An upcoming exhibit at the Museum of the Mississippi Delta will provide a look inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman.
“Parchman” is a collection of photographs taken by Delta State University professor R. Kim Rushing. A book with the same name was released in December 2016.
“I just thought it’d be really fascinating to do this exhibit on Parchman,” said Cheryl Thornhill, executive director of the museum. “I’ve always been interested in that part of our history, of the Parchman penitentiary. We know that blues singers were incarcerated there. We know that civil rights folks were incarcerated there, and we know that it’s been in movies, such as ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’”
An opening reception for the exhibit will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the museum. The exhibit will run through Nov. 4.
Parchman is the oldest prison and the only maximum-security prison for men in the state. The prison, located in Sunflower County, was constructed in 1904 and covers 20,000 acres.
In 1994, Rushing was the first outside photographer in Parchman’s history allowed long-term access to inmates and the chance to photograph them in their cells and living quarters after earning the trust of his subjects.
“I think that my decision to focus my attention on Parchman could have been influenced by my family life as a child,” said Rushing.
Throughout his childhood, Rushing’s father was a civil servant, working with the sheriff’s office and the police department, serving as co-director of the local civil defense and chief of the fire department and sometimes driving an ambulance.
“My last year in high school, he got a job for me working as the radio dispatcher for the sheriff’s office and night guard for the jail,” said Rushing. “I was around law enforcement quite a bit of the time. I also had a lot of interaction with the city and county prisoners.”
During that time, Rushing’s father was often recruited to transport prisoners to Parchman penitentiary to begin serving their time there.
“I had many questions about the place that I wanted to ask him, but he was not a man prone to sharing his thoughts, deep or otherwise,” said Rushing. “Twelve years later, I found myself living in Ruleville, 12 miles down the road from Parchman. The Mississippi Delta is packed full of curiosities that I wanted to know more about. Parchman was simply the greatest curiosity and the question for which I had the longest history.”
Rushing was allowed to photograph the inmates for almost four years.
“To give him access to the prison was extraordinary,” said Thornhill. “I think people will be interested in this exhibit because there is kind of a fascination with Parchman, because it has been a part of our folklore or oral history that people talk about, and here’s photographs of what it really looks like in there. I think that’s fascinating to people.”
In Rushing’s book, several of the portraits are accompanied by handwritten letters by the inmates sharing their thoughts about their lives and prison conditions.
“Sometimes I think we might misconstrue the people who are incarcerated as not educated well, but these letters are very well written and well thought out,” said Thornhill. “I’m sure that’s hard to do, because ... you can imagine sitting in one of these cells every day, and some of these people are on death row.”
Rushing’s book, published by University Press of Mississippi, features 125 black-and-white photographs. The images and letters combined provide the most comprehensive understanding of Parchman in print. The photographs in the book were edited from thousands of images Rushing made during the four years. He worked with 18 men who appear in the book. Some of his subjects agreed to write, and others declined.
“I spent a lot of time listening to the stories these men told me about their life, both in prison and before they landed there,” Rushing said. “The stories were often moving and powerful. I decided to try to get them to put their stories on paper, but I didn’t have much luck. ... It was a bit more complicated than I anticipated. There were rules about writing utensils. After all, a pencil can make a pretty good shank. Some inmates were only allowed a limited amount of paper at one time. Also, I was asking these men to make themselves vulnerable on paper in an environment that had the potential to become hostile in a quick and unforgiving way.”
Rushing provided a few generic questions as a starting point.
“I also made a promise that their words would never be altered, edited or taken out of context,” he said. “That is the reason you will see photographs of their handwriting in the book and the exhibit, just the way they presented it to me.”
Rushing said he admires the courage of the men who decided to write, including one inmate, Terry Wilkins, who wrote a 14-page, flowing, journal-like story.
The exhibit will consist of 27 framed photographs of inmates with 40 pages of handwritten stories.
“It was my desire to include the inmate writing in the exhibit, so I included the more interesting photos of the inmates who chose to write,” said Rushing. “The rest of the photographs in the exhibit are selected from the more powerful photographs that I made during my time there.”
Prior coming to the Museum of the Mississippi Delta, the “Parchman” exhibit was on the walls at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. Before the book was published, Rushing showed his work at the Delta Arts Alliance in Cleveland and some of the photographs and text were exhibited in a couple of places in Texas.
Rushing said that he learned a great deal from this project.
“I learned that everyone has a story and most are willing to share it, if I am willing to listen,” he said. “I hope that the takeaway for the people viewing this work is that judging people from a distance seldom works. I already knew that in a theoretical way, but the work I did at Parchman drove the lesson home for me. I hope my viewers get some of that.”
In a partnership with Turnrow Book Co., Rushing will sign copies of his book at the reception. He will also speak about his experience taking the photographs.
For more information, call the museum at 453-0925 or visit www.museumofthemississippidelta.com.
•Contact Ruthie Robison at 581-7233 or rrobison@gwcommonwealth.com.
