Oxford: The Epicenter of Southern Culture

(Continued from the homepage)  However the anthropologists and cultural scholars decode the Ole Miss tailgating ritual, chances are that the decoding will take place on the campus itself. For the University of Mississippi’s commitment to preserving and understanding Southern culture in all its marvelous idiosyncrasies is not only an official mission, it is also an abiding passion.

Whether it’s virtues of barbeque or the virtuosity of William Faulkner, folk art or fine art, B.B. King or Martin Luther King, Ole Miss has the answers and shares them in venues that are often historical or cultural institutions themselves, like Faulkner’s beloved Rowan Oak, or the venerable Lyceum building, more than 150 years old, or the Victorian jewel of Ventress Hall.

The exhibits of UM museums are as wide-ranging as the net that Southern culture casts. You can see Faulkner’s Nobel Prize ensconced in purple velvet; you can see a hair from the tail of Robert E. Lee’s horse Traveler. You can see the musical papers of blues legend B. B. King; you can see the note of support that Rosa Parks wrote to James Meredith when he integrated the school in 1962.

And percolating throughout the campus and the town of Oxford itself are the words and ideas—and the rarified air of the breeze they’ve shot—of some of the greatest and most popular writers in America, past and present. Not only Faulkner, but Willie Morris and Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah and John Grisham and Ace Atkins and Donna Tartt. Many writers show up here just to soak up the atmosphere.

And then there’s the rotating cast of talent brought by the John and Renee Grisham writer-in-residence program., and the writers who come to read their works on the local Thacker Mountain Radio show. Originating from Oxford’s Off-Square Books, the radio program—think Prairie Home Companion meets the Mississippi Hills—hosts musical guests and both local and nationally known writers reading from their latest volumes. If you’re in town for a broadcast, be sure to grab a spot on the makeshift bleachers. 

If you asked these writers where they would head first on a cultural tour of the UM environs, there’s no doubt what they would answer: The home and cultural shrine dedicated to the man who many believe was the finest novelist of the 20th century.  The rambling Greek Revival home Faulkner bought in 1930 and spent the rest of his years and some of his fortune repairing and expanding, Rowan Oak takes you inside for an intimate glimpse of the worlds of Faulkner. In fact, in his office, you’ll find yourself in the middle of both worlds, as the everyday world meets the fictional with Faulkner’s hand-written outline for his novel A Fable, printed in graphite and red grease pencil across the walls of the room.

From Rowan Oak, take the walking trail through Bailey’s Woods to the University Museum, where the permanent collections include the Millington and Barnard Collection of Scientific Instruments, the David M. Robinson Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities, and Southern Folk Art including the bright and bold masterworks of noted artist and Oxford resident Theora Hamblett.

At the J.D. Williams Library, the top-floor archives are top-flight treasure troves for literary, cultural and blues archival material. Here, visitors can see cultural totems like Faulkner’s Nobel, along with 300 manuscript collections, including the Faulkner collection and over 20,000 volumes of Mississippiana. You’ll find B.B. King’s musical papers housed in the Library’s Blues Archive, which happens to be the world’s largest repository of blues recordings and other blues materials. It is perhaps appropriate that the new Civil Rights Monument stands halfway between the Williams Library and the Lyceum, the campus’s most historic building:  when James Meredith came here to get an education in 1962, he strode into history as a result.

Over the course of its more than 150 years, a lot of history has passed in front of the fluted columns of the Lyceum building, but the bullets holes carefully preserved in those columns are not remnants of the Civil War (although the building housed a hospital for both Union and Confederate soldiers during that time) but rather from the 1962 rioting—what’s been called the last shot of the last battle of the Civil War.

In Ventress Hall, you’ll want to see this Victorian beauty’s original Tiffany stained glass window commissioned by a sorority honor to the University Greys, a company of Ole Miss students who all fell at Gettysburg. As you wind your way up the turret, where graffiti has accumulated for more than a century, remember that local legend has it that Faulkner, in his cups, supposedly climbed to the turret to shout that campus cheer.

Throughout the year, the UM campus opens its doors for on-going calendar of cultural and literary symposiums and celebrations, many sponsored by the University’s nationally acclaimed Center for the Study of Southern Culture, housed in the restored Barnard Observatory.   A few notable celebrations include the Oxford Conference for the Book in the spring, followed by the Double Decker Arts Festival and the summertime Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha that draws scholars and Faulkner lovers from all over the world.

In October, the Southern Foodways Alliance, which documents and champions Southern cooking in all its delicious forms, will hold its annual seminar on the State of Southern Cooking. Professional and amateur eaters are welcome. Ole Miss Homecoming will be held in October as well. Come hungry for Southern culture.

(Photos of Rowan Oak and Faulkner's typewriter courtesy of Walter A. Mixon, Gallery South, Oxford.)