The Mound Bayou Demonstrator: Black Memory at the Margins and the Means of Cultural Production

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. It begins with the printer.”

– Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”¹

This essay begins with a printer, in both senses of the word: the printer as person, and the printer as object. It is, as Derrida rightfully steers us, a deliberate privileging of these two interpretations over what might be more conventionally seen as being fundamental to archival research, the printed object. In many ways, to arrive at this particular region of interest—the Mississippi Delta—in the period of time between emancipation and the first Great Migration (1916–1940), is to confront not a wealth of archival material from and about this moment, but the profound silences in the archives.

Historians rightfully note that Black print culture in the American South had to overcome particularly arduous obstacles and hostile circumstances, from its earliest beginnings during the era of slavery. In Mississippi, as one example, law and custom decreed that enslaved persons were not allowed to learn to read or write, and at any Black assembly—including religious gatherings—white persons were required to also be present. It was, furthermore, illegal to train any Black persons as typesetters.² The relative scarcity in surviving copies of Black periodicals makes it even more difficult to formally outline a history, let alone fully discern the “culture” part of Black print culture. But what if we heed Rodney G.S. Carter’s insistence that archives are practices of power, and a reflection of the powerful in society? Carter calls for archivists to “allow for multiple narratives to fill some of these gaps, to make users aware of the silences, and to attempt to understand and respect the choice of certain groups to keep their silence.”³ What happens to “Black print culture” when the printed material is lost to us? Why and how was it lost?

At the core of this line of inquiry, the “center” as we typically understand it has been displaced. What we know about lost periodicals often comes from external accounts, either not directly involved with the actual printing of the paper, or outside the community a newspaper served. Yet we know without the physical preservation of copies that these newspapers undoubtedly existed, that they circulated widely in one or more places, and that residents read it and discussed it. In other words, for the existence of every periodical there was an imagined and real audience, movement and circulation.

What about an editor and his press can we piece together with the artifacts left behind? More importantly, what can we speculate about the impact his press and published works had on the community, Black readers in the South, and perhaps even readers on a national scale? If, as Pierre Nora writes, “imagination invests [the archive] with symbolic aura,” what happens when that archive in part becomes imaginary, or trace? And if “the sacred is invested in the trace that is at the same time its negation,” we should contemplate the implications of theorizing the trace, particularly in ways that can make a tangible impact on the communities who did not leave in the First and Second Great Migrations (1940–1970), the ones who stayed behind and remain there today.⁴ “The South is a disaster and it is also a miracle,” writes Imani Perry. Of her home state Alabama, she observes that “organizers have literally never stopped fighting. But the nation’s eyes haven’t thawed enough to see it.”⁵ The same can be said about Mississippi. The imagined divide in this country between the North and the South remains one which relies upon caricatures of an irredeemable South and progressive North. This ahistorical narrative sustains a moral superiority which allows Northern critique of the South without palpably addressing histories of migration...