and possessiveness that characterizes the world of The Road. Sometimes when I mention this book to other “free world people” like me, they tell me how depressing or horrific they found it, how uncertain the ending. Men in this book club—almost exactly the inverse—find its portrait of human nature perfectly realistic, but its ending full of hope.
But how do we know the people who take the boy in at the end, after his father dies, are also “good guys”? Well, the men tell me, because the boy checked to be sure: they had not plundered or cannibalized his father’s body from its resting place, had not placed their own material survival over respect for the dead. And also because, as I recall one man putting it... Goodness will find you in the end.
It’s a few days before Christmas 2023. This is our final session on The Road. We pass out the men’s certificates of completion, and the plastic-wrapped, security-scanned Little Debbie cakes we have brought to celebrate the holiday season and the conclusion of yet another book. The men cast their votes for what we will read next. There There, Tommy Orange’s novel about “urban Indians” in Oakland, is the decisive winner; we’ll start reading it together in the new year. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the runner up: I’ll have to put that one on the ballot again.
*****
South Mississippi Correctional Institution (SMCI), though not as well-known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary (“Parchman”), is one of the two largest state prisons in Mississippi, incarcerating almost 3,000 men at minimum, medium, and “protective” security levels. SMCI was built in 1989 in Leakesville, a little town of about 1,000 people at the time. This was a period of exponential growth in incarceration in the US, when prisons were seen as bringing much-needed job opportunities, cheap incarcerated labor, and visitors’ spending dollars to rural communities. Men at SMCI perform road work and other free labor in the Leakesville and surrounding communities, and harvest blueberries on the prison’s blueberry farm.
I’ve been reading books together with residents at SMCI since the summer of 2022, in a book club sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council. When it comes to prison education, there tends to be more attention given to classes that offer college credit, but book clubs are every bit as vital and meaningful as degree-earning college courses are. Since large percentages of incarcerated people in Mississippi—as in the US as a whole—have not yet had the chance to finish high school and don’t qualify for college classes, more accessible programs like GED classes, book clubs, lending libraries, or creative writing, art, and theater groups are the front line of the arts and humanities in prison.[i] As longtime prison educator Kyes Stevens has put it, accessible, non-degree programs can normalize the love of learning for incarcerated people, and “[plant] seeds of possibility” that education is for everyone, not just a select few.[ii]
Over the past nearly three years, our club has chosen eclectically and read widely, in subjects both painfully near to the men’s own experiences and trauma, as well as subjects with more seeming distance and escape. We have read and discussed literary fiction: from John Steinbeck’s great novelistic retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story, East of Eden; to the 19th-century revenge flick The Count of Monte Cristo; from Sing, Unburied, Sing, the beautiful, part-road-novel, part-ghost-story by Jesmyn Ward about a family haunted by racism and incarceration in South Mississippi; to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We have also read non-fiction books on urgent contemporary topics: A Knock at Midnight, the memoir of lawyer and activist Brittany K. Barnett who grew up with the trauma of the war on drugs and with an incarcerated mother in Texas, and who now advocates for reduced sentences and pardons for nonviolent drug offenses; Chasing the Scream, a history of the war on drugs; and Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward’s heartrending memoir of death and loss, of the toll that life in America takes on Black men and on the women who love and care for them. Right now, in the spring of 2025, we’re reading Watership Down, about a ragtag group of rabbits who infiltrate a concentration-camp-like warren to free some female rabbits.
Our conversations about these books have been some of the most vibrant and thought-provoking I’ve ever had the privilege to be a part of, in any classroom. The conversation is free-wheeling and usually guided by whatever the participants want to discuss. We debate and disagree over interpretations. We digress—sometimes at length—and tell our own stories. Justice-impacted people are fellow scholars, fellow teachers, with vast life experiences and deep insights.[iii] When we read a history of the failed policies of the “war on drugs”; or when we read Jesmyn Ward on what it’s like to grow up in a family impacted by racism and incarceration in South Mississippi: I am not the expert in the room on these subjects.
And I am learning. In our discussion of Sing, Unburied, Sing, one of the men talks about how Richie, the ghost character (who can only be seen or talked to by a few people in the living world, and uses the boy Jojo as his intermediary), shows what it feels like to be incarcerated. How it feels that people on the outside can’t hear or understand your story, and vice versa. Another book club member named Joey connects the beginning of the novel—the opening scene where Jojo, on his 13th birthday, wants to prove to his Pop that he is now a man and "can get bloody" by helping to slaughter a goat—to the end of the novel, where Jojo is now the one who comforts his Pop, for Pop's past guilt and metaphorical “bloody hands.” Jojo “gets bloody” by embracing and helping to bear Pop’s survivor guilt from his time at Parchman. Maybe what it really means to be a man, Joey suggests, is to help bear another person's burdens.
Similarly, as we read Chasing the Scream together, we talked about mental health, and about the real reasons people struggle with addiction: not lack of character or mere chemical dependency, but prolonged trauma, isolation, or depression. “The opposite of addiction is connection,” writes the author of Chasing the Scream. Incarceration for nonviolent drug-related offenses, the book argues, is counterproductive. Far from reducing drug use, it creates conditions—prolonged stress and trauma with scant mental health resources—that would drive someone to drug use.[iv] Multiple book club members confirmed these insights about addiction: one described his youthful drug use as coming from a desire to “fit in”; another said it was connecting with other people—accountability and support—that had helped him to quit. One man told us that the book enabled him to see that his struggles with addiction were not simply his own fault. For another reader, Blackwood, his main takeaway from the book was focused not on himself but on others: to be more “compassionate” and “empathetic” to fellow incarcerated people who continue to struggle with addiction.
*****
At a moment when the Humanities are under attack, at risk of defunding or censorship, these readers are reminding me of some of the central values of the Humanities: to be a more democratic teacher, a more attentive reader, and a more empathetic listener. If the Humanities are about cultivating “persons capable of paying attention,” to each other, to texts, to difficult concepts and conversations, then the incarcerated classroom seems like one of the last spaces where this kind of “sustained attention” takes place.[v] As one justice-impacted educational activist put it, “it’s when the waters are still, that you can see your reflection.”[vi] As we increasingly lose the ability to go slow, lose the practice of offering each other time and attention and care, our incarcerated neighbors have much to teach us. For us to slow down and practice listening and learning. For us not to treat anyone as “out of sight, out of mind.”
Of course, I don’t want to idealize the carceral classroom. On the one hand, the book club does foster many of the values of humanistic education. The men at South Mississippi Correctional have encouraged and renewed my belief in the habits of close attention and in-depth discussion. But being incarcerated, even though it sometimes affords periods of timelessness, attention, and care, also works directly against other values of a humanistic education. It can be dangerous to make yourself too empathetic and vulnerable. It can get you in trouble to exercise your critical thinking too much, against an unjust or absurd system.[vii] Under such conditions, how can we, in the words of Angela Davis, “do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system”?[viii]
*****
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden begins with an almost mythic pre-history of the Salinas Valley in California, as Steinbeck biblically creates the stage where much of his own Genesis story will take place.[ix] Steinbeck surveys, as if passing through geological strata, past and present landscapes, trees, and water sources, the lives and migrations of the original native inhabitants, the coming of the Spanish and then Anglo-American settlers with their new place names and new “titles” to the land. Civilization culminates in vast, fertile farms (and in the twin, similarly sedative institutions of the church and the brothel). One longstanding book club member, Lonnie, is from California and has something to add: “There's a prison there now,” he says. In other words, Steinbeck’s biblical epic of the Salinas Valley would need some updating, to bring it into our present age of mass incarceration.[x]
We discuss East of Eden over the course of several meetings. We return repeatedly to the book’s main themes of guilt and responsibility—do you have the choice and freedom to overcome your family curse, your traumatic upbringing? Can everyone be saved, even the most wicked characters be redeemed? Cal—the “Cain” character, the complicated, self-conscious schemer who knows he is not as good nor as loved as his brother Aron, but who wants desperately to be—this Cal resonates with multiple men. One man talks about the difficulties of his own upbringing in Jackson, MS but maintains that, like Cal, he still has his “timshel”—the word Steinbeck used for Cain’s ability to choose goodness. Another participant puts this potential for redemption more simply: “Cal’s my guy.”
On guilt and responsibility, we agree with the character Lee—the cook, philosopher, and beating heart of the story—that guilt can become unproductive and self-indulgent, unless it produces change. And sometimes guilt can also be false or destructive, like the “survivor guilt” one book club member feels towards his army buddies who were not as lucky as he. That kind of guilt is over something you have no control over—much better to feel responsible for things that you can change.
*****
I have my own share of “survivor guilt,” of course. My impressions come from a place of privilege—the privilege of getting to be with the men in this slowed-down, unplugged, more attentive way, but then also getting to leave when we’re done, while they go back to the zone.[xi] I get to feel inspired and connected as an educator, while fellow book club members go back to a space where it may be dangerous to show vulnerability and seek connection.[xii] One book club is certainly no answer to the crisis of mass incarceration, and may even be viewed by some as complicit with the carceral system.[xiii]
Linda Small, a justice-impacted educational activist in Maine, has helped me think my way through this guilt and helplessness: she tells me that we can hope and work towards prison abolition in the future, while still participating in smaller reforms right now that “divert people from the system in the first place”; that “keep people safer or more comfortable while incarcerated”; or that “pull people out of the system sooner than later.”[xiv] Perhaps Steinbeck’s Lee would say this digression has been self-indulgent. That we should concentrate on what little good we can do, within the spheres we can control. As the incarcerated writer Malakki advises prison educators, “It’s not about you.”[xv] People who are incarcerated want educational opportunities for their own reasons.[xvi] And we are all responsible to think beyond prison education and to construct communities that would make incarceration uncommon. Programs for our incarcerated neighbors are essential, but just as essential are bail funds, petitions and pardons for the innocent, sentencing reforms, reentry support, affordable housing, fulfilling job opportunities, and more.[xvii]
*****
One summer we read Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo. When it got to the point where Edmond is unjustly condemned to solitary confinement in a dungeon on the Chateau d’If, the men—a number of whom had spent time in “the hole”—pointed out how realistic the depiction of his isolation is. His loss of the sense of time. His stages of grief. Even how finely-tuned his senses become. One reader said that Dumas must have been or must have known someone who was incarcerated, because of how realistically the author writes about the senses in solitary confinement—how you come to know people only by their sound, by their voice.
When Edmond finally meets the older prisoner on the other side of the wall, the supposedly insane priest, Abbé Faria, the men were struck by the mentor-protégé relationship that develops between the two prisoners. Talking about Faria’s father-son relationship with Dantès, and about the human need for companionship, a reader named Chris pointed out that, for incarcerated folks who don’t get to see their loved ones as often as they’d like, friends inside can become as close as family or as a brother, and like the Abbé Faria can help you get oriented, get “street smart.” The Abbé Faria, who is resourceful and creative—making things, studying, keeping track of time, remembering, writing a book, improving himself—is a model of how to resist the experience of incarceration: “we call that doing the time, not letting the time do you,” another man said. These, and so many others, are the insights that come with the care and attention these readers give.
*****
I tell the men how grateful I am for them. I tell them, as I often do, that I learn every bit as much from them as they learn from me, that we are all educators.[xviii] They thank me for coming. The regular meetings of the book club, one participant has told me, are like “flowers on the highway” or “mile markers” that help mark the passage of incarcerated time.
When the man and child of McCarthy’s The Road share their hot breakfast of ham and biscuits in someone else’s shelter, the boy asks his father: “Do you think we should thank the people?” “The people?” “The people who gave us all this.” The child improvises a prayer of thanks to the “dear people” who gathered these provisions and did not live to enjoy them—people who are now, he hopes, in heaven. McCarthy seems to be saying that even in a future where organized religion, theological knowledge, even books themselves have become obsolete, and where the heavens are silent and prayers go unanswered, humans will continue to generate rituals and reasons for gratitude. As he writes elsewhere, “Evoke the forms. When you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe life into them.”
Joseph Peterson teaches history at the University of Southern Mississippi. This essay draws in part on comments he presented at the Mississippi Book Festival in 2023 and 2024, and elsewhere. He is grateful to the Mississippi Humanities Council and the McMullan Family Foundation for their guidance and sponsorship of prison book clubs in Mississippi; to staff at South Mississippi Correctional Institution for their organizational work and assistance; to Linda Small for her advice and feedback; to Matt Casey for feedback, and Corinne Dekkers and Bafumiki Mocheregwa for their collaboration; and above all, to the men of SMCI’s book club, for allowing him to read and learn alongside them.
[i] Insights throughout this paragraph, inspired by Rebecca Ginsburg, “Introduction,” in Rebecca Ginsburg, ed. Critical Perspectives on Teaching in Prison: Students and Instructors on Pedagogy Behind the Wall, (New York: Routledge, 2019), 4.
[ii] Kyes Stevens, presentation at “Changing Lives: Supporting Incarcerated Students in the Prison Classroom and Beyond” (Mississippi Consortium for Higher Education in Prison Convening), Jackson, MS. Sept. 23, 2022.
[iii] Inspired by Patrick Alexander, presentation at “Changing Lives: Supporting Incarcerated Students in the Prison Classroom and Beyond.”
[iv] According to a report by Disability Rights Mississippi, “The only contact that offenders oftentimes have with a mental health professional is when they are exhibiting suicidal ideations or actions.” Disability Rights Mississippi, “Cruel and Unusual Punishment in Mississippi Prisons: A Tale of Abuse, Discrimination & Undue Death Sentences,” 7. http://www.drms.ms/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DRMS-MDOC-Report.pdf
[v] D. Graham Burnett, “History, the Humanities, and the Human,” in ed. Darrin M. McMahon, History and Human Flourishing, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 41.
[vi] Patrick Rodriguez, panel comments made at the Mississippi Book Festival, August 2023.
[vii] Tessa Hicks Peterson, “Healing Pedagogy from the Inside Out,” 178-180.
[viii] Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 103.
[ix] This interpretation is not original with me, but I cannot now find where I read it.
[x] On California’s massive expansion of prisons and of the prison industry, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, (London and New York: Verso), 2022. See also Kay Gabriel, “Abolition as Method [Review of Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation],” in Dissent (Fall 2022). https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/abolition-as-method/
[xi] Anne Dalke with Judy Cohen, “Untimeliness; or, What can Happen in the Waiting,” in Ginsburg, ed. Critical Perspectives on Teaching in Prison, 138-140.
[xii] Malakki (Ralph Bolden), “An Open Letter to Prison Educators,” and Tessa Hicks Peterson, “Healing Pedagogy from the Inside Out: The Paradox of Liberatory Education in Prison,” in Rebecca Ginsburg, ed. Critical Perspectives on Teaching in Prison: Students and Instructors on Pedagogy Behind the Wall, (New York: Routledge, 2019), 17-18, 178-180.
[xiii] Wilson Gilmore, 218, 229-231.
[xiv] Linda Small, comments made at the National Convening “Inside & Out: The Humanities and Mass Incarceration,” March 14-16, 2024, Chicago, IL; and in a follow-up email of 6/11/2024.
[xv] Malakki (Ralph Bolden), “An Open Letter to Prison Educators,” 18.
[xvi] Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 55-59; Russel X, “Hope for Leaving a Legacy,” in Ginsburg, ed. Critical Perspectives on Teaching in Prison, 19-21.
[xvii] Cp. Tessa Hicks Peterson, “Healing Pedagogy from the Inside Out: The Paradox of Liberatory Education in Prison,” 180-184.
[xviii] Again, inspired by Patrick Alexander.
Wonderful, thought-provoking essay. The author makes such a strong case for the humanities.