The Water in Which You Swim (July/August 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 4)

The Water in Which You Swim

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Authors: Willie Morris, William R. Ferris

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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July/August 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 4

William Ferris, fifty-two years old, is a prolific writer in folklore, American literature, fiction, and photography and is co-editor of the monumental Encyclopedia of Southern Culture . Since 1979, he has been the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. His establishment is quartered in the recently renovated Barnard Observatory on the beautiful, wooded Ole Miss campus. That notable edifice and the Center itself are emblematically important, for there Ferris and his colleagues have everything in Southern Studies in one place— just as they have in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, an ambitious highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow mosaic.

Ferris’s Center’s pinnacle of achievement to date is the Encyclopedia, by any measure a stunning work. Co-edited by the historian Charles Reagan Wilson and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1989, the 1,630-page volume involved more than eight hundred scholars and writers of various disciplines and callings. One national reviewer judged it “the first attempt ever to describe every aspect of a region’s life and thought … even the iced tea that washes down its catfish and cornbread.”

 

I returned from the East to my native Mississippi in 1980, only a year or so after Ferris himself had done so, and our friendship goes back to those early days at Oxford. The father of a young daughter, Bill is a tall, agile fellow, a figure of fine company whose moods, depending on the milieu, swing easily from serious to whimsical to mischievous. He is noted for a certain sartorial casualness, having reputedly worn a suit and tie only four times since coming home.

He resides in a rambling, eclectic house directly across the street from the Oxford town cemetery where all the Faulkners (or, if you prefer, Falkners) lie buried, not to mention Augustus B. Longstreet and Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar. Bill’s dwelling will be remembered by all indigenous chroniclers for its Christmas parties, at which is served the most efficacious celebratory punch south of the Tennessee line, and for a former pet parrot as voluble and garrulous as the guests themselves.

 

In all such as this Bill Ferris is a valuable and singular comrade, who serves his civilization—America and the South that is an indwelling part of it—with good cheer, resourcefulness, and distinction. I interviewed him last summer at a hotel in Natchez, where we both were addressing a symposium on that city’s history and culture.

It’s June the sixth. It’s D-day, isn’t it, Bill?

This is D-day all right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Give us some background on the founding of your center.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Center was the idea of several faculty members at Ole Miss who felt that something needed to be done at the university to focus on the region and to draw on the history of the university itself—Faulkner, civil rights—and they received a grant to bring in a consultant, Richard Brown from