Ralph Eubanks's Reading List

"I love Native Guard . Natasha says that poetry is “necessary utterance.” Native Guard is “necessary utterance.” It captures a story of Mississippi that had been effectively silenced: The story of African American soldiers who guarded captured Confederates. This is a story that complicates narratives about the South. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The poems are not only about this native guard. Many of them are very personal, like the poem ‘Miscegenation.’ Trethewey talks about how in Mississippi, where she grew up, her birth was a crime because interracial unions were forbidden by law. One of Natasha’s great themes is memory. It’s not only personal memory, but what we choose to remember about our cultural landscape as well as what we choose to forget. The ‘lost cause’ is a body of pathology, a pack of myths. Myths help us deal with complex aspects of our culture. They can be helpful until they obscure reality and keep us from seeing the truth. The myth of the “lost cause” really obscured reality. The reality is that the South did not secede for noble reasons. The Confederacy’s cause was slavery. As I said, a myth is problematic when it obscures reality; the cult of the ‘lost cause’ is problematic. It was a way for Southerners to avoid the ignominy of their loss and the immorality of their aims."

"I love this book. It’s about how the past forms a person and a landscape. Spirits enter the story and haunt her characters. Jesmyn captures the landscape so profoundly well. The character Leonie, one of the three narrators in the novel, is going to get her husband out of Parchman Farm, a maximum security prison in a corner of the Delta. Leonie’s husband calls the prison a place for the dead, which fits with the way other Mississippi writers characterize it. Parchman, I believe, is like a physical wound on the landscape of the Mississippi Delta. Jesmyn never describes Parchman as a wound, yet through the intimacy of her prose you sense that she feels the same way I do about the place. And the book sheds light on how the Gulf Coast sees the rest of the state. People from the Gulf Coast say once you are above Forest County, it feels like a no man’s land because the intermingled Creole culture that distinguishes the Gulf Coast disappears above that line."

"It’s based on the true story of an African American woman who became the postmistress of a town in the Delta and her struggle with assuming a position of an authority in a majority Black place that was dominated by white men. The story takes place in the fictional town of Loring, Mississippi, which is Steve’s native Indianola, Mississippi. We’ve known each other since we were 19. Because I know Steve so well, I know it’s based on that story and it’s also Steve’s way of confronting the place where he grew up. The post mistress whose story inspired Steve’s was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt. After Roosevelt, President Woodrow Wilson effectively shut Black people out of the civil service. So, it is mirroring that story. The history and fictional world fit together. A friend of mine, Tommy Franklin, said “a good novelist lies his ass off but he tells the truth.” That’s what Steve does. He takes historical facts and builds a story around them to create a broader truth. A Place Like Mississippi tells the story of Mississippi through its literature. When I was asked to write the book, my editor Will McKay said, I think this is a book that should begin in the Delta. My reaction was: absolutely not. The myth is that all of Mississippi literature springs out of the Delta. To dispel that myth, I began the book on the Gulf Coast with Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey, two African American women writing difficult things about the South. Then I move on through the state, using the geographic regions of the state to tell the story of its literature I work up to Oxford, Mississippi, and William Faulkner. The book includes a photograph of 28 working writers living in Oxford, Mississippi, to show Faulkner’s legacy. It was inspired by a photograph of 57 jazz musicians in Harlem taken by Art Kane in 1958 and published in Esquire magazine. I end the book in the Delta at writing class in Parchman prison and examining the story of writers from prison, using the poems of Etheridge Knight, who’s from Mississippi. So, it’s a journey through the state, through its real and imagined landscape and through its literature."

"This book takes a photograph that was published in Life magazine of a group of white men gathered outside of a building at the University of Mississippi, where I teach today, during the tumult over the integration of the institution by James Meredith. One of the men holds a night stick or a baseball bat, suggesting they’re ready to do violence to resist desegregation. Hendrickson tracks down each man in the photograph and traces their stories since the photograph was taken. I love how the book tells the story of what happened outside of the frame of this photo. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He also looks at how resistance to desegregation impacted the descendants of the men in the photo. He traces how the story got handed down to the next generation. It’s almost biblical, which is appropriate for the author who is a former seminarian. He asks if the sins of the father are visited on their sons and daughters."

"I love teaching this book because it says so many things about Southern place and space. And it privileges the narrative of the outsider. One character, Boubacar, who came from Somalia, is learning to navigate the Delta. The jukebox which the title refers to lives in a small town grocery store owned by a Chinese immigrant, like a great many that once existed in the Delta. Shearer tells the story of newcomers to this small town and shows how the Delta looks through fresh eyes. I really admire Celestial Jukebox as a work of literature. First, Faulkner probably never said it. In My Mississippi , the writer Willie Morris assigned those words to Faulkner because, he said, he felt it was something that Faulkner should’ve said. Willie was on to something; that’s a lot of what Faulkner’s work is about. There is so much in Mississippi, which Faulkner mined for his fiction, that can explain this country. It’s time that we stop thinking of Faulkner as a Southern writer or a Mississippi writer and start thinking of him as an American writer or an international writer. By getting readers to understand the complexities of a place like Mississippi, Faulkner helps us understand a lot about the rest of the world."