Dick and Buddy

Detail from cover

Mississippi confounds me. Every second I’m there, its contradictions abound. How could a place of such natural beauty also be a place of unremitting historical ugliness? How has it offered the world such cultural heroes as Muddy Waters, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Elvis, side by side with such villains as Ross Barnett, Byron De La Beckwith, and Hayley Barbour? And there’s the one question that probably bedevils all those with a literary bent: How could such a benighted state produce Eudora Welty? Ellen Douglas? Richard Ford? W. A. Percy (and to a degree his nephew, Walker)? Faulkner?

No single answer can satisfy that question, but it’s worth noting that all these writers came from families where wealth or privilege was present or near enough. All these writers could gravitate toward the vocation of writing with the notion they’d have family name or connections to fall back on and that eking out a meager existence was not their lot. And that is why the achievements of Richard Wright and Lewis “Buddy” Nordan—two native sons of the Mississippi Delta (the most southern place on earth, according to James C. Cobb)—should stand as that much more astonishing: clearly, though it may seem the fertile soil of the alluvial plain of Mississippi produces fiction as easily as it does cotton, some of its makers had to struggle mightily to shape their lives into story.

It’s hard to think of two writers who came from more difficult circumstances. Working class seems more aspirational than actual when one considers some facts of their biographies: Wright, the grandson of slaves, abandoned by his father, moved from Natchez to Memphis to Jackson as his mother searched for security; Nordan, an only child whose biological father died before “Buddy” had turned two years old. His schoolteacher mother remarried a housepainter and they remained in Itta Bena, where Nordan encountered the stark unreality of witnessing Emmett Till’s killers roaming free, despite their well-known guilt. That both writers captured their youth in fiction and memoir (Wright astonishingly in Black Boy [1945], Nordan whimsically in Boy with Loaded Gun [2000]) seems no coincidence: as it is often with writers from working class backgrounds, the fiction can seem tame compared to what really happened. Indeed, it’s a marvel that both men survived their childhoods, let alone, through will and luck (that commodity Richard Yates reminds is what all writers might need most), managed to depart the Delta—Wright to Chicago, New York and eventually Paris; Nordan to the Navy, Auburn, Arkansas, and finally Pittsburgh. What profits us, their readers, is that neither could never quite leave the Delta and working class life in their writing. True, Wright’s most famous novel, Native Son (1940), is set in Chicago, and Nordan placed Lightning Song (1997) in the Mississippi’s Hill country, but it is their Delta writing that most embodies the tragedies, triumphs and yearnings that link this disparate pair.

As it is often with writers of this caliber, the best case to make has already been made in their work; all one should do is simply to encourage the reader to encounter them on her own. And they’d have no shortage of choices from Nordan and Wright. Each mastered multiple forms—the short story, the novel, the memoir (Wright even wrote some remarkable haikus); both sustained a fairly high level of achievement throughout their careers. Wright’s productivity sets him apart from Nordan, however. One might even conclude that Wright knew he was not long for this earth, given his publication of a book every other year between 1938 and 1961, the year of his death. And while the common reading of his work is to view how it illustrates the racism of the early and middle twentieth century, harrowingly, accurately and insightfully; yet one can’t overlook how frequently class intersects with race to produce his most compelling fictions. As often anthologized as it is, “The Man Who Was Almost A Man” (1961), might have diminished over the years but for the absolute mesmerizing power...