W. Ralph Eubanks
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road. His next book, A Place Like Mississippi, is forthcoming. A 2007 Guggenheim fellow, he is currently a visiting professor of English and Southern Studies and writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi.
An essay from the Place Issue
I visit Mileston more than I do my parents’ graves; it is here in the Delta that I can again imagine them as vibrant people, a way of dimming the memory of the pain of watching their decline into illness and old age.
The exhibition is a sort of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness narrative, moving seamlessly from subject to subject. Tattered orange and red dishtowels on a clothesline, each piece of cloth shot through with holes; a line of railway freight cars shrouded in the evening light of the Mississippi Delta; thin shadows cast on brown cinderblocks below a periwinkle-blue sky. The bohemian and gothic Souths collide in Eggleston’s photographs—his bright colors and distinct perspectives imbue rusting signs and aging buildings with a spiritual, emotional darkness that speaks to a decaying world of an older South fading into suburbia and industrial development.
