American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty and Culture, 1830-1998 (review)

American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998. By Ted Ownby (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 228 pp. $45.00 cloth $18.98 paper

There is a bit of irony writing a book about consumer culture in one of the poorest states in America. Yet, it is the peculiar relationships between class, race, and poverty in Mississippi that provide an unusual and thoughtful setting for Ownby's fine study of the meaning of goods in a southern region. Scholars have spent a good deal of time debating whether the spread of consumer goods has destroyed cultural traditions and values or whether it has served as a democratizing force in American society. Ownby, however, calls for an understanding of "other people's dreams" in order to see "the way goods and shopping have carried meanings some people find subversive and liberating" (170).

In antebellum slave society, planters saw ownership of goods as their privilege, and they associated frivolous consumption with their wives and slaves. Poor white people lived in fear of debt, especially after the Civil War when many fell from yeoman status to that of tenantry. Emancipation created opportunities for freed people to own property, work for wages, and purchase goods. However, the rise of sharecropping and the plantation commissary insured that planters would control their workers' consumption by determining croppers' access to clothing, furniture, food, and other necessities.

Planters continued to view blacks as frivolous and unable to manage money. Witness the constant outcry about blacks' fast spending of their settlement money to buy clothes, cars, gadgets, and other things that they could not purchase on the plantation. With cash available once a year, croppers used the settlement money to express their freedom, however briefly, from the close supervision of their employers. Consumer goods, in short, were sources of contention between planters and sharecroppers, enmeshed in the class relations of the plantation social order. As such, access to goods became one of the goals of the freedom struggle; black Mississippians staged boycotts to force storeowners to treat them with dignity and fairness. Chain stores, like Woolworth's, that promised cheaper goods to more people became sites of struggle for those seeking liberation from the grip of segregation and disfranchisement.

Ownby concludes by discussing the rise of the Walmart chain and its role in democratizing racial and class relations in Mississippi. As he accurately notes, all people--black, white, rich, and poor--shop at Walmart. He might also have added that the most integrated places in regions like the Mississippi delta are the various chain stores and restaurants. Small-town cafes still deny black people a table with white people, whereas all people sit together in McDonald's or Ryan's. Moreover, Walmart and K-mart have replaced the town squares and streets where people often segregated into their own social corners. Everyone enters the main door of Walmart and everyone competes for the blue light specials at K-mart.

As Ownby notes, cultural critics may lament the loss of regional identity and traditions that they associate with the advent of the chain stores, but from the shoppers' point of view, access to goods without regard to class and race is not to be taken for granted in Mississippi. This is a marvelous book.

Nan Elizabeth Woodruff
Pennsylvania State University

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