Et tu, Leake county?

Praise for Michael Bible’s Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City

– Michael Bible may have hit what a lot of us were trying, a singular new voice for CEO’s to slackers. He’s so open, so easy, so fluid, you’ll smile with joy turning every page. — Barry Hannah

– Did I read this or did I dream it? A sharp and elegant book, full of surprises and delights, about to burst with barely concealed emotion, but so placid to look at. Like a dream, it is written in a secret code, but it’s as easy to get into as a death cult. Getting out is another story. I promise you’ll read it again as soon as you’re done. — Jack Pendarvis

The Lyric Theatre - Tupelo

What became the Lyric Theatre was built in 1912. Mr. R. F. Goodlett canvased the area seeking financial backers and within a week had secured enough funds to begin construction. The Comos, as the building was originally named, was designed as a vaudeville theater and included space for several commercial offices. Because its sturdy brick walls made the Lyric one of the few buildings to escape the fury of the 1936 tornado unscathed, the building was pressed into melancholy duty as a make-shift temporary mortuary in the aftermath of that tragedy.

Monta Ellis - NBA superstar

Kid Rock - Jackson, Mississippi

Pilgrimage   by Natasha Trethewey

Vicksburg, Mississippi


Here, the Mississippi carved
            its mud-dark path, a graveyard

for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
            Here, the river changed its course,

turning away from the city
            as one turns, forgetting, from the past—

the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up
            above the river's bend—where now

the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.
            Here, the dead stand up in stone, white

marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand
            on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;

they must have seemed like catacombs,
            in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor,

candlelit, underground. I can see her
            listening to shells explode, writing herself

into history, asking what is to become
            of all the living things in this place?

This whole city is a grave. Every spring—
Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle

with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders
            in the long hallways, listen all night

to their silence and indifference, relive
            their dying on the green battlefield.

At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—
            preserved under glass—so much smaller

than our own, as if those who wore them
            were only children. We sleep in their beds,

the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped
            in flowers—funereal—a blur

of petals against the river's gray.
            The brochure in my room calls this

living history. The brass plate on the door reads
Prissy's Room. A window frames

the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,
            the ghost of history lies down beside me,

rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

July 1936

Mississippi River Bridge

Club Paradise

Mississippi Queen

Faulkner

Bird Like Me

Photograph by Birney Imes
Freedom Village Juke, Washington County 1985.
from the book Juke Joint, University of Mississippi Press. © 1990

Bailey Magnet School

Built in 1938, Baily Magnet’s art-deco building has been marveled as an architectural wonder. It was recently voted as a top architectural site by the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects. According to the Washington Post, its architect, N.W. Overstreet, made the cover of a 1938 Life magazine for the school’s forward look and his revolutionary technique of formed-in-place concrete. The marvel lies in the details which include carved stone reliefs of Andrew Jackson (the namesake of the city of Jackson) with his troops and Chief Pushmataha with his braves, allies in the Indian wars.