To crack the code of Southern black culture, it’s a good idea to start in church.
That’s one of the first things journalist Alysia Burton Steele discovered when she came to the Mississippi Delta in search of elders — women who looked like her grandmother and great-grandmother, who might talk to her about their lives and teach her something about her own.
The result of her search, “Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom,” a collection of formal portraits and oral histories, became a book in 2015 that has accomplished the rare task in the publishing world of maintaining steady reader interest through word of mouth.
Two years later, “Delta Jewels” is becoming a much-loved text as its subjects, church mothers of the Deep South, grow older and even pass on.
“I lost my beloved grandmother over 20 years ago,” Steele said in the book’s introduction. “I missed her increasingly over the years and decided that with the skills I had, I would pay it forward and interview and photograph other people’s grandmothers. I needed them in my life, and wanted their wisdom.”
Steele will talk about the project on Thursday at the Museum of the Mississippi Delta at a special event sponsored by the Mississippi Bicentennial Commission and the Mississippi Humanities Council.
A Pennsylvania native who teaches journalism at the University of Mississippi, Steele located to Mississippi in 2012 and began taking pictures in the Delta in 2013. The biracial product of a mixed-race marriage, she wanted to explore her black side and the black women of her Southern grandmother’s generation.
But first she had to get access, and to do that she went to pastors, starting with Juan Self of Clarksdale.
“I didn’t pick any of the women in the book. Pastors picked the women. I knew from my upbringing that pastors were the key to the community,” Steele said.
After carefully scrutinizing Steele and her project — Steele said she had dinner with the family and went to church with them — Self shared names with Steele, and through him she got to know other pastors in the Delta.
“In the end, I had 19 pastors helping me in 27 towns,” she said. “They picked the women, and I picked the stories.”
Steele’s working philosophy, that everyone has a story worth sharing, panned out as she visited church mothers for two years and listened to their tales of hard work, faith, Jim Crow and more, drawing her ever closer to the source of strength she’d known in her own grandmother.
“It was a great experience,” Steele said. “It taught me better interview skills. Sometimes I learned the best thing was just to put the recording equipment down and listen.”
The stories she heard sometimes broke her heart. Like when a woman in Tunica told her about picking cotton and the landowner’s sons putting dead possums in her family’s drinking water.
“I remember crying as I was typing up some of the stories,” she said.
What Steele had first envisioned simply as a personal project turned into something bigger when it caught the attention first of Southern Living magazine, then the religion editor of The New York Times. Southern Living dedicated six pages to a spread of Steele’s photos and the women’s recorded stories. Samuel Freedman of the Times came down to Sumner in 2014 and followed Steele as she visited two elderly neighbors, Lela Bearden and Herma Mims Floyd.
In his subsequent article, Freedman explained: “Whether by formal investiture or informal acclamation, nearly all the women in the (book-in-progress) held the title of ‘church mother,’ a term of respect and homage in black Christianity. As lifelong residents of the Delta — the landscape of the blues bards Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the terrain of the civil rights crusaders Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer — the women had lived through segregation and struggle and liberation.”
Beyond capturing the essences of these American lives, Steele taught herself the skills of the oral historian, from interviewing to transcribing and editing to good audio technique. Now, she is passing those skills on to students at Ole Miss and around the state through the work of the foundation she created to encourage young people to mine their own families and communities and capture and preserve the voices of their elders.
“I think people love connecting to grandmothers,” Steele said. “I think it transcends age, race and gender. Not every story is sad, and not every story relates to race.
“Hopefully we’ve all had someone in our lives that we loved and treasured.”
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
