Allen Boyer: “The Other Mississippi: A State in Conflict With Itself,” by David Sansing

*Editor’s Note: Dr. David Sansing will read and sign copies of “The Other Mississippi” on Tuesday, September 4, 2018, at 5 p.m., at Off-Square Books.

Professor David Sansing.

“Mississippi is not just a state of the Union, it is a state of mind,” David Sansing remarks. “It is more than a constituency, it is a condition.” As a professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi – as someone who made those observations at the first Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1974 – Dr. Sansing knows Mississippi in all these ways. “The Other Mississippi,” his most recent book, illuminates them all.

“The Other Mississippi” is a collection of addresses and short pieces. Each takes an unfamiliar angle or studies a detail. There are essays here on the Mississippi state flag, Mississippi writers, the Bilbo Purge, the Meredith Crisis, the derivation of the nickname “Ole Miss,” and the origins of Colonel Rebel – apparently modeled on James “Blind Jim” Ivy (1872-1955), a black peanut vendor and campus personality who led cheers at football games.

LQC Lamar.

Personalities have their place here. They include Sallie Reneau, who fought to establish a Mississippi state college for women; soprano Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield of Natchez, who was born into slavery but performed for Queen Victoria; and Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, the moody math professor who got his job because his father-in-law was chancellor. Toward the end come memorable short essays that originated as eulogies – for Oxford mayor John Leslie, Governor Bill Waller and his first lady Carroll Waller, and longtime Ole Miss administrator Dr. Ron Borne.

“The Other Mississippi” is a response, or a counterpoint, to James Silver’s classic “Mississippi: The Closed Society.” The other Mississippi has the same outline and shares the same landmarks as the Mississippi that people think they know. It is not an alternative version of the state. The other Mississippi has always existed; it has simply been forgotten or overlooked or blatantly ignored.

Mississippians cross into the other Mississippi when an unexpected fact or outlook up-ends their previous understanding of their home. Sansing recalls looking into the other Mississippi as a teenager, when his boss at the A&P tried and failed to explain why another teenage employee, a black youth who was Sansing’s friend, would not be at the store’s Christmas party. Sansing crossed over into the other Mississippi when he got his first teaching job, at Perkinston Junior College. But the other Mississippi is not defined by race or profession. Sansing recalls that he first encountered the region when he was five or six, growing up in Greenville, in Delta terrain as flat as a flannel-cake, and a playmate told him for the first time about hills.

The subtitle of this book speaks of conflict (and the state has seen its share of that). It might better have been “A State in Conversation With Itself.” Readers will find new facts and provocative connections here, no matter which Mississippi they customarily inhabit.

For more information about Sansing’s story, read his Q&A here. 

“The Other Mississippi: A State In Conflict With Itself.” By David Sansing. Nautilus Publishing. 342 pages. $24.95.

Allen Boyer is the Book Editor of HottyToddy.com. He is a native of Oxford who lives and writes in Staten Island.