Rooted Re-Run: W. Ralph Eubanks
"Seeking to understand the place where I am from has become a spiritual necessity."
This month, while I’m out and about promoting my new book, Split the Baby, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite interviews from the Rooted archives, sans paywall. This week’s interview with W. Ralph Eubanks is from 2023. I’m so excited to read Ralph’s forthcoming book, When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became It’s Poorest Land, which is now available for pre-order.
Where are you from?
I’m from south Mississippi, a small town called Mount Olive that stands right in the middle of the Piney Woods region. When I was young, I thought of my part of Mississippi as a place where nothing much happened. As I have grown older, I have come to see how wrong I was.
Why did you leave Mississippi? Where did you go?
Like many ambitious young black people from a small town in Mississippi, I felt I had no other choice but to leave. My high school years were spent in Mississippi during the early years of school integration, and if there is one insight gained from that time it is how black ambition can be constrained by any number of structures. It’s not that those structures didn’t exist in other places. It’s just that I felt I needed to live in a place where I could grow into whatever I imagined for myself.
As soon as I graduated from the University of Mississippi, I first went to Europe and spent a great deal of time in County Leitrim in Ireland, a place that oddly reminded me of the Piney Woods, with its green rolling hills. It was odd to be so far away from home yet to be constantly reminded of home in the landscape. Then I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a place more foreign than Ireland and where I felt liberated from the burdens of the South. By the time I entered my graduate program in English Language and Literature, I had made my Southern accent virtually nonexistent. For example, I learned to say the difference between a “p-i-n” and a “p-e-n.” After graduate school, I ended up in Washington, DC, where I have lived for more than 40 years. As Zora Neale Hurston would have said, “I erased the map of Dixie from my tongue.”
Why did you return to Mississippi?
In 2015, well into middle age, I found myself unemployed and floundering. It was a very confusing time in my life, since I have been working since my days as a teen-age sack and stock boy at my local Piggly Wiggly. Through a stroke of luck, I ended up teaching at Millsaps College as the Eudora Welty Visiting Scholar in Southern Studies. That is why Millsaps College is such a special place for me; it was the place that welcomed me home. When I needed somewhere to go and sort out my life, there were no questions asked. After years as a black Southern expatriate and sometime critic of the place that shaped the man I have become, my loyalties were not scrutinized when I decided to come back home to sort things out. In spite of everything, Mississippi left the door open for me and had my room ready.
If someone were to ask me what stands at the center of my writing, I would have to say it is the search for home. And there is no need to go looking for a place to call home unless you are lost.
Was the Mississippi you returned to the same one you had left?
No, definitely not. I felt I could be my authentic self here in a way I could not have imagined as a young person. Of course, there were a few things that were different. What was especially difficult coming back was that so many people did not see me as black, but thought I was white. As I wrote in an essay for The Common, it was difficult being viewed as racially ambiguous, particularly since I remember segregation and went to segregated schools. The battle to change the flag was heating up when I arrived—it was just a few months after the murders at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina—and Donald Trump held a rally in Madison in March, just three months after my arrival. I went to the rally to observe and quickly realized that while Mississippi had changed since I left, the old forces I remember were still in existence. That rally served as a reality check and is one of the reasons I keep one foot in Mississippi and another back in my adopted home of Washington, DC.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
If someone were to ask me what stands at the center of my writing, I would have to say it is the search for home. And there is no need to go looking for a place to call home unless you are lost.
Although I have lived an unbelievably lucky and happy life, I have been lost in ways that no map could ever remedy. In the moment that I sat down on the same patch ground where I came from—on the exact spot where the house I grew up in had been flattened by a tornado years before—I realized that both the place I had run to and the place I had run from were both home. Washington, DC, was a place I had constructed for myself to feel at ease in the world and Mississippi was my true spiritual home, even though the place still puzzled me. Both the North and the South are a part of me, but Mississippi left its mark on me, affecting what I saw in the world as well as how I felt about what I saw. Since returning to Mississippi I have come to realize it can never be escaped; the place leaves an invisible tattoo on your soul that can never be removed.
How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?
What has been special is the renewal of ties with friends from high school. When I was given the key to the city in my hometown of Mount Olive, so many of my former classmates came and it really touched me. And it is my fellow writers in Oxford and faculty members at the University of Mississippi, where I teach now. All of these people keep me grounded.
Since I am working on a book on the Delta, I have spent the summer living in Clarksdale, which is the hometown of my dear friend Edward Vaughn, who died just ten years ago. Being in his hometown has made me feel connected to him. But being in the Delta has helped make new connections as well.
Since returning to Mississippi I have come to realize it can never be escaped; the place leaves an invisible tattoo on your soul that can never be removed.
Recently I took part in a play by StoryWorks in Clarksdale, which does journalism-based theater. The play was called “Mrs. Carter and the Sunflower Seven.” It is the story of the children of Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter and their children who integrated the schools in the Delta town of Drew in 1965. I played the part of activist Amzie Moore in the play—Moore helped the Carter family after they were kicked off their plantation when they integrated the schools—and got to work with Gloria Carter Dickerson, one of the Carter children who integrated the schools. Many of the Carter children were present and came onstage as part of the post-performance discussion.
Those three performances with the young people of Drew and others from the community not only helped me with my writing. It helped anchor me to the place I am writing about.
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?
When I tell people who don’t know me very well back in DC that I am writing a book on the Mississippi Delta, they immediately think that I am writing a book about the blues. Of course, the blues is a narrative theme that runs through almost everything I am writing. You can’t discuss the power dynamic of the Delta, both the past and the present, without talking about or referencing the blues. But back among my neighbors in DC, even when I go into an in-depth explanation and say that I am writing about the people of the Delta and how their struggles with inequality mirror the rise of income inequality nationally, I am still seen as writing about the mythic land of crossroads deals with the devil made with a mojo hand.
For years, we as a nation have paid a great deal of attention to the stories of the people who left the Delta, the children of the Great Migration. Instead, I am interested in the stories of the people who have stayed in the Delta. Or those who have chosen to return, to help transform the place.
Mississippi has a mythology many connect with images of Alan Parker’s 1988 film “Mississippi Burning.” The Mississippi Delta has its own mythology, even though it was central to the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. In writing a book for a general audience on the Delta, one of my toughest jobs as a writer is to get my potential readers to see aspects of the Delta other than the blues: its physical beauty, the richness of its history—particularly the rich ethnic history of the place, which includes the stories of immigrants from Italy, China, and Lebanon—and the resilience of its people. For years, we as a nation have paid a great deal of attention to the stories of the people who left the Delta, the children of the Great Migration. Instead, I am interested in the stories of the people who have stayed in the Delta. Or those who have chosen to return, to help transform the place.
How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?
Place has an ongoing and lasting impact on human experience, and as Ralph Ellison noted, “Geography is fate.” Being from Mississippi has shaped how I see the world.
As I have learned since my return to Mississippi, there can never be a full repatriation to the place you once called home once you have left. A divided sense of self becomes a part of your identity. Part of returning home is accepting a feeling of exile amidst the familiar. One of the ways I have found to cope with my feelings of displacement is to reconnect with Mississippi the place: its geography, literature, and its history. Seeking to understand the place where I am from has become a spiritual necessity.
What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?
I have come to understand how disconnected we as Mississippians are from our landscape. Even for people who have grown up in Mississippi, the Mississippi River exists more as an idea than a real river. From the Great River Road in the Mississippi Delta—a road that runs parallel to the river—one can sense the Father of the Waters across the horizon with massive cotton fields heading toward the river. But the levees that were built to tame the Mississippi obscure the view. And as you drive the road South, there are few places to get close to the river.
When a flood closed the Great River Road State Park in 2011—which was where I first encountered the great river—the state lost a recreation area that introduced its young people to the beauty and power of the Mississippi River. Today at the park, which is only open for day use and is in a poor state of repair since it has been neglected for more than a decade since the flood, you can visit a beautiful oxbow lake—those are lakes formed when the river changes its course—but you can’t get close to the river. And more than 90 percent of the land along the river in the state of Mississippi is privately owned. So, a generation of Mississippians truly have little direct relation to the river that gives their state its name. I think that needs to change.
The way Mississippi has lived up to my expectations is by engaging with the river. The river has become a part of me, the way I connect with the place I am from, and I have become an evangelist for getting more people to engage with it.
Place has an ongoing and lasting impact on human experience, and as Ralph Ellison noted, “Geography is fate.” Being from Mississippi has shaped how I see the world.
What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?
I wish more people saw Mississippi as a mirror to America, which is how I see it. Contemporary Southern writing, particularly from Mississippi, confronts the realities and complexities of our current moment and provides a window into the power of storytelling to foster cultural change. The South, especially Mississippi, has something to say. I wish more of the country listened to our writers and thinkers.
Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?
I wish more people would read the work of Ellen Douglas, who was born Josephine Haxton in Natchez and lived and wrote in Greenville. Her story “On the Lake” is a masterpiece. And I think everyone should read William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge. Attaway is also from Greenville and went on to write for television and a few songs for Harry Belafonte, like the famous “Banana Boat Song.”
If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?
That is easy: on education and educational enrichment. I’ve come to see that profoundly during my time in the Delta, through the work of people like Gloria Dickerson at WeTogether2Create Change and the Sunflower County Freedom Project. Folks from Mississippi should think of contributing to the work of both groups.
Mississippi is a very poor state and I realize we cannot educate ourselves out of poverty. As I travel around the Delta, I have encountered so many bright and talented young people. And every day I think about how much richer their lives would be if we spent more on education. The people of the Mississippi Delta are this state’s untapped resource.
Doc Eubanks is one of the most important minds that Mississippi has produced, in the tradition of poet, editor, and literary theorist Dr. Jerry W. Ward.
Thanks for reposting. One never tires of reading or hearing Mr. Eubanks.