Dear readers, it’s time for another holiday book roundup, assembling the best and most gift-able Louisiana and Mississippi titles of the past year. This Christmas, may the seams of your stockings strain under the weight of the pages inside.
Courtesy of LSU Press
Preserving Our Roots
by John Coykendall
LSU Press
I just found out what cushaw is. At the Red Stick Farmers Market, a lady was selling pies, and I eagerly bought the only flavor I couldn’t identify. (This eagerness for culinary novelty is endearing in a modern person, but probably would have killed me as a caveman.) I brought it back to share with an older coworker, who said casually, “Oh, cushaw. My mother grew those to use in pies, I like it better than pumpkin. I ate those my whole childhood.” My ignorance of this once-cherished gourd is one of the problems John Coykendall has spent a career trying to solve. The horticulturalist and foodways researcher has spent the past decades collecting seeds for heritage varieties of plants, ensuring that future foodies have access to the kaleidoscopic array of food-crop varietals American farmers once produced; one of the hotspots he regularly visited was Washington Parish, up in the corner by Mississippi. His adventures are reported in a new book, Preserving Our Roots, assembled from a lifetime of notes and journals with the help of Coykendall’s co-author, filmmaker Christina Melton.
Lavishly illustrated, the book presents sensual photos of sin-black tomatoes, regal purple-hull peas, and inviting cornbread, along with hand-illustrated pages from Coykendall’s journals. Recipes teach not only dishes, but skills—in among the instructions for fried fish and green peas with potatoes are how-tos for homemade butter and mayonnaise, all of which will make you want to throw down whatever you’re doing and rush to the stove. (Imagine, if you will, a 34-year-old food lover tapping away at a laptop and looking at this book, turning the page, and whispering aloud to an empty house: “Why… of course you can put bacon in corn. Of course you can.)” Buy this for your favorite gardener or cook, and think of it as an investment—you will reap the benefits.
Courtesy of University Press of Mississippi
Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865-1941
by Susan T. Falck
University Press of Mississippi
One of the funniest things anyone has ever said to me—and during several years working in local media in Louisiana, people have said a lot of funny things to me—was when a Natchez lady of a certain age and grandeur, after arguing forcefully for greater inclusion of black history in public narratives, added, “Now, I’m no radical. I belong to the garden club.” Had I been a little better informed, I might have thought to ask which garden club, since in Natchez, the division between garden clubs has at times been as crucial as the more familiar categories of race and gender. Natchez’s deeply complex relationship with these very garden clubs and, more broadly, with its vivid and complex past are explored in Remembering Dixie, a look at how a wealthy small town in antebellum Mississippi developed into The Old South ™.
Falck begins by making two key points. First, just because Natchez wasn’t blown to bits by Yankee cannons doesn’t mean its residents didn’t suffer mightily in the war; black and white residents alike faced shortages and violence as a result of invasion, occupation, and upheaval. Second, Natchezians had wartime and postwar experiences more diverse than are often acknowledged; Confederate veterans and their wives lived the war very differently, as did freedman and members of Natchez’s proportionally considerable free black population. All of these people had to find ways to assemble their memories and ideas about the past into coherent narratives; the elite, white, female version became dominant but was not alone. From these starting blocks, Falck goes on to present a compelling story of how Natchez came to be what it was a generation ago and what it is today, complete with evocative quotes and anecdotes from her sources and enriched by her storytelling gifts. The history buff on your list will thank you effusively for this book; the chapter “The Battle of the Hoopskirts” alone is worth the price of admission.
Courtesy of LSU Press
Adventures of a Louisiana Birder
by Marybeth Lima
LSU Press
Of all the authors in this year’s book roundup, I’m most interested in spending a day with Marybeth Lima. An avid birdwatcher whose other credits include two books on playground design, Lima writes with an enthusiast’s vim and an endearing honesty, copping to crying at the beauty of the sound of hundreds of geese simultaneously taking to wing. The book traces a “big year” in Lima’s birdwatching career, during which she and her wife opt to go all-in, bird like crazy, and see how many species they can spot in a calendar year. The idea was actually had by Lynn Hathaway, Lima’s wife, after the two drove from Baton Rouge to Slidell to catch a limited-release birding documentary in the theatre. Hathaway, upon realizing that birdwatching could be more action-packed than Lima’s usual pace, offered to join her if they could do it with a little more oomph. Oomph they get: Hathaway is badly injured in a boat explosion, and Lima, a natural raconteuse, manages to make the story of her spouse’s long recovery both harrowing and guffaw-worthy. Breezy but not lightweight, Adventures of a Louisiana Birder is a perfect bedside companion—or just the right thing to dip into as you wait for the next flock to fly by.
Courtesy of Grove Atlantic
The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom
Grove Atlantic
By now, you’ve probably heard the new truism that “every map of Louisiana is a lie,” referring to the fact that land loss has outpaced most cartographers’ attempts to keep up with the collapsing fractal of the coast. In the same way, most maps of New Orleans are bluffs, as Sarah Broom points out: they focus on the tourist-tempting Garden District, French Quarter, and now the Treme, trailing off somewhere around the Industrial canal and omitting New Orleans East, generally without comment. Less glamorous but just as loved by many of its residents, and taking up an entire “surely that can’t be right” quarter of the city’s developed land, New Orleans East deserves a chronicler and a champion. Broom takes up that mantle in The Yellow House, an elegant hybrid of history and memoir.
To live in New Orleans is to have complex feelings about it, to find yourself saying things like “If we would put half the energy we spent on parades into building inspections…” This feeling seems even more intense for Broom, who writes with warmth and affection of her old stomping grounds and the titular yellow house, maintained by her mother Ivory Mae, that anchored them. To explain the yellow house, though, she must also explain the exhausting corruption, venality, and occasional apparent malice that historically guided much of New Orleans’ civic policy and always hit its black residents hardest. Emotionally, The Yellow House is not an easy read, but Broom’s prose, elegant when she writes as herself and artful when she slips into the voices of other figures in her narrative, makes it difficult to set down. Buy this book for your friend who’s been saying she’s ready to move away from New Orleans for the last five years, but can’t quite bring herself to go.
Courtesy of the University Press of Mississippi
Pappy Kitchens and the Saga of Red Eye the Rooster
by William Dunlap
University Press of Mississippi
The delightfully named Pappy Kitchens began painting in earnest at 67; luckily for him, his then-son-in-law William Dunlap was an emerging figure in the American contemporary art scene and had a mischievous streak. He appreciated Kitchens’ work, but the rural, narrative scenes he produced were out of step with a very avant-garde avant-garde: at a time when people were earnestly asking each other what abstract canvases meant, Kitchens was presenting viewers with paintings of a rooster having symbolic, allegorical adventures. Through Dunlap’s efforts, Kitchens achieved a measure of recognition during his life, and now, with this new book, will be even better remembered among the self-taught Southern artists of the late 20th century.
The central images of the book are the sixty-panel adventures of Red Eye the Rooster, a foundling whose exploits recall those of Biblical patriarchs and the animals of fable. As interesting as this major work is, though, I found myself more captivated by the additional paintings added to the back, which feature sometimes-lengthy typed captions, complete with ignored typos, irregular ink colors, and unapologetically phonetic spellings (“appendictima”). These fables, proverbs, and jokes (given God’s sense of humor, there’s not always a clear distinction) are instantly familiar and vivid, except for a couple that are so confusing I know something’s been lost in translation over the decades—unless Pappy himself was having a bit of a laugh. Someone you love has a Clementine Hunter print in their house. They might not know it yet, but they want this book.
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