Before coming to Greenwood to open the bookstore, one of the finest places we ever lived was Taylor, Mississippi. This was years before developers got hold of it, when it was just a sleepy rural town filled with unassuming artists and colorful country folk. At the end of a long day we often took respite on our backporch, and on especially fine afternoons we would relish hearing a toy siren crying out over the cotton field, then spy a golf cart toddling over the tall backyard grass. It was the mayor of Taylor, Jane Rule Burdine, delivering cocktails. What more can you ask from a community when your mayor makes happy hour house calls?
We spent many a fine evening with Jane Rule at her home across the field, listening to good music on her backporch (one of the finest in all the South), eating her first-rate cooking, having great conversation and on special occasions being granted entry to her office, where she kept her photos in matted stacks. We were young and learning to love our Southernness rather than be ashamed of it (as popular culture had tried to convince us), and like the artists who gave us permission to love our home — William Faulkner, Johnny Cash, Larry Brown, and William Eggleston — Jane Rule touched us deeply through her photography and her generous, creative character.
Now, all these years later, few things delight us more than to introduce Jane Rule's first book, a collection of Delta-themed photos, at a book launch party this Thursday. Delta Deep Down is an essential collection of Mississippi art by a tremendously gifted and largely unknown artist who grew up in the Delta and has spent years traveling the backroads with her camera. Her images have always struck as sympathetic without being maudlin and indicatively Southern without resorting to cliche.
Mississippi fiction writer Steve Yarbrough will be present at the event (along with Wendy McDaris, the curator for this book, who has further raised this collection with her careful juxtapositions) and he contributes an introduction to the book that lends a personal perspective on this land she has documented. In reference to the book's cover photo, he writes, "The image that Jane Rule's book both begins and ends on is haunting precisely because it captures the past that's always lurking within the Delta's present." That's one of the most striking features of this place, and it is captured incredibly in these photos. It's more than shooting a caved-in sharecropper shack or abandoned cotton gin. It's written on faces and peculiar details, sometimes inexplicably. These are scenes that any Southerner will recognize from earlier times. What makes them unique to the Delta is that, for better or worse, they're not out of place today.
We hope you'll come by and meet our dear friend, a Mississippi treasure. We'll have drinks and music, courtesy of Dent May (back by popular demand), and if you can't make it, you can reserve a copy signed by all participants. Check out samples of her work here.
