Rooted Book Club: THE STEPS WE TAKE by Ellen Ann Fentress

Our January 2024 Book Selection

Our first Rooted Book Club meeting takes place one week from today—on Monday, January 22nd at 7 p.m. CST. We will be reading and discussing The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning with author Ellen Ann Fentress. In addition to being a memoirist, Ellen Ann is an accomplished journalist, filmmaker, teacher, and podcaster. She produced and directed the documentary film Eyes on Mississippi on iconic journalist Bill Minor. And she is the founder and editor of Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible for Southern Schools, which publishes first-person accounts from former segregation academy graduates like herself along with essays about the public school experience.

You don’t have to read the book to attend the book club meeting, but, of course, I hope you do! You can order a copy from our partners, Lemuria Books (in Jackson) and Friendly City Books (in Columbus), or purchase a book through our affiliate Bookshop link.

Here is the official description of The Steps We Take:

Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She’s also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. “Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location,” she observes in The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. As a good southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others. As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter. Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband’s business. She followed the scripts she was handed by society.

But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern—make that American—white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia. For Fentress, her dodges both behind her front door and beyond became impossible to miss. Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white “segregation academies,” a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the Washington Post, Slate, Forbes and other publications.

The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.

Have you started reading The Steps We Take? Is there a particular essay or chapter that stands out to you? What question(s) would you like to ask Ellen Ann?

Note: If you registered for the Book Club before today, please check your email for an updated Zoom link. Don’t hesitate to email me with any questions!