O. N. Pruitt's Possum Town: The 'Modest Aspiration and Small Renown' of a Mississippi Photographer,...

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O. N. Pruitt’s Possum TownThe ‘Modest Aspiration and Small Renown’ of a Mississippi Photographer, 1915–1960

by Berkley Hudson

O. N. Pruitt (right) with his son Lambuth ( far left) and probably Pruitt’s brother Jim (center).

Both Lambuth and Jim worked as photographers — Jim in nearby Starkville, and Lambuth in Jackson,

Mississippi, circa 1925. All photographs from the O. N. Pruitt Collection in Wilson Library’s North

Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town 5

ometime in the 190s, jack-of-all-trades photographer O. N. Pruitt focused his bulky, large format view camera beside a northeast Mississippi lake surrounded with swamp cypress. Draping the camera’s black cloth over his head the better to see the upside down and backwards image that appeared on the ground glass,

he clicked the shutter. Black-and-white, nitrate negative film would soon reveal two African American men standing in a wooden boat filled with huge spoonbill catfish. Close by, a white man stands in the water next to another boat laden with spoonbills. He holds the trophy fish by the gill, dangling it vertically to display its size — almost as long as he is tall. The two black men in the boat, one smiling, seem deferential. But their looks and body posture, and the gaze of another black man leaning against the tree, suggest that the white man may have caught that fish, but he did not catch them all. Shadows of the four men appear as murky reflec-tions in the lake water.

About the same time that he made this photograph Pruitt was called to take a very different picture. On Monday, July 15, 195, the telephone rang in Pruitt’s home in Columbus, Mississippi. Come quickly, he was told; there had been a lynching, a double lynching. With that, Pruitt, who always kept his camera equip-ment at the ready in his car trunk, sped south of town on paved and then gravel roads. There, in a backwoods churchyard, he found two men — described as young “Negro farmers” in Associated Press accounts published around the na-tion — lynched from a big oak tree. One Pruitt photograph depicts the bodies of Bert Moore and Dooley Morton, hanging side-by-side from ropes tied to the tree. A white man, wearing a straw boater and kneeling with his back to the camera, grasps their pants’ legs, apparently to steady the bodies for the picture.1

Moore and Morton — two among at least four thousand African Americans lynched between 1889 and 1946 — had been accused of harassing a white woman. The day after the lynching, a Tuesday, the local newspaper reported this salient detail: hundreds of spectators came to look at the bodies of the lynched men before they were cut down, more than twelve hours after the lynching occurred. Although the images did not appear in the local newspaper, Pruitt, a commercial and studio photographer, was nonetheless contacted to document this horrific event. The subject of this image tells us everything about Pruitt’s time and place, while his role in photographing it speaks volumes about the relationship of the small-town southern photographer and the community in the early twentieth-century South.

From 1915 to 1960 Pruitt was the de-facto documentarian of his postage stamp of soil, Lowndes County, Mississippi, where race, class, and gender mattered greatly. Pruitt took pictures throughout northeast Mississippi, but he focused on the crossroads town of Columbus, the county seat situated along the Alabama border. Specializing in “portrait and commercial work,” Pruitt’s photography stu-

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54 southern cultures , Summer 2007 : Berkley Hudson

dio, in the words of his advertising brochure, “pictured many phases of the life of Columbus and Columbians.” Ranging from the mundane to the horrific, the photographs offer a record of family picnics, river baptisms, carnivals, parades, fires, tornadoes, funerals, and even two of the last public and legal executions by hanging in Mississippi, as well as the illegal lynching of the two African American farmers. By photographing the familial and the communal, the sacred and the profane, Pruitt shows us a broad range of community life filtered through his own perspective, that of a white man in a highly segregated society made up primarily of Anglo-Americans and African Americans.

Stories unfold whenever any single Pruitt photograph is given a close reading, whether the image is compelling in its own right, defying categorization, or sim-ply one that would have appeared in the local newspaper or as an example of the routine studio portraiture that was Pruitt’s bread-and-butter. These photographs function like pottery shards from an archaeological dig that may tell one tale but point to others. When seen in fullness, the stories form a mosaic, grounded in a past time and place yet continuing into the present. The Pruitt Collection is a uniquely rich resource for scholars and students interested in the American South. Its photographs capture scenes that range from the ordinary graces of everyday life to ethnic identity to race relations and brutal power.

Spoonbill catfish at Alligator Lake, circa 1930s.

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Pruitt left few letters or notes about his work. He was not a writer; he was a photographer. Today, more than eighty-eight thousand Pruitt negatives remain, and the collection is now housed in the library of the University of North Caro-lina at Chapel Hill, where it is being catalogued and made available to scholars and others interested in photographic studies and in southern history and culture. Until now, Pruitt and his images have not been treated in a scholarly manner. Nor have they been published or distributed in any broad way, although they sometimes did appear in the local Columbus newspaper, the Commercial Dispatch. Exceptions to this narrow publication include a handful of images. The lynching picture by Pruitt, for example, was transformed first into a postcard in the 190s and then into the anti-lynching statement of a voting rights poster in Mississippi in 1965. The photograph of mule trader Sylvester Harris, who in 194 was helped by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was distributed nationally by the Associated Press. The New York Times, the Chicago Defender, and the New York Herald Tribune were among the newspapers that published the image.

The lynching of Bert Moore and Dooley

Morton, July 1935. They were accused

of harassing a white woman, and a

mob of three-dozen men in a motorcade

of six cars seized Moore and Morton

from the custody of a deputy, who was

driving them north from Columbus to a

jail in nearby Aberdeen. The mob drove

Moore and Morton south of Columbus

and lynched them in the churchyard of

the Zion African Methodist Episcopal

Baptist Church.

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That the Pruitt images stand out is certain. The former photography curator of the Museum of Modern Art (moma), John Szarkowski, has said the Pruitt images are like fine wine that is aging: they are valuable and their meaning will continue to change. Trudy Wilner Stack, a former curator of the Center for Creative Photog-raphy at the University of Arizona, observes that the Pruitt pictures are a history of the town for a time period in which there is no written history; for that reason alone, she says, they are significant. Tom Rankin, of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (and author of another essay in this issue of Southern Cultures), notes that Pruitt went into the neighborhoods of his community in ways many commercial and studio photographers did not.4

The depth and range of the Pruitt images distinguish them from other similar collections and encourage the viewer to think about photography and its docu-mentary role in a different way. In the 190s and 190s, Pruitt was apparently the only professional, jack-of-all-trades photographer working in Columbus. He functioned as a street photographer and sometimes as a photojournalist. He doc-umented tornadoes and floods of biblical proportions, a fire at a cotton mill and fires in the downtown business district. He photographed train wrecks and celeb-rities such as world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and Columbus native son playwright Tennessee Williams. He photographed the parents of celebrated writer Truman Capote. He recorded two Lowndes County courthouse execu-tions that were among the last such public hangings before Mississippi replaced the executioner’s rope with a traveling electric chair.5 Yet equally intriguing is how Pruitt dealt with and photographed individuals in his studio and large groups of people — some who paid him to take their pictures and some who may not have wanted their photographs made.

Although Pruitt was a good photographer, he was by no means an artist or documentarian to match the level of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Eugene Atget, or August Sander. Still, the aesthetic of the Pruitt images reveals an accom-

Baptism on banks of Tombigbee

River, with white onlookers. Pruitt

took another photograph of essentially

this same group along the riverbank,

with whites conducting a baptism and

African Americans looking on.

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plished photographer. More important than any aesthetic element, however, is the content. He was in the right place at the right time. In addition to photograph-ing disasters and calamities, he did not flinch from making numerous pictures that documented harsh realities of community life, including death portraits of children and the previously mentioned lynching and execution photographs.

A critical element of the content is the potent reality of racial divide that per-meates the images, both in their production and use. During the time Pruitt pho-tographed, Mississippi was without a doubt at the center of what historian Joel Williamson calls the “crucible of race.” As a white man, Pruitt photographed blacks and whites both inside and outside his studio. The complexity of black-white relationships appears in a concrete way, both in how the photographer staged the photograph, including placement of subjects according to race, gen-der, and social status, and also in how the subjects presented themselves before the camera. Much also can be learned from studying photographs in which only African Americans appear or ones in which only whites are pictured. Pruitt was not the only white photographer to invite African Americans into his studio, nor was he the only white photographer to go into their churches and homes to pho-tograph them. He was, however, somewhat unusual in the degree that he did so.6 The Pruitt photographs also serve as a detailed visual reminder of the Jim Crow era in which Pruitt worked.

“Miller’s Traveling Museum, World Fair Freaks,” circa 1930–1935.

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Only in recent decades have scholars considered the work of small-town pho-tographers such as Pruitt. Beginning in the 190s and 1980s, general as well as photographic historians began to focus more on ordinary folk, popular culture, and vernacular culture specific to a local place and people. Photographic stud-ies, like other disciplines in academia, has moved away from an emphasis on the “great men” approach to embrace oral history and cultural, social, and labor his-tory, as well as feminist and ethnic studies. “Photography,” notes former moma curator Szarkowski, “has learned about its nature not only from the great masters, but also from the simple and radical works of photographers of modest aspiration and small renown.” One of those photographers is Pruitt.

Other twentieth-century photographers in the American South that might be considered Pruitt contemporaries, and who were also white, would be Paul Buchanan and Bayard Wootten of North Carolina and T. R. Phelps of Virginia. Three important African American insider photographers working in the Ameri-can South at the same time as Pruitt were Richard Samuel Roberts of Columbia, South Carolina, P. H. Polk of Tuskegee, Alabama, and Ernest C. Withers of Mem-phis, Tennessee. Similarities exist between their photographs and Pruitt’s. Polk, Roberts, and Withers, however, focused mainly on African Americans, and the images of these three show different sensibilities in their treatment of subjects who were African American. Jno. Trlica, working in central Texas at about the same time as Pruitt, was another insider photographer. The Czech photographer

Blackface minstrel show, circa mid-1920s.

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dealt largely with working-class immigrants from Eastern Europe and Mexico. Trlica’s subjects, like Pruitt’s, gaze straightforwardly at the viewer.8

Scholars have also studied the work of two small-town photographers who have been especially important in the development of photographic scholarship in the last thirty years and whose work invites comparison with Pruitt’s — Mike Disfarmer in Arkansas and Charles Van Schaick in Wisconsin. Disfarmer worked in Heber Springs, Arkansas, from 190 to 1959, roughly the same period as Pruitt’s career in Mississippi. In 1961, two years after Disfarmer’s death, the contents of his studio — thousands of glass-plate negatives — were bought for five dollars. The images were first published in a Heber Springs weekly newspaper, later in Modern Photography, and then in a 196 book, Disfarmer (reissued in 000). Scholars consider the Disfarmer collection important for its portrayal of rural America and Arkansas during the World War II era. Pruitt’s record of everyday life and ordi-nary townsfolk compares favorably to Disfarmer’s “elegant, if naïve, simplicity.”9 One key difference, however, is that Disfarmer photographed in a homogeneous rural community where racial diversity was not present; his subjects were white.

In the last three decades photographic historian Michael Lesy has frequently focused on the importance of images made by rural photographers, who, like Disfarmer, made their living by taking group portraits of social and religious orga-nizations and families. In Wisconsin Death Trip, published in 19, Lesy drew on a collection of thirty thousand glass-plate negatives made by Charles Van Schaick in

Fire on Market Street, circa 1930s.

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Black River Falls, Wisconsin, from 1890 to 1910. Lesy sees early commercial and studio photographers as witnesses to community events rather than practitioners of photographic art or artistic interpreters of the worlds around them — although sometimes both of those things occur. “Commercial photography as practiced in the 1890s,” writes Lesy, “was not so much a form of applied technology as it was a semi-magical act that symbolically dealt with time and mortality.”10 If you had horses, for example, and wanted pictures of them in order to remember them, then you could pay the photographer to photograph them. In many ways, that was the life of Pruitt, who supplied images for his community, especially in the 190s and 190s, when cameras and film were not commonplace in businesses and homes. An extreme example of the photograph’s role in mastering “time and mortality” would be the death portraits taken to preserve the memory of the deceased. Throughout his career Pruitt often took post-mortem photographs as well as those of funeral processions, burials, and the accompanying flower ar-rangements. He also photographed people in poor health and on their “death beds.”

Like Pruitt, Van Schaick and Disfarmer were insiders in their communities. As a trusted member of the community, Pruitt could be called upon to take pho-

“Pasha Buried Alive,” November

1930. Former heavyweight champion

Jack Dempsey (left), “Pasha” (in the

coffin), “Madame Flozella,” and Arch

Persons, manager of the act and the

father of Truman Capote.

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tographs of every sort, including extreme ones such as a lynching, execution, or even medical photographs to document injuries or severe disfigurement due to cancer or burns. His camera’s eye could be counted on not to condemn or judge. Their access to their clients was personal and more intimate than had the pho-tographers come, camera and tripod in hand, from outside of the community. He was not an artist in the distanced manner of an Atget or Sander, nor an artistic documentarian such Henri Cartier-Bresson of France or a crime photographer à la Weegee (Arthur Fellig) of New York City.11 Above all, Pruitt was an insider photographer for northeast Mississippi.

o. n. pruitt, an insider photographer

Otis Noel Pruitt was born on September 11, 1891, on a farm in south central Mississippi. By age nineteen he was working with his uncle in a mercantile store and had married his girlfriend, Lena. Pruitt became interested in photography when he began photographing his son and daughter as children. As a sideline while working at the store, Pruitt used a Brownie 1 camera to photograph tim-berland for landowners that wanted to market acreage to potential Yankee buy-

Before the execution of James Keaton on May 25, 1934, at the Lowndes County Courthouse. An all-white jury

convicted Keaton of the murder of service station owner Fred Hayslett. The district attorney who prosecuted the

case was John C. Stennis, who later would become a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. This was among the last

rope hangings on a courthouse lawn in Mississippi.

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ers in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Pruitt’s uncle, however, reportedly grew weary of the smells of the photographic chemicals that Pruitt used to develop film and make prints. In 1915 Pruitt left the store for photography.

He headed north to work for Henry Hoffmeister, a German immigrant who, beginning in 1900, had developed a thriving business as a studio and commercial photographer in Columbus, Mississippi, and the surrounding area. Pruitt found Hoffmeister to be a cantankerous boss. To take a break from him and to further his photographic education, Pruitt studied for a year at the Illinois School of Photography, focusing on courses in x-ray and general photography. He even-tually returned to Columbus and in late 191 bought out his employer, vowing “to continue the same high-class work which has characterized the Hoffmeister Studio.”1

Pruitt’s studio was located on the second floor of a brick building on the south side of Main Street. Hoffmeister had installed special northern skylights, ideal for lighting without shadows. Pruitt stayed there until a combination of a fire and difficult financial times in the mid-190s prompted him to move to a new studio across the street. In the front of the shop, he shot portraits, using risers, various props, and drapery for backdrops. In the back, behind rows of hanging negatives,

Boy with bloodied nose, surrounded by crowd, 1920s or early 1930s.

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he developed film. Marjorie Baugh Doster, who as a child was a regular subject of Pruitt’s portraits, recalled the “clotheslines full of negatives drying.1

Throughout his life, Pruitt was a well-known, well-liked fixture in the town where almost everyone addressed him simply by his last name. Eventually, he be-came a part of the white, male Columbus power structure. Dark-haired and wiry, Pruitt had a lively, feisty personality, friendly face, and ears that noticeably stuck out. He routinely wore a business suit, white shirt, dark tie, and dress hat during the workday. He was gregarious and known for his sense of humor and love of practical jokes. Although he was a devoted member of the Barraca Sunday School class at the First Methodist Church, he commonly told “smutty jokes.” He bought Roitan cigars by the box and, though not a heavy drinker, sipped a glass of Mogan David wine before bedtime. He loved to hunt and fish and even built his own fishing pond, Pruitt’s Lake, north of Columbus. “He thought that photography was fun. That was what he did,” said Thomas Caldwell, Pruitt’s grandson. “He didn’t care about much of anything other than photography and having a good time and going fishing.”14

In the 1950s Pruitt hired as his assistant a white man named Calvin Shanks, a wavy-haired beanpole of a fellow who, like Pruitt, loved cigars. By 1960 Pruitt

Split-back glass-plate negative taken in Pruitt’s studio.

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retired and sold his business to Shanks, who then changed its name to Shanks Photo Service. Pruitt died seven years later. Shanks ran the business until his death in 1981; his widow kept the business going until the mid-1980s. She sold most of the negatives to a local photographic hobbyist, Bill Frates, who had a passion for the photographs Pruitt had taken of trains. Frates maintained the col-lection until 198, when he sold it to five men who had grown up in Columbus and wanted to preserve it.

Pruitt was essentially an unlettered man who, other than a year spent in an Il-linois photography school, was educated in rural, segregated primary and second-ary schools in Mississippi. He was not known as a reader or intellectual by any means. It is not clear what he knew of the wider world of photography as an art form. He spent most of his life in Columbus and did not travel much beyond the northeastern part of the state, as illustrated by his perfect attendance record at Kiwanis Club meetings for nineteen years in a row.

Like the traditional craftsperson that makes clay pots, or white oak baskets, or fiddles, Pruitt produced his craft in exchange for money, and his studio was very much a business on which he and his family depended. “He’d photograph anything,” said Rachel Shute, who worked for Pruitt as a re-toucher from the mid-190s through the early 1940s. “Most of the time Mr. Pruitt got paid. . . . Mrs. Pruitt always was very much on his coattails — demanding money.” It is hard to

Men with beehive on Main Street, circa 1930s.

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decipher, however, whether Pruitt was paid for all of his photographs. As was a common practice in the Depression-era South, he may have bartered in exchange for taking photographs. In other instances, it seems he photographed for the sheer love of picture taking. It is unclear, for example, whether Pruitt was paid to take the photograph of the 195 lynching or whether he thought he might make money from the image by printing it as a postcard as other photographers did with lynching images across the South. Pruitt, Shute said, did convert the lynch-ing image into a postcard that he sold or discreetly showed to interested white men who came to his studio. Law enforcement officials and insurance companies sometimes commissioned Pruitt to take pictures of murders and disasters, such as train and automobile wrecks, fires, and tornadoes. At times, Pruitt’s photo-graphs of these news events would appear in the Commercial Dispatch. On occa-sion these pictures were distributed nationally via the Associated Press. Pruitt was sometimes summoned to testify before juries, and his photographs were offered as evidence. Like many commercial photographers who worked in small towns across America, Pruitt’s photographs were as likely to appear in newspaper adver-tisements as the news pages.15 In the 190s and early 190s, Pruitt regularly took pictures for the “Birthday Club,” apparently a “whites-only” club of children who would pose for pictures in Pruitt’s studio. The Commercial Dispatch would then publish these portraits within the news pages at the time of the child’s birthday,

Girl with canebrake rattlesnake, circa 1920s.

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include information on the “club member,” and also give information about how to join the club by having your picture taken by Pruitt. Pruitt also developed film for those individuals in the area who owned cameras.

The setting or subjects of some Pruitt photographs reflect a racial, class, or gender bias. The most prominent, wealthiest, whitest, most masculine, or most

Body of boy in a casket with a mirror.

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feminine subjects often appear at the center of the image. In other cases, there is scant evidence of prejudice or even differentiation among subjects. Many Pruitt images do reveal what cultural historian Joel Williamson calls a template of “white Southern mentalities” — conservative, radical, or liberal. White conservatism, be-ginning in the 180s and continuing today, sees African Americans as having a place in southern society, but one not equal to that of whites. The other two views grew as a reaction to this conservatism: radicals hold the belief that African Americans have no place in society, and liberals advocate full equality and accep-tance in every regard.16

Pruitt moved authoritatively within his small-town community as the “photo-eye,” photographing rich and poor, black and white, male and female, young and old.1 To gain a true picture of northeast Mississippi and the American South it is necessary to supplement the Pruitt pictures with a detailed “caption.” The photo-graphs and their context enrich our understanding of Mississippi and the Ameri-can South; that understanding, in turn, can inform issues of current relevance in the region. Pruitt’s racial attitude and vision of the South revealed in many of the photographs generally can be categorized as white racial conservatism. At the same time, subjects in other photographs clearly co-create the image with the photographer to achieve a more liberal racial viewpoint. The photograph of the lynching certainly served the purposes of white racial radicals, even though years later the image was used to foster support for those advocating voting rights for African Americans in Mississippi.

Preliminary research of Pruitt’s life and of a sampling of thousands of pho-tographs in the Pruitt Collection suggest that as a photographer he fluctuated between liberal and conservative mentalities. In practice, he does mirror each per-spective. Although Pruitt’s work often reveals the white conservative nature of the South, he supplied vital images for the black community’s use. He photographed African Americans both in and out of his studio. In this era and within the black community, writes social critic bell hooks, photographs served the important role of revealing “a sense of how we looked when we were not ‘wearing the mask,’ when we were not attempting to perfect the image for a white supremacist gaze.” Before integration, she notes, African Americans constantly struggled “to cre-ate a counter-hegemonic world that would stand as visual resistance, challenging racist images.” A crucial part of that resistance was the display of photographs in southern black homes.

When Pruitt photographed African Americans in their churches and homes, away from the white community, the subjects appear more open and revealing, often seemingly co-creating the image with him. In essence, they helped to de-termine how they ultimately would look. It must have been unusual, in many re-spects, in the segregated South when Pruitt photographed African Americans in his studio. This was happening in a town where, until the 190s, “colored only” or

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“whites only” signs were posted in virtually every public place. Yet Pruitt invited African Americans to his studio to photograph them, and he went to their houses to take their pictures, too. And for everyone, black or white, he also provided the service of developing film and printing pictures for those fortunate enough to have their own cameras. Regardless, the Pruitt images — whether of African Americans, whites, or mixtures of the racial groups, and whether taken in the studio, street, home, school or church, or on the farm — have their own dynamic of pose, gaze, object, and subject.

columbus, pruitt ’s postage stamp of soil

During the first half of Pruitt’s years as a photographer — the 190s and 190s — Columbus was essentially a half-white, half-black community of ten thousand residents. It was also a growing agricultural market center for cotton, lumber, floral plants, honey, dairy cows, beef cattle, and tombstones. Originally, the northeast Mississippi area had been the home of the Choctaw, before they were killed or forced onto reservations in Mississippi. The Choctaw passed on to the white settlers their name for the place: Sheck-a-tah Tom-a-ha, or Shukota-maha. The phrase means Possum Town, after the wizened-looking, possum-like man, Spirus Roach, who ran a trading post in the riverside community around the

Advertisement for Pruitt’s photography

studio, April 1941.

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time of its founding in 181. A century later, the 19 wpa Guide to Mississippi described Columbus as

a city in which there is room to breathe. . . . A comfortable old-tree shaded town, the streets are broad, the sidewalks wide, lawns are spacious, and houses are set apart in a manner characteristic of the lavish ante-bellum period in which they were built. It is the junction of the Old South with the New, with gracious lines of Georgian porticos forming a belt of mellowed beauty about a modern business district.

The guide depicts Columbus’s African American community in a similar pictur-esque light:

The same leisurely atmosphere of spaciousness is carried into “Northside,” the Negro section of town. Here approximately 45 percent of Columbus’ popu-lation lives in low-roofed, red frame houses that are festooned with wisteria and shaded by umbrella chinaberry trees and tall, brightly colored sunflow-ers. A majority of the Negro men find work with white families rather than with industries, or are delivery boys, taxi drivers, and filling station helpers. The Negro women who work are employed almost entirely as domestic servants. In their section of town they have their own stores, cafes, hotels and recreational center.18

Mississippi schoolroom. The screen on the stage bears an advertisement for Pruitt’s studio.

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Although most of the town’s citizens were either black or white, there was some additional diversity. The Chinese husband and wife, who in the 190s ran the laundry on Market Street, just north of Main Street and around the corner from Pruitt’s Studio, were a familiar sight, walking in single file, he in front of her. Like many towns in the nineteenth-century American South, Columbus was home to a well-established community of Jewish storeowners, dating to 186. In 186, two years after the end of the Civil War and well into the Reconstruction Era, the Loeb family came directly from Europe to Columbus. Into the mid-twentieth century, Loebs, Feinsteins, Rubels, and Rosenzweigs sold much of the dry goods, clothing, and shoes bought in town. Many of their relatives were stor-eowners in neighboring Mississippi towns.19

The advent of World War II brought diverse outsiders to the community. North of Columbus on prairie farmland, the U.S. military built airstrips and barracks for the Columbus Air Force Base, filled with newly commissioned officers that had gotten their “wings” to fly. Dressed in their pressed uniforms glinting with brass, they lined up outside Pruitt’s studio to have their pictures made. On one occasion, Lt. Clark Gable, already well known for his performances in such movies as Gone

Women at a tea party, served by a white maid.

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with the Wind, came to town to pay a visit and boost the morale of his fellow air corps officers.0

In those days in Columbus, beer with .5 percent alcohol content was the only alcoholic beverage that those soldiers would have been able to drink legally. After Prohibition ended, Mississippi legislators voted to allow the residents of each county to decide if beer could be sold, but liquor and wine were absolutely for-bidden until 196. “Mississippi was a dry state, one of the last in America, but its dryness was merely academic, a gesture to the preachers and the churches,” writes Mississippi novelist and journalist Willie Morris, capturing a sense of the 190s and 1940s. “My father would say that the only difference between Mississippi and its neighbor Tennessee, which was wet, was that in Tennessee a man could not buy liquor on Sunday.” In Mississippi the bootleggers worked everyday.1

More than a few times, moonshiners had their wares dumped out in Columbus for public shame at the Lowndes County Courthouse. Pruitt photographed mo-ments such as these. Nonetheless, the Columbus Chamber of Commerce boasted of its low crime in a brochure titled “Columbus, The Friendly City”: “We have few major crimes in the county and 95 percent of the petty offenses are committed

Oscar West, “cleanup

boy” at Brown Buick-

Cadillac Company,

circa 1930.

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southern cultures , Summer 2007 : Berkley Hudson

by our colored population.” The brochure provided no details about the eighteen documented lynchings of African Americans in Lowndes County between 1889 and 198, one of the highest rates for any county in Mississippi. Nor was there mention of the Ku Klux Klan march on horseback along Main Street in the early 190s, when it seems that Pruitt photographed the parade.

Although Columbus was a small town, it would seem that more than its fair share of celebrities were born there or passed through. In some cases, Pruitt had the opportunity to photograph them. Among these was Thomas Lanier Williams, born in Columbus in 1911 and later known as the playwright Tennessee Williams. With his older sister, Rose, who also was born in Columbus, Williams lived with their mother and her parents at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church rectory, where his grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin, was rector. By about 1915 the family had moved across the state to the Delta town of Clarksdale, where Dakin became rector of another church. Years later, in May 195, Pruitt photographed Williams when the playwright, much to the bemusement of the townspeople, returned tri-umphant as a Pulitzer-Prize winner. Walter Lanier Barber, who as “Red” Barber would become the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, spent the first decade of his life in Columbus. In the mid-190s, Eudora Welty was a young college girl in

Man with girl in field.

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O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town

town, attending the Mississippi State College for Women, the nation’s first public, all-women’s college. Welty eventually would become one of Mississippi’s most celebrated authors of the twentieth century.

Also during the 190s, Charles Henri Ford as a boy lived in the Gilmer Hotel, where his father managed the coffee shop. While still living in Columbus he ed-ited a blues magazine that published articles by some of the period’s most literary writers, including William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. After moving to New York and then to France, he had a long career as an avant-garde writer, publisher, filmmaker, photographer, and poet. He coauthored in 19 one of the nation’s first homoerotic novels, The Young and the Evil, which was banned in the United States and England. Ford’s sister, Ruth, became an actress and collabo-rated with William Faulkner on his theatrical production of Requiem for a Nun.4

Another famous native son of this era, blues singer Big Joe Williams, was born in 190 just outside of Columbus in the western Lowndes County community of Crawford. He likely never posed for a Pruitt picture, since Williams’s rambling days started about the time Pruitt came to Columbus and he did not return per-manently to live there until after Pruitt had died. Folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett, author of the classic Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (196), did overlap with Pruitt

Camel ride, Locke’s Zoo, circa 1924.

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in Columbus when he was researching his book as a Yale dissertation. So, too, did the first woman to become secretary of the Democratic National Committee, Dorothy McElroy Vredenburgh, who lived in Columbus in the 190s and early 190s. By 1944 she was appointed to the post that she held through the 190s, be-coming a familiar figure presiding over the Democratic national conventions.5

We do not yet know whether Pruitt captured images of Welty while she was a student, Barber and his family, the Ford siblings, or other celebrities, but the full cataloguing of the Pruitt Collection may reveal images of these notables and much more. The Pruitt Collection offers the opportunity to investigate what claims the photographs make about identity in a town, a state, and a region during the early and middle twentieth century. The images illuminate a place and a “past that in-terprets” the South of today.6 In doing so, the Pruitt images offer a context for thinking about race relations, class, gender, culture, and history — as well as the history of photography in particular — in the American South. In nearly a half century of continuous photography, Pruitt created a visual record that is arresting and always instructive.

notes

With heartfelt thanks, the author gratefully acknowledges all those who have helped him to preserve and research the Pruitt Collection. Most special thanks go to his original partners, natives all of Columbus, Mississippi: James P. Carnes, David Gooch, Mark Gooch, and Birney Imes.

In December 005, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill acquired the Pruitt Collec-tion in a bargain sale and gift transfer from its owners who had bought it in 198 with the purpose of ensuring its preservation. The collection is now housed in Wilson Library as part of the North Carolina Collection Photo Archives and is in the process of being catalogued and archived.

1. The accounts of Pruitt’s documenting the lynching were drawn in part from interviews, including one with his daughter, Irene Pruitt Raper. She was interviewed by James P. Carnes, a former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, in Columbus, Mississippi, in October 1991. A tape record-ing and transcript of the interview are in possession of the author. Between 1994 and 00, the author conducted interviews about the lynching with Columbus residents Merle Fraser Sr., Eva Byrd Heard, Parker George, Sarah Lusk, Helen Randolph, Wilbern Sprayberry, Clyde Stokes, Dr. Emmett Stringer, and Billy Thompson.

. Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order (Oxford University Press, 1986), 84–85. See “Two Negroes Pay for Act on Tree Limb. Lynching Marks Attempted Assault on White Lady,” Commercial Dis-patch (Columbus, Miss.), 15 July 195, 1; “Lynch Episode Is Closed Here. Negroes Met Death at ‘Hands of Unknown Parties’ Is the Verdict,” Commercial Dispatch, 16 July 195, 1; and Associated Press, “ Negroes Lynched By Mississippi Mob,” New York Times, 16 July 195, 40. For a discus-sion of how lynching images functioned as a cultural force, see Amy Louise Wood, “Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy,” American Nineteenth Century His-tory 6. (September 005): –99. These Pruitt images did not appear in the local newspaper. However, one of the lynching photographs was converted into a poster image for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in about 1965. See James Allen, et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Press, 000), fig. 91 and n. 91, 199–00. The endnote

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incorrectly references the lynching as occurring “circa 1910.” See also Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (St. Martin’s Press, 00), 15. In this text, the caption incorrectly suggests the lynching occurred in the 190s.

. “No Understrappers Could Stop This Man,” New York Times, 1 March 194, 1; “Down on the Farm Saved by Phone Call to President (AP Photo),” New York Herald Tribune, 5 March 194; “This Is Sylvester Talking!” Chicago Defender, 10 March 194; “Sylvester in the Times,” Commer-cial Dispatch, 5 March 194, 4; “Sylvester in Movies; Sound Reel Men Here,” Commercial Dispatch, 6 March 194; “He Telephoned the White House,” Commercial Dispatch, 8 March 194, 1; and “Negro Aided by Roosevelt Shuns Politics, as He Works Farm Saved by Phone Call,” New York Times, 1 May 195, .

4. Szarkowski comments to Pruitt Collection owners James P. Carnes, Birney Imes, and Mark Gooch in Birmingham, Alabama, 1989; Trudy Wilner Stack, conversation with author in Tucson, Arizona, August 1999; Tom Rankin, executive director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, conversation with author, 11 November 00, in Durham, North Carolina.

5. David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Simon & Schuster, 1996), 05−.

6. See generally Joel Williamson, Crucible of Race (Oxford University Press, 1984). Amy Louise Wood, “A Profound Sort of Proof: Lynching Photography and Conventions of Portraiture,” presentation at Emory University conference “Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histo-ries and Legacies,” 4 October 00, Atlanta. Wood referenced late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Georgia white studio photographers who disdained photographing blacks in their community.

. James D. Startt and William D. Sloan, Historical Methods in Mass Communication (Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1989), –9. Estelle Jussim, The Eternal Moment: Essays on the Photographic Image (Aperture, 1989), 161.

8. See Ann Hawthorne, ed., The Picture Man: Photographs of Paul Buchanan (University of North Carolina Press, 199); Jerry W. Cotton, Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten (University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and David Moltke–Hansen, “Seeing the Highlands, 1900–199: Southwestern Virginia through the Lens of T.R. Phelps,” Southern Cultures 1.1 (Fall 1994), –49. For discussion of other photographers of the American South, see also Janice Broderick, “Charles Elliott Gill: Ozark Life Through the Lens of an Early Photographer,” Missouri Historical Society 5. (199): 8–91. See also Michael V. R. Thomason, “Two Alabama Photographers Who Recorded History: Erik Overybey and Draffus Hightower,” Alabama Review 55. (July 00): 16–180; and Dennis O’Kain, “Documenting the Deep South: William E. Wilson, Photographer,” Georgia Re-view . (199): 66–680. See Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to Present (Norton, 000). See also Dinah Johnson, All Around Town: The Photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts (Henry Holt and Company), 1998; and Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn, eds., A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts 1920–1936 (Bruccoli Clark and Al-gonquin Books, 1986). In addition, see Separate, but Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson (Public Affairs, 00.) Barbara McCandless, Equal before the Lens: Jno.Trilica’s Photographs of Granger, Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 199).

9. Toba Pato Tucker, introduction by Alan Trachtenberg, Heber Springs Portraits: Continuity and Change in the World Disfarmer Photographed (University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Julia Scully, Dis-farmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939−1946 (Addison House, 196), 1. Pruitt’s genius also was the straight–forwardness of his images. See a discussion of the emergence of this style in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (Doubleday, 1964), 111–5. Also see Szarkowski’s Photography Until Now, , for a discussion of how Alfred Stieglitz, August Sander, and Edward Weston ad-

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opted the technical vocabulary of commercial photographers who used “full–scale negatives that yielded brilliant prints on smooth, hard–finished papers that revealed maximum detail and tonal nuance.”

10. Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip (Pantheon Books, 19). 11. Connections with Pruitt’s style also exist with Martín Chambi of Peru, Seydou Keïta

of Mali, August Sander of Germany, and Eugène Atget of France. See Martín Chambi, Martín Chambi: Photographs 1920−1950 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 199); Michelle Lamunière, You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portraits Photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibè (Harvard University Art Museums and Yale University Press, 001); August Sander, August Sander (Aperture Foundation, 19); and Eugene Atget, Eugene Atget (Aperture Foundation, 1980).

1. Biographical information in this section is drawn partly from formal interviews with Pruitt’s daughter, Irene Pruitt Caldwell Raper, and her son, Thomas Caldwell, and from informal conversations with Pruitt’s assistant, Calvin Shanks, who in 1960 bought Pruitt’s business. Pruitt’s son Lambuth is deceased. Tapes and transcripts in possession of author. See also archival files at the Columbus–Lowndes Public Library in the local history section and filed under the names of Pruitt and his one–time employer, Henry Hoffmeister. See “Pruitt’s Studio,” Commercial Dispatch, 4 January 19, 5. “Business Announcement,” Commercial Dispatch, 4 January 19, 5.

1. Author interviews with Marjorie Baugh Doster, Columbus, Mississippi, 8 January, 00. Tape and transcript in possession of author.

14. Author interview with Thomas Caldwell, Fairfield, Ohio, 0 May 001. Tape and transcript in possession of author. Pruitt biographical information based on interviews by author, James P. Carnes, and Birney Imes between 198 and 000 with Merle Fraser, Eva Byrd Fraser Heard, Irene Pruitt Caldwell Raper, Calvin Shanks, and Rachel Shute.

15. Over his four decades in business, Pruitt had a number of assistants and “re-touchers,” both men and women, young and old, black and white. As a retoucher, Shute used a lead-based pen to draw on negatives “to take out wrinkles” and other blemishes in portraits of Pruitt custom-ers. Once, she said, at a customer’s request, she was able to visually remedy the disfigurement of a man whose little finger was missing. After working for Pruitt, Shute was a reporter, and gossip and society columnist for the Commercial Dispatch. Interview with author, April 000. Tape in author’s possession. See James Allen’s Without Sanctuary for examples of lynching postcards that were created for profit. See Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown for references to lynch-ing photography and the creation of lynching postcards. Irene Pruitt Raper, taped interview with James P. Carnes, Columbus, Mississippi, October 1991, and Merle Fraser Sr., taped interview with author, Columbus, Mississippi, June 1994. Both Raper and Fraser confirm Shute’s comments about Pruitt’s making a postcard of the lynching photograph and showing it discreetly to some people who visited the studio. Tape and transcripts in possession of author. For Pruitt’s tornado photographs, including ones of the dead lined up in a makeshift morgue, see Martis D. Ramage, Jr., Tupelo, Mississippi, Tornado of 1936 (Tupelo: Northeast Mississippi Historical and Genealogical Society, 199), 9–10, 105, and 111. “Argument in Locke Case This Afternoon and Goes to Jury Late,” Commercial Dispatch, 0 September 198, 1. During the 190s and 190s, the Commercial Dis-patch was essentially the only local news medium for Columbus residents. Other newspapers from the “big cities” — Jackson, Memphis, and Birmingham — covered news from Northeast Missis-sippi but in a limited manner. Local radio news did not become a fact of life until the 1940s.

16. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 4–8.1. Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov said “the photo–eye can show us things from unexpected

viewpoints and in unusual configurations.” See Ossip Brik, “What the Eye Does Not See,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writing, 1913–1940, edited and with an

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O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town

introduction by Christopher Phillips (Museum of Modern Art and Aperture, 1989), 19.18. The 1900 census for Columbus and surrounding Lowndes County listed three out of every

four residents as black. This percentage gradually declined with the Great Migration north. By 190 two of every three residents were black, and by 190 the percentage breakdown was 4 per-cent white and 58 percent black. Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State (University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 18.

19. Author interview with Billy Thompson of Columbus, April 000. Tape and transcript in possession of author. See also James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese (Harvard University Press, 191). Leo E. Turitz and Evelyn Turitz, Jews in Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi, 198), 8–8.

0. Author interview with Pruitt assistant Rachel Shute, April 000. Tape and transcript in possession of author. Author interviews with Eva Byrd Heard, August 00. Tape and transcript in possession of author.

1. Willie Morris, North Toward Home (Houghton Mifflin Company, 196), 54.. “Law Violators Scored by Jury,” Columbus Dispatch, 18 May 1919, 1. See also “Dozen Stills

Torn Up at Court House. Lye Found in One as They Are Battered and Sold to Junk Dealer Today, Commercial Dispatch, 0 December 19, 1; “Officers Drive on Moonshiners. Nashville Ferry Sec-tion Scene of Raids and Two Shooting Scrapes Among Negroes. Two Stills Taken,” Commercial Dispatch, 4 March 195, 1; and “Justice Fines a Blind Tiger. Having White Lightning in His Posses-sion Costs Negro One Hundred Dollars,” Commercial Dispatch, 9 October 191, 8. “Columbus, The Friendly City,” undated brochure with pencil notation — circa 19−4—in local history archival files at Columbus–Lowndes Public Library. Julius E. Thompson, Black Life in Mississippi: Essays on Political, Social and Cultural Studies in a Deep South State (University Press of America, 001), 6. See also Williamson, Crucible, 11–18, and Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynching, 1882–1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1995), –44. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood and How It Changed America (Simon and Schuster, 199), photograph and caption, 16–. It is likely that Pruitt took the photograph of the Ku Klux Klan march depicted in the Barry book.

. “Columbus in the 0th Century: a Chronology,” Commercial Dispatch, January 000, 4A.4. Patti Carr Black and Marion Barnwell, Touring Literary Mississippi (University Press of Mis-

sissippi, 00), 0–8.5. “Young Woman Named Secretary by Democrats,” New York Times, 1 March 1944, 4.6. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker

Evans (Hill and Wang Noonday Press, 1989), 90.

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