Party Cheers Voluminous Look at Dixie

Around the courthouse square that inspired the novels of native son William Faulkner, this university town threw the oddest sort of weekend literary and academic street party.

The occasion was the publication of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Ten years in the making, the book was a project of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

Bluegrass and Gumbo

While a bluegrass band played and people ate gumbo, greens and even black-eyed-pea pate, the 1,656-page encyclopedia was hailed as the most complete and unusual compendium ever written on the best and the worst of Southern culture. The work of a team of editors and 800 scholars and writers, including “Roots” author Alex Haley who wrote the volume’s foreword, the book puts together essays and entries dealing with everything from lynchings to mule trading, from nuclear pollution to basket making and the blues.

“This encyclopedia is going to be a torch to light paths in the future,” William Ferris, one of the book’s co-editors and director of the university’s culture center, proclaimed to the hundreds gathered in the street Saturday.

Amid the late-afternoon humidity, audience members cooled themselves with yellow, funeral home-style hand fans as they listened to Ferris’ thoughtful remarks, which were sharply contrasted by his outfit, best described as a la Elvis and Southern tacky. The silky black jumpsuit with white fringe and tiny appliqued mirrors had its zippered front open nearly to the navel.

Still, Mississippi-bred, Yale-educated Ferris seemed to embody the spirit of the book, which dozens of people lugged under their arms after buying them in a local bookstore, Square Books.

Bookstore proprietor Richard Howorth organized the “encyloparty” that included a Guinness World Book of Records-type of book signing. As many as 50 contributors and editors sat outside at tables. They signed inscriptions for the scores of encyclopedia buyers who had traveled from throughout the South and patiently waited in line for hours, straining under the weight of their purchases.

“If you carry this book around, you will not only grow in knowledge but in your physical fitness,” University of Mississippi Chancellor Gerald Turner told the crowd.

Inside Square Books, a sign promoted the 8-pound plus, $50 book this way: “Only $5.98 per lb. Same as catfish fillets.”

In all seriousness, though, Howorth said: “This is the most important thing the university has done in the last 10 years, in terms of measurable academic achievement. Plus it’s truly a fabulous book.”

Even so, Howorth said he was amazed that he sold 290 copies during the three-hour signing.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Press published the book and though the official release date is September, this month the volume has begun appearing in bookstores.

In many respects the party, which lasted well into the night with three bands playing blues, “white-trash rock” and Cajun zydeco at clubs on the square, reflected the encyclopedia’s scope of serious to fanciful.

During the signing, four graduate students were wreathed head-to-toe in leafy, green kudzu, the erosion-control vine rumored to have engulfed cows and cars wholesale in the countryside.

Oxford writer Larry Brown, wearing a toy pistol in his jeans’ waistband and with his shirt totally unbuttoned, came as “The Misfit,” a Flannery O’Connor fictional character.

But nationally known writer Barry Hannah, who teaches at the university, backed down on his promise to come dressed as Mississippi’s grand dame of literature, Eudora Welty, who did not attend.

Jane Rule Burdine, mayor of nearby Taylor (pop. 200), did wear a curly blond wig and an orange lace dress with a low-cut bodice for her Dolly Parton look. And one local lawyer dressed as the landmark desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. A huge, V-shaped piece of brown cardboard covered him and attached was a piece of wood inscribed with: “of education.”

As book buyers made their way through the line, contributors gave them samplings. “You can use raw okra to make a Halloween mask,” New Orleans writer Carolyn Kolb told people. “Just stick it directly on your forehead and nose. It’ll hold.”

Contributor Jack Bass startled one man by telling about his entry: the Orangeburg, S.C., Massacre. Two years before the 1970 tragedy at Kent State University where four white students were slain, a lesser-known but similar killing occurred when state highway patrolmen killed three black students at South Carolina State College.

With the sweep of his hand, University of Tennessee historian James C. Cobb, a major consultant for the book, gestured toward 40 to 50 people in line. “This may be a Bible for the converted, a book of cultural self-reinforcement for Southerners.”

But, he said, the project represents “an attempt to assert a cultural identity apart from one of just backwardness.

“Was Southern religion, Southern folk culture, Southern music distinct enough to say that the South was really different?” he asked. “Or was it superfluous to the fact that the South stood apart because it was the most racist, most violent, most ignorant, most impoverished part of the country?”

Co-editor Charles Wilson said the book exhaustively proves that the South is distinct in its triumphs and tragedies. The book’s main scholarly achievement, he said, rests with its detailing the contributions of Southern blacks in the South and throughout the world. And, he said, “The book looks at Southern culture as a creation of both whites and blacks.”

Beyond that, he said, it deals with other ethnic groups and their cross-cultural elements, such as kosher grits.

One contributor discovered new frontiers in his own area of food expertise: Goo Goo Clusters, the caramel, marshmallow, peanuts and chocolate treat. Tom Rankin, a folklorist from Mississippi’s Delta State University, said he signed the book of one woman who spun this tale: Her late husband, because of an ailment, had been under doctor’s orders not to eat Goo Goo Clusters. After he died recently, the maid cleaned under his death bed. There she discovered the floor littered with Goo Goo wrappers.

The night before the book signing, writer Willie Morris in an interview spoke of why he felt all this focusing on the South was not just self-indulgent navel gazing.

Morris, one of the 250 individuals whose biographies are in the book, said, “It is not a regional book per se. It’s a national book because the South is America writ large.”

Morris--a Mississippi-born writer-in-residence at the university, a novelist and a former chief editor of Harper’s magazine--added: “There’s something in the past of the South that can instruct the nation. The South possesses a sense of tragedy, guilt and failure and, at the same time, nobility and guts and courage. These are lessons for the rest of America. But I just don’t know if America cares about this anymore.”