Landscapes of the Heart

For anyone who wants to understand the South and particularly the southern state that has in many ways represented both the worst and the best of the region, Elizabeth Spencer's LANDSCAPES OF THE HEART is an absolute must-read. I know nothing except perhaps Harry Crews' poignant autobiography, A CHILDHOOD, that approaches it in realizing both a southern world and an insider's intimate experience of that world. Spencer's nuanced prose and her ability to recreate her childhood in Carrollton, Mississippi, makes it hard to put her memoir aside. By the last page, we too have become Mississippians of a certain time and place. Don't miss this fine book. I've spent a professional and avocational lifetime studying the literature and culture of the South, where I was born and where I have chosen to live. One of the things that has puzzled me most about this region has been Mississippi, a state that lies just across the Mississippi River from my home state, but in its culture and attitudes is far distant from the world in which I grew up and have lived. Alabama, Georgia, East Texas, the Carolinas, Tennessee---all are distinctive. But Mississippi strikes me as a world apart even in the Deep South, a world of its own, inward-looking even at the dawn of a new century. And yet the state probably has produced more highly creative and accomplished people, per capita, than any other southern state. Forget for a moment the writers. Consider Jim Henson, father of the Muppets; Elizabeth Hazen, a pioneer chemist who discovered the first fungicidal antibiotic; Leontyn Price, whose full soprano voice changed the Metropolitan Opera; Craig Claiborne, longtime food critic for The NY Times who changed a nation's attitude toward food; Oprah Winfrey, who created a unique career; Walter Payton, Brett Farve, Red Barber in sports; Sela Ward and James Earl Jones, actors; Shelby Foote, the historian. Consider the musicians: Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Buffett, Bo Diddley, Faith Hill and Tammy Wynette, to name only a few. And then there are the writers: Wm Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Norris, Elizabeth Spencer, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Walker Percy, for instance. And they are still coming. It is simply impossible to imagine Southern and American culture without these and many other creative Mississippians. What is there about the state, which in so many ways still looks inward and backward, that accounts for the astonishing achievements of so many of its citizens? Elizabeth Spencer's brilliant memoir helped me understand the world of Mississippi and its effects on bright, creative people as nothing else has ever done, including Faulkner's powerful fiction, almost all of it set in his home state. In a prose both familiar and evocative, Spencer pulls us into the life of a little girl growing up in a state that has no real city, that was made up of little towns where everyone had a clear identity and connections in other little towns all over the

The author gives you a feeling of what it was like to grow up in the South, to be a citizen of that time and place, but to move away enough to see it in perspective. Many mentioned names and relationships useful for genealogy, too.

Miss Spencer's vivid comparisons of life in North and South Mississippi are especially interesting to those of us who have made this migration; she writes of the beauty of church names on the Mississippi Coast ("Our Lady of the Gulf," etc.) and how the construction of Interstate 10 changed things forever. Her description of the rustic conditions faced by Junior college teachers of the 1940s is revealing and a rather sad commentary on a system that took a long time to improve. The award she will receive in October from the Mississippi Library Association is much deserved.