A Review of
The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning
By Ellen Ann Fentress
University Press of Mississippi
Hardcover; 194 pages
Mississippi writer’s memoir seeks to tell the truth about the South and her place in it
By Shannon Barbour
Special to the Clarion-Ledger
Every so often, I step beneath the awning of Lemuria Books and am transported. I had only one foot across the threshold the first time I saw the cover for Ellen Ann Fentress’s “The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning,” poster-size and leaning against a column of books. The setting is important, serendipitous even, because the cover, a self-portrait by Mississippian Dusti Bongé, is itself entrancing.
With the book in hand, I noticed the eyes of Bonge’s portrait gazing toward the fore edge, imploring me to open it. Open it I did and found that Fentress does with words what Bongé does with paint: presents reality in such a way that my perspective shifted.
“The Steps We Take” winds itself around four main signposts, each titled “Volunteering,” and while Fentress doesn’t adhere to a strict chronology, these chapters follow her from high school to college to housewife years to today. The volunteer chapters do more than anchor us in time; they guide the narrative in new directions. Fentress explains it: “Through the lens of how I volunteered, you could see the shape of what else was at work within and surrounding me.” Of all her charitable work, this might be Fentress at her most generous because she offers the whole of herself: the funny, the fallible, the kind-hearted, the heartbroken, the angry, the human. Through her unflinching storytelling, Fentress relives for us the awkwardness of a first crush, her personal sexual revolution, a foray into teaching French, the highs and lows of home renovation and the slow unraveling of the life she expected.
In a devastating scene, Fentress says, “I saved myself from acknowledging information that clearly wasn’t great. I simply played as if things that happened didn’t.” I won’t give away the context, but in a way, I don’t need to: the sly brilliance of the book is the universality Fentress achieves even while recounting the most personal of stories. Fentress has a certain knack for these double-edged sentences where one side cuts to a familiar nerve and the other side pierces. Her aim is always true and often administered with humor. Take this one: “In quotidian conversations for girls in Mississippi, anything less than over-the-top, performative sunniness comes across as rude. It’s a high, frankly exhausting, bar, then and now.” And this one: “As I’ve pointed out before, to be a polite Mississippi woman. . .you’re compelled to crank out a sizable share of enthusiasm at all times. It’s just courteous.”
With her choice of title, Fentress invites everyone in; these are our steps, not hers alone. She includes us in her movie references, discussions of books, memories of watching March of Dimes telethons and driving familiar streets in familiar cars with familiar-sounding friends. Even for the shared experiences and remembrances that are more difficult, Fentress commands our attention, guides us with a sure and steady voice: “We were both aware of what the other represented in a way that people born after 1975, and maybe non-Mississippians, simply aren’t. Race was the very subtext of our relationship.” And: “It’s painful but clarifying to come to terms with the truth that the Old South was, in fact, an open-air crime. The same goes for the white supremacist message of the South’s neo-Confederate monuments.” Fentress comes prepared with research and a lifetime of living in Mississippi and a desire to make right what has been done wrong. No longer is she willing to save herself from acknowledging things that aren’t great, and neither are we.
Even though Fentress proves herself a very real person, capable of grace and failure and love, “The Steps We Take” still feels mythologic in scope, but maybe that’s just Mississippi. The cracked land and crumbling houses, a storm that destroys but provides solace, the chorus of well-intentioned volunteering friends, an ever-evolving David and Goliath story where the Goliath of white patriarchy just won’t lay down and die, a new quest not yet ended. Realized and ongoing. Fentress promises that “[t]ime and our feet are moving forward,” and I’ll go anywhere Fentress leads.
Shannon Barbour is a literary nonfiction writer in the Jackson area.
Clarion-Ledger / Hattiesburg American Mississippi Books Page 