Tag: Mississippi

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Man Running Across Mississippi for LGBTQ+ Rights

Mikah Meyers


Mikah Meyers is a running man and he’s running across the width of Mississippi in the month of February to raise awareness for LGBTQ+ rights. Meyers, who attended the University of Memphis, started a program called Outside Safe Spaces (OSS) to help create more welcoming outdoor spaces for LGBTQ+ people.

Outside Safe Space Pin

After visiting every U.S. national park in 2018, Meyers noticed that outdoor and rural spaces were not as welcoming to LGBTQ+ people, which prompted him to create OSS. A symbol that looks like a rainbow-colored tree serves as a non-verbal way to signify that people in those spaces welcome LGBTQ+ people. 

This running adventure started in September 2020 when Meyers decided to run across the state of Minnesota to bring awareness to the OSS program.

After the Minnesota trip, Meyers wanted to expand his reach. He did a poll on his Instagram asking followers which state they felt was the most homophobic in America. Mississippi was the unfortunate winner of that survey. So, Meyers put on his running shoes and headed to Mississippi. 

“Someone shared that they are a crisis counselor for the Trevor Project Lifeline (LGBTQ suicide hotline) and the majority of their calls come from Florida and Mississippi,” said Meyers.

“I mapped it out and at 170 miles and my six-mile Minnesota daily average, I could cross the state in 28 days,” he said. “Perfect timing for February’s 28-day month and escaping the cold up North.”

So, that part didn’t go quite as planned. Nevertheless, he has persisted even in below-freezing conditions over the past several days. So far, he’s visited the birthplace of Elvis Presley in Tupelo while wearing an Elvis costume on his run. 

At the end of his Mississippi running journey, he plans to have a socially distant finale at Horseshoe Casino in Tunica on February 28th to celebrate his finish. Participants can meet him there at 4 p.m. at the finish line.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

From Scratch: Sara Embrey Bakes Sweet Treats Down on the Farm

CREDIT: Paul Embrey

It takes a lot for a new dish to break into that clique of traditional holiday favorites at the dinner table.

But Sara Embrey’s mini coconut cream pies did just that this past Thanksgiving at our small outdoor family gathering.

Maybe not this Christmas, but in future holiday functions with the family, those little pies everyone was gobbling up will be there with the pumpkin pie, sweet potato and green bean casseroles, and turkey with cornbread dressing.

I asked Ruth McClallen Thompson, who brings the pies, where she gets them. She told me Sara Embrey in Coldwater, Mississippi, bakes them.

So I gave Embrey a call.

Paul Embrey

Sara Embrey with some homemade sweets

“Oh, gosh. My story is not exciting,” Embrey says. “I couldn’t cook when I got married. I didn’t have a clue. My sweet husband cooked the first year. Thank goodness my mother taught me to read. So I know how to read a recipe.

“The first thing I ever cooked was spaghetti. And it was a package, a Lawry’s packaged seasoning. It just told you to add water, and I succeeded.”

Not all of Embrey’s efforts were successful. “I’d put it in the garbage can before my husband got home.”

She took a cake decorating class after they moved to Jackson, Mississippi. Students had to bake a cake before they decorated it. “I would come home with the cake and my husband would very quickly take it to work the next day. He’s all about, ‘Let’s make a dollar here.’

“My family got sick of birthday cakes real quick, so we became pie people — or cobblers or something like that — for birthdays. And you learn to stick candles in that.”

After they moved back to Tate County 30 years ago, Embrey began baking petit fours, which she learned how to make in another class in Jackson, and selling them at little league baseball games and church functions. People began ordering them for their children’s birthday parties.

Embrey branched out to baking other things, including the coconut cream pies. “I kind of put three recipes together on those.”

One recipe was for the filling and another for the topping. “But the bottom part is such a simple thing,” she says. “All the crust is that store-bought cookie dough in those rolls that you cut. Just that with some flour added. You mix that up and put that in your tins and mash it around and make a pie crust.”

Embrey is particularly proud of her lemon-filled cupcakes. “It’s very similar to a lemon icebox pie, [with] that thick custard. I have a certain decorating tip you put down in there and you shoot that stuff down in the cupcake. The topping is some Cool Whip with the filling.”

The Embreys live on a farm, where they have 30 head of cattle. “We moved out to the family farm about six or seven years ago. And listen to me, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m feeding a calf right now.”

Embrey, who doesn’t even have a name for her business, does all her baking in her kitchen. “I have to keep my eye on the Mississippi Cottage Law to make sure I’m okay.”

She bakes everything except wedding cakes, which make her too nervous. “If somebody calls me for a birthday cake or anything, I’ll say, ‘Let me have a picture of what you’re thinking.’ And, I’m going to be very honest. If I feel I can’t do it justice, I’m not going to embarrass you or me.

“This is not going to pay my house note, so I can say, ‘No.’ It’s not something I’m trying to make a living doing, but I have enjoyed doing it. There are some weeks where I may do 400 petit fours. But, as we say at my house, it’s either feast or famine, where [the orders are] massive and then weeks when we’re not doing anything. And that’s the week where you go fish.”

To order, call Embrey at (662) 560-3379 or email sissyembrey@icloud.com.

Categories
News News Blog

Federal Judge Sides With Tennessee in Water Rights Case

Corey Owens/Greater Memphis Chamber

A diagram shows the layer of aquifers underneath Memphis.

Tennessee has not been stealing billions of gallons of Mississippi’s waters for years, according to an opinion issued Thursday in a legal battle over water rights here that began in 2006.

The original suit claimed wells drilled in Memphis siphoned off water that belonged, exclusively, to Mississippi. Mississippi officials wanted the U.S. Supreme Court to recognize the state’s right to the water and wanted Tennessee to pay $615 million for the water Tennessee had already consumed.

But a federal judge working on the case opined against Mississippi’s claim Thursday. Judge Eugene Siler, appointed as Special Master on the water suit, recommended that the suit be dismissed and for the states to share the water.

The core of Siler’s ruling was that the disputed waters flow between many states. Thus, they become an “interstate resource,” meaning rights to the water are held by many states. Mississippi officials claimed the water is stored under their state boundaries and belongs only to them, making the water an “intrastate resource.”

“Mississippi’s claims are simple: Tennessee has, by pumping in Shelby County, Tennessee, taken groundwater that would have remained in Mississippi for centuries,” reads Siler’s ruling. “Over more than a decade of litigation, at every level in the federal court system, the core of Mississippi’s claims has not wavered. Mississippi thinks Tennessee has stolen and continues to steal its water. Easy enough.”

But Siler says surface boundaries and rights are easier when compared to the the “various rock formation and complex hydrology” found underground.

“And Mississippi claims those subsurface differences require distinguishing its water from the water that sits below other states,” Siler said. “Tennessee, on the other hand, thinks any of those geological differences are much ado about nothing. The Special Master agrees with Tennessee.”

Officials in Mississippi claim waters in the Sparta Sand Aquifer are stored only under the Magnolia State, making it an intrastate resource, only available for one state. Mississippi argued that “it owns a fixed portion of the aquifer because it controls the resources within its state boundaries.”

Officials in Tennessee claimed the Sparta and the Memphis Sand Aquifer were connected, making waters there an interstate resource, available for many states.

Siler said both aquifers are part of a much larger aquifer — the Middle Claiborne Aquifer. This massive aquifer lies beneath Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
U.S. Supreme Court

The Memphis Sand comprises much of this aquifer’s northern portion. The Sparta Sand takes up much of the southern portion, according to the suit.

But Mississippi’s suit seeks to separate the two. With that, officials there believe Memphis — specifically Memphis Light, Gas & Water (MLGW) — has “’forcibly siphoned’ off its water to the tune of billions of gallons. And that without modern pumping technology, none of that water would be available to Tennessee.”
[pullquote-1-center] The water and the water pressure in the Sparta Sand are both down because of MLGW’s pumping, according to the suit. Tennessee’s “heist” of groundwater is so fast and so great, Mississippi now has to drill deeper wells. That has increased the cost on Mississippians who rely on the aquifer for their groundwater.

Siler said Mississippi’s claim of a water drawdown proves that the aquifers are connected and, thus, should be a resource shared by the states. Mississippi officials claim, though, that Tennessee can only get the water if they pump it out.

Siler recommends Mississippi and Tennessee simply share the water. However, Mississippi “specifically rejects the application of equitable apportionment to this case.”

U.S. Supreme Court

“While Mississippi acknowledges that the aquifer extends underneath both states, it alleges that the groundwater is stored only underneath Mississippi,” reads the ruling. “In fact, its position is Tennessee can only access the water underneath Mississippi by pumping it out. As a result, Mississippi believes that the groundwater ‘is neither interstate water nor a naturally shared resource.’ Therefore, it claims that Tennessee has no right to the water. Thus, equitable apportionment cannot apply.”

But Siler sided with Tennessee in the case and will recommend to the U.S. Supreme Court that the state should share the water.

“Water is finite,” Siler wrote. “Especially the usable kind. And the Middle Claiborne Aquifer holds lots of it. Unsurprisingly, both Mississippi and Tennessee want it. Luckily, instead of war, the law requires they share it.”

U.S. Supreme Court

Read the Special Master’s report here:

[pdf-1]

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Malco Theatres Begins Phased Reopening

After three months of shutdown, Memphis-based Malco Theatres has announced a plan to reopen all of its movie theaters. Malco owns 33 theaters with more than 340 screens across six states in the Mid-South.

Beginning on Monday, June 15th, Malco will reopen four locations in Mississippi: The Desoto Cinema Grill in Southaven, the Olive Branch Cinema Grill, the Tupelo Commons Cinema Grill, and the Renaissance Cinema Grill in Ridgeland. In Tennessee, the initial wave of reopening includes the Smyrna Cinema; while in Kentucky the Owensboro Cinema Grill will begin screenings on June 15th. In Memphis, the Malco Summer Drive-In remains open seven days a week with a slate of double features across its four screens.

“Malco is very excited to re-open theaters and welcome our customers back,” says Malco President/COO David Tashie. “We have been diligently working on implementing new measures and protocols to ensure the safety of our guests and employees, and we cannot wait for everyone to enjoy a night out experiencing movies on the big screen again.”

At this point in the year, we should be seeing mainline Hollywood studios rolling out their big guns for the summer season, But since the coronavirus pandemic shut down public gatherings in March, the studios have either rescheduled releases or shunted films into streaming services or video on demand. A handful of drive-in theaters across the country have been the only outlet for new releases. The current box office leader is The Wretched, a low-budget horror from IFC that became the first film to sit at number one for more than five weeks since 2017’s Black Panther. The Wretched has brought in $1.1 million since its release on May 1st. For comparison, Black Panther earned $700 million domestically and $1.1 billion worldwide.

Malco Theatres Begins Phased Reopening (2)

The initial offerings include new releases The King of Staten Island, starring SNL alum Peter Davidson and directed by comedy auteur Judd Apatow, and The High Note, a musical comedy featuring Dakota Johnson and Black-ish star Tracee Ellis Ross. There will also be summer classics such as Jaws, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, Madagascar, and the Indiana Jones trilogy, as well as pre-COVID 2020 releases The Invisible Man, Trolls: World Tour, and I Still Believe.

Malco Theatres Begins Phased Reopening

Malco plans to reopen a new batch of theaters every week, with the goal of having the entire network operational by July 14th for the release of Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated, sci fi spy film Tenet.

You can purchase tickets for reserved seating in advance and review the newly implemented pandemic safety measures on the Malco website. 

Categories
News News Feature

CannaBeat: Cannabis Beer & Medical Marijuana in Mississippi

CREDIT: SweetWater/Facebook

A group is pushing to get a medical cannabis initiative on the ballot for the 2020 general election in Mississippi next year, and it’s nearly there.

Medical Marijuana 2020 told The Clarion Ledger newspaper recently that it had two-thirds of the 86,000 signatures it needed to put the issue to Magnolia State voters next year. The group has until September 6th to get the signatures and file them with election officials.

SweetWater/Facebook

SweetWater’s 420 Strain G13 IPA

Canna-Beer

Beverage companies are betting big bucks that you want to drink cannabis beer.

When Molson Coors teamed up with HEXO, a cannabis grower, its CEO said the cannabis-infused beer business could grow to $10 billion annually — and that’s only in Canada.

Anheuser-Busch teamed up with cannabis-grower Tilray recently in a $50-million deal. Constellation Brands, the maker of Modelo and Corona, invested $4 billion in a grower called Canopy Growth.

You can already find cannabis-inspired beers in Memphis, like Pinner by Oskar Blues. SweetWater says its 420 Strain G13 IPA is “not illegal, but it smells like it should be.”

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Tracy Morgan Cancels Tunica Show Over Anti-Gay Mississippi Law

Tracy Morgan

Comedian Tracy Morgan announced that he’s canceling his upcoming appearance at the Horseshoe Casino in Tunica due to Mississippi’s new law allowing for discrimination against LGBT people.

Morgan was supposed to perform on Friday, April 29th. He released the following statement on Tuesday afternoon:

“Tracy did not make this decision lightly. He very much looks forward to rescheduling his tour dates in the area after the ‘Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,’ is either repealed or heavily amended.”

Horseshoe Casino said refunds will be made available for those who’d already purchased tickets.

Earlier this month, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed the law that allows churches, religious charities, and privately held businesses to decline services to LGBT people if doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Oxford Film Festival 2016

The 13th year of the Oxford Film Festival marks the beginning of a new era for Mississippi’s premier film gathering. Since its inception in 2003, the festival had been run as an all-volunteer organization. But last year, executive director Molly Fergusson, operations director Michelle Emanuel, and hospitality director Diala Chaney decided to hang up their clipboards. The festival had gotten too big and needed a new infusion of support to continue.

“When the directors left, the community decided that it was important to continue,” new executive director Melanie Addington says. “The board of directors did some fund-raising to create a full-time position, and that also expanded our sponsorships so we could grow the festival. Basically, we doubled our sponsorships this year as everyone rallied around the idea of letting the festival continue.”

Addington takes over as the festival’s first full-time executive director after more than a decade of volunteering. “I’ve always been a fan of independent film, and I was really glad Oxford had something like this when I moved here. I liked getting involved, and I saw places that I could provide skills I had and help the festival grow. And then I just kept taking on more and more duties, as you do. It’s nice to be doing this full-time instead of on the weekends and instead of sleeping,” she says.

Food + Film

This year, the festival runs five days, beginning on Wednesday, February 17th. “It’s a special ticketed event, Food + Film, so you can eat what you’re seeing on the screen,” Addington says.

The first of six short films about food and drink at the festival’s opening night is director James Martin’s documentary The New Orleans Sazerac, tracing the history of the iconic regional cocktail that has captured the imagination of the current spirits revivalists. Using a number of interviews with Big Easy historians mixed with some careful photographic research and a little snazzy animation, Martin takes the audience all the way back to the dawn of the cocktail age in 1839, when apothecary Antoine Amédée Peychaud first mixed his family’s secret recipe of bitters with brandy, measuring portions with an egg cup known as a coquetier, from which we get the term “cocktail.” The film is detailed and informative, but brief enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, which means it will go down easy with one of its titular cocktails.

Other films at the opening-night event include Vish by Danny Klimetz, Oxford Canteen by Brett Mizelle and Heather Richie, and a pair of films about barbecue by filmmaker Joe York. “It’s a big eating and movie-watching festival,” Addington says.

Memphis Connections

Bluff City filmmakers will be out in force at this year’s festival. Friday night at 7:45 p.m. is the Mississippi premiere of The Keepers, Sara Kaye Larson and Joann Self Selvidge’s documentary about the people behind the scenes at the Memphis Zoo. It’s another chance for Mid-Southerners to see the film that won Best Documentary at the 2015 Indie Memphis Film Festival, playing to a pair of sold-out crowds.

Self Selvidge also codirected the documentary Viola: A Mother’s Story of Juvenile Justice, with Sarah Fleming. The moving short film is just one success story from what is planned to be a feature-length documentary about the Memphis juvenile justice system. Drew Smith’s charming short Snow Day, which, along with Viola, won special jury awards at Indie Memphis, will screen on Friday night, as will Edward Valibus’ music video for Faith Evans Ruch’s “Rock Me Slow,” which will compete in the music video bloc.

Syderek Watson, Marcus Hamilton, and Jose Joiner

This year’s Oxford Film Festival will also see the premiere of the first completed film funded by the Memphis Indie Grant program. G.B. Shannon’s short film proposal for Broke Dick Dog won the $5,000 competition in 2014. “The story that it originated from was actually a feature script,” Shannon says. “When the grant came around, I kind of pitched a truncated version of the feature script, which is a road trip movie about this guy who comes home from his mom’s funeral and finds out from a letter she gives him that he has two brothers. Her last wish is for them to track their father down and meet him and give him this letter.”

Shannon says truncating the concept from feature length to short helped refine and illuminate the story. The bulk of the action takes place at the ’50s-era offices of radio station WREC. “It’s on 240 around Frayser. I’d seen it for 20 years, and I always wanted to shoot something there. So when I decided the father was going to be a DJ, I thought oh, we gotta shoot it there. And they were open to it.”

Changing the father character to a radio DJ also changed the complexion of the cast. “I know more about classic soul and funk than I do oldies rock-and-roll, so I thought it needed to be a soul station. And I’m glad, because it broke me out of my comfort zone, and I got to audition people whom I had never worked with before.”

The all-black cast includes great performances from T.C. Sharpe, a veteran of three Craig Brewer films, Jose Joiner, Rosalyn Ross, Syderek Watson, and Marcus Hamilton. “Marcus had never been in anything before,” Shannon says. “He’d played a rapper in a Kroger commercial, but as for learning lines and stuff like that, he had done nothing. I needed somebody real, and I thought he nailed it.”

This will be Shannon’s fourth Oxford Film Festival entry, having won Best Short Film in 2013 with Fresh Skweezed. “They know how to do it right. The parties are great. Melanie’s fantastic. It’s just a fun festival that always has great films.”

Persistence of Memory

First-time filmmakers are often attracted to comedies, talky dramas, or low-budget horror films. Rarely has a first-timer tackled heady science fiction with as sure a hand as Claire Carré did in Embers, which makes its Mississippi debut on Friday at 8:30. As with all science fiction, it helps to have an original concept. The setup is familiar: A global plague has ended humanity’s reign upon the earth, but this is not a weaponized super-flu like The Stand or a zombie virus like The Walking Dead, but a transmissible neurological disease that resembles Alzheimer’s, robbing its victims of memory. An intertwined group of survivors roam the ruined landscape, including a couple, played by Jason Ritter and Iva Gocheva, who rediscover their love for each other anew every day. A silent child, played by Silvan Friedman, is separated from her father and thrown into a series of encounters that land her with James Robertson (Tucker Smallwood), a psychologist searching for a cure to the disease even as he himself is suffering from it. Meanwhile, Miranda (Greta Fernández) and her father (Roberto Cots) have been trapped in a high-tech bunker for nine years, trying to wait out the plague as they battle boredom and despair.

Greta Fernández in Embers

Embers‘ setting is carefully constructed. Imagine Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough film Memento expanded to encompass the entire world. Carré’s secret weapon is her sharp eye for locations, from entire abandoned neighborhoods in Gary, Indiana, to bomb shelters in Poland.

Embers makes a strong argument that it is our memory that makes us human. As one man, played by Matthew Goulish, wanders through a decrepit neighborhood, he struggles to understand how his malady has affected his perception of time, repeating the haunting refrain “Now is now, and here is here. And now is now…”

Guest Spots

The lineup of expert panels and discussions has tripled this year. “We used to have three. Now we have nine. And they’re all free, thanks to the Mississippi Humanities Council. You can do nothing but panels and have a full schedule all weekend,” Addington says.

The annual animation panel, which takes place on Sunday, brings back Adventure Time head writer and storyboard artist Kent Osborne, who will be joined by his fellow Adventure Time alumnus Jack Pendarvis; animator John Durbin from Moonbot Studios, who won an animation Oscar in 2011; and voice actor Susan Hickman, veteran of everything from MacGyver to Kiki’s Delivery Service.

And the festival will look to the future with the first presentation of immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences in the Mid-South. One of the VR films, Randal Kleiser’s Defrost, is fresh from its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. “It’s a narrative story that they put you in the center of it. Actors, people whose faces you know, are acting at you. That’s different from what I had thought of as VR, which was more computer animation,” Addington says.

“We needed to focus on the ‘festival’ part of our name as much as the ‘film’ part of our name,” Addington says. “It’s got to be about the experience and the movies … So that’s a big priority for me, to create things that you wouldn’t be able to experience unless you were at this event.”

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

On stage: Byhalia, Mississippi and The Brothers Size.

Closure is for Caucasians? That’s my only real criticism of Byhalia, Mississippi, Evan Linder’s refreshingly antiromantic comedy of Southern manners. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more on the topic without giving the whole thing away.

Byhalia, Mississippi, a winner of Playhouse on the Square’s annual new play competition, centers around Laurel and Jim, a struggling young married couple who like each other so much you can’t help but root for them. Jim’s flings are in the past, but Laurel’s brief indiscretion is only discovered when her white trash baby is born with African-American features. Hysteria ensues from all quarters.

Laurel isn’t the world’s best mom. She says inappropriate things and sneaks off to the roof to smoke joints and stuff. But she gets one thing exactly right: There are too many rules and too many standards for applying them. Start simple with “Love each other, and tell the truth.” Build from there.

Director John Maness assembled a strong ensemble that includes Marc Gill as a family friend who seems to have a secret of his own and Evan McCarley as Jim, Laurel’s unemployed husband. Jessica Johnson gets the most audience response as Ayesha, the status-conscious wife of the man who fathered Laurel’s baby, and Gail Black is especially effective as Celeste, Laurel’s conservative mother. Collectively these actors tell stories about growing up, grouping up, pairing up, and growing apart in a world where nobody’s racist and everything is.

Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” is slyly referenced throughout the show, although Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” may be the more appropriate song. Byhalia is treated like a gossipy “little Peyton Place” full of “Harper Valley hypocrites.”

Not so long ago, audiences for new work were hard to come by. Byhalia, Mississippi sold out its opening night. This is fantastic news. Hopefully, it won’t be the last sellout for this promising young play.

Byhalia, Mississippi is at TheatreWorks through January 31st.

The Brothers Size uses West African myths and modern theater traditions to tell an intense tale of siblings who make vastly different life choices but remain connected.

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney is attracted to theater because live performance isn’t passive. Theaters are places where people go to imagine collectively. To that end, his inventive narratives are set in poetic environments. Actors turn words into scenery. They speak stage directions, conjuring ghost communities out of breath and percussive movement. That’s why the Hattiloo’s prosaic take on McCraney’s three-character epic is a little disappointing. Ritual and naturalistic acting take turns when they should blend. Lengthy blackouts and an unnecessary intermission wreck fluidity. A piece of theater that aspires to music becomes a run-of-the-mill play.

Donrico Webber is a terrific actor. He was eerily convincing as Malcolm X in the Hattiloo’s short-lived production of The Meeting and is similarly real as Ogun Size, the serious-minded mechanic who hires his ex-con brother Oshoosi to keep him out of trouble. After two years in the hole, Oshoosi, effectively played by Courtney Williams Robertson, is given a choice between two very different visions of freedom. He might pick Ogun’s monotonous prisoner-of-work vision or the more leisurely option presented by Oshoosi’s former cellmate Elegba, a sexually ambiguous trickster played by Ronnie Bennett.

Director Brooke Sarden made Katori Hall’s idiom-rich Hurt Village soar in 2012, but can’t seem to get The Brothers Size off the ground. The spoken stage directions are treated like obstacles instead of opportunities. Movement sequences become self-contained bits set apart from all the regular acting.

McCraney populates his fictional Louisiana bayou town with characters who are always on the verge of bursting into song. The Hattiloo’s cast won’t be remembered for its vocal prowess, but, figuratively speaking, The Brothers Size is at its best when it sings. Webber and Robertson may butcher “Try a Little Tenderness,” but the most authentic moments happen when the actors become an air band, working out Temptations-style dance moves and playing together like kids. Transcendent.

Categories
News The Fly-By

A Look Back at the Fight Between a Faulkner Statue and a Tree

In the January 23, 1997, issue of the Memphis Flyer, Phil Campbell detailed a struggle between a tree and a writer’s statue in Oxford, Mississippi.

The proposed statue would be a tribute to William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize-winning author from Oxford, who penned Southern classics such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, among many others. The writer was born in New Albany and bought a home in Oxford for his family in 1930 that he called “Rowan Oak.” Despite this, however, the town had not done much to pay homage to him, according to the article.

“Even Square Books, the town’s popular bookstore, displays more photos of one-time Oxford resident John Grisham than it does of Faulkner,” the story read.

The statue was set to be built with $70,000 raised by businesses and the Oxford Board of Aldermen, one that would show Faulkner “standing with dignity, with a pipe in his mouth, looking off into the distance, sporting his signature tweed coat and baggy britches.”

Faulkner’s oldest-living relative at the time, his nephew Jimmy Faulkner, gave his approval for the project until Oxford residents became upset with how the project began to unfold.

The William Faulkner statue in Oxford sits in front of City Hall.

On the plot in front of Oxford City Hall, where the statue was to be raised, sat a magnolia tree. The mayor during that time, John Leslie, privately told the city’s electric department to cut down the tree because “the board of aldermen hoped to pass an ordinance creating a ‘tree board’ that would effectively have prevented the tree from being removed,” Campbell wrote.

Residents wrote letters against the mayor’s actions and two dozen showed up to the tree stump on one particular day, even laying a wreath on the dead tree. The Faulkner family pulled its support of the project after the writer’s daughter, who lived in Virginia, spoke out against the tree being cut down. The nephew originally believed the project had the daughter’s blessing but ended up speaking out against it, even going in front of the board of aldermen.

“Jimmy Faulkner appeared before the board of alderman, with dozens of other people in tow, to protest the mayor’s decision the week after the tree was felled. His presence made a strong statement, given the family’s affection for privacy and general apathy for politics,” the story read.

Some people felt “manipulated,” and the convoluted situation surrounding the fallen tree involved many parties. Joseph Blotner, who wrote a biography on Faulkner, was quoted in the article in favor of the statue.

“In ‘Go Down, Moses’ and other works, Faulkner deplores the disappearance of the big woods in the Delta,” he said in the story. “However, there are many, many magnolia trees in and around Oxford. There is only one native son that brought honor to his town, his state, and his country.”

Despite the controversy, the statue went up as planned. The bronze statue now sits in front of City Hall in Oxford, depicting Faulkner on a bench with his legs crossed and holding a pipe.

Categories
News

Tunica Queen Offers Evening Jazz Cruise

If an early fall evening on the Mississippi River floats your boat — especially one filled with the music of Mercer, Gershwin, Porter, and Ellington — check out the Tunica Queen’s first jazz dinner cruise scheduled for this Thursday, October 11th.

The cruise, which will leave the dock at 7 p.m., features an acclaimed trio of Mid-South musicians, including alto saxophonist Carl Wolfe, pianist Renee Koopman, and bassist Tim Goodman. Vocalist Jane Malton, of the Memphis Jazz Orchestra, will also perform.

Wolfe, a Grammy nominee for his composition “Yesterday I Loved,” has played with Doc Severinson’s band and has backed the likes of Ray Charles and Nancy Wilson.

The Tunica Queen is a three-deck riverboat that can seat 250 people and operates daily sightseeing cruises and dinner cruises. For more information and to make a reservation for the jazz cruise, call 1-866-805-3535 or visit their website.