The Neshoba County Fair: Place and Paradox in Mississippi by Robert Craycroft (review)

Robert Craycroft. The Neshoba County Fair: Place and Paradox in Mississippi. Mississippi State University Center for Small Town Research, 1989. 136 pp., many illus. A remarkable southern tradition is documented in this book on the Neshoba County Fair, an event that is at once an agricultural exposition, a carnival , and a one-week-a-year living community. Whereas most county fairs have the first two features, it is the third aspect of the Neshoba County Fair that sets it apart from all others and that provides the focus of this study. Originating in 1889 as a picnic in a pine grove, the Neshoba County Fair by 1894 had begun to construct permanent buildings, forerunners of the 600 or so present-day cabins that are grouped around Founder's Square and extended more informally in outlying neighborhoods. How these arrangements were formed and transformed over time to arrive at the present layout is explained in both words and diagrams, followed by an experiential description of the Fair's customary activities across the year, week, and days of the season. An extended analysis of the Fair's physical environment occupies the central section of the book, and the volume concludes with a more philosophical inquiry into the characteristics of place and paradox mentioned in the subtitle. The adjective unique crops up again and again in the text as the author searches for archetypical forms to which the Fair might be compared. None of the proposed paradigms- religious camp meetings , American small towns with a courthouse square, European villages - account individually for the distinctive forms and activities observed at the Fair, although collectively they suggest BOOK REVIEWS 63 interesting parallels. Paradoxes abound. During the Fair, people from a fundamentally rural region live at a density of 180 persons per acre and indulge in the vigorous public life this density affords; their cabins conform to building regulations stricter than those of any American municipality; and they willingly forgo the conveniences of telephone, television, and refrigeration. Yet there is much about the Fair that is typically southern. Status depends largely on one's familial relation to founders of the Fair rather than on accomplishments or income. The Fair's society is closed, and all transfers of cabins must be approved by the elected Fair Board. Not surprisingly, no AfricanAmericans or Native Americans inhabit cabins. This racial exclusiveness, legal because the Fair is a private entity, is in fact one of the most troubling aspects of the Fair, raising questions also about the author's assumptions in writing this account. The Fair as presented here is the Fair known only to whites. Although blacks may attend daily events, the life described in this book is that of the resident community, which seems to carry on as if the twentieth century did not exist. An entirely different chapter might be written on the Fair as experienced and perceived by black residents of Neshoba County, and one suspects that they would not use the word paradise in their descriptions. In fairness, Craycroft does start to address this issue on pages 122-23, then breaks off, leaving most of page 123 blank, as if he wanted to say more and then had second thoughts. This reader was struck with the notion that the Fair's spirit and sense ofplace recall nothing so strongly as a family reunion, where stories are told and retold, news is exchanged, intergenerational ties are strengthened, and too much good food is consumed by all. Families can be hostile to outsiders , and in this respect, too, the Fair is much like an extended family group. One must compliment the author for a thought-provoking book, intelligently combining aspects of anthropological research with the spatial and formal analysis more familiar to design professionals. The volume is handsomely produced, well designed, and appropriately enlivened by photographs, diagrams , and line drawings (the work of architectural graduate student Lindsey Bute). Readers unfamiliar with the Fair would be better informed if the map contained in the Appendix, which lists street and neighborhood names, had been placed at the beginning of the book as a guide, and an editor should have eliminated the comparative and superlative forms ofunique that are incorrectly...