Just in time for Mother’s Day weekend, a prominent Mississippi author and journalist will visit Hattiesburg to promote her latest book, deconstructing the stereotype of the “helpful, ever-cheerful and often self-deceiving” white woman from the southern United States.
Ellen Ann Fentress – whose work has appeared in the New York Times, among other prestigious publications – will hold a book signing for her memoir The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning from 2-4 p.m. May 11 at The Author Shoppe, 140 East Front Street in downtown Hattiesburg.
“It’s my story of looking at the script that I got in my life as a Southern woman, but hopefully it’s a wider story that is the script that we all get in our life,” said Fentress, who now lives in Jackson. “We kind of all get a script for our life, and once you become aware of it, figuring out where you start and the script ends, I think everybody gets that.
“The title says ‘we’ because I hope it’s just not one person’s story – I hope it’s something that starts a conversation where people will look at their lives.”
The book signing will be moderated by Benjamin Morris, the author of Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City.
The book details Fentress’s struggles with race, class and history, specifically the expectations saddled on women from the South. Growing up in that area, Fentress was one of the nearly one million students in the South who was enrolled in all-white “segregation academies,” which were founded in the mid-20th century by many white parents in order to avoid their children attending desegregated public schools.
Realizing disparity in that measure, Fentress decided to dedicate a part of her life to helping others. As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter.
Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French and served as the bookkeeper for her husband’s business. To document and engage with her history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in The Washington Post, Slate, Forbes and other publications.
The Steps We Take is Fentress’s attempt to reconcile her region’s history and her own past in those situations.
“I think it applies in the most personal and private levels in your own family, but also in the wider world as well,” Fentress said. “So I think that’s something that I really wanted to do in the book – I wanted to come with my full self to the project, to look at how this plays out one on one with your loved ones and your friends, your family, then the wider world in the community.”
In addition to the aforementioned publications, Fentress’s works also have been featured in Salvation South, The Bitter Southerner, The Atlantic Online and Rooted Magazine, among others. She also made the documentary “Eyes on Mississippi,” which details the life of Mississippi journalist Bill Minor, the head of The Times-Picayune’s news bureau who covered numerous events during the Civil Rights Movement and the 1955 murder of Black teenager Emmett Till by white supremacists.
“I started as a newspaper reporter, and I still do some reporting, but I love long form, and I love the freedom you get in long form to go deeper (than with other formats),” Fentress said. “Even as a reporter, those were my favorite days, was when I had done the research and I got to sit at my desk and simply write and think about what I had.
“I was drawn to personal essays, and a few of my pieces were essays were stand-alone essays that were previously published, so… for (The Steps We Take), I started looking at them, and it was kind of like a mosaic in progress of what Southern life looked like. So the new pieces in there, I filled in the gaps to sort of make it piece by piece. It kind of all went together to turn into a memoir.”
