T HE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 2 3
A YOUNG BLACK “MANSERVANT”for a white family who
called him “Humpy” because of a back deformity. A Ku Klux
Klan march down Main Street circa 1922. Overall-clad men at
the construction site of the Magnolia Bowl football stadium in
- Minstrel shows, baptisms, carnivals and lynchings. In
his studio and out in the world, Otis Noel Pruitt used his cam-
era to bear witness to the soul and soullessness of Columbus,
Miss., in the first half of the 20th century. Curated from the
88,000 negatives the author Berkley Hudson rescued “from
the dustbin of history,” O.N. PRUITT’SPOSSUM TOWN(Univer-
sity of North Carolina, $49.95) is a “‘photobiography’ of a
time and a place”: a Southern town, east of the Tombigbee
River and west of the Alabama border, weathered by Jim
Crow and the Depression. The locals called Columbus “Pos-
sum Town,” a nickname bestowed by Choctaw and Chicka-
saw inhabitants who thought one early white settler looked
like a marsupial.
Pruitt spent most of his life in Columbus, where his
white skin allowed him to move freely in both white and
Black spaces: homes, churches, rivers, fields. Many im-
ages, especially those of Black subjects, lack identification
or context. Are those the injured boy’s parents beside him
on the porch? What ails the old woman in bed, being
tended to by an unnamed caretaker? “Regardless,” Hud-
son writes, “the visual record is powerful, enabling read-
ers to supply their own captions.” With ethnographic rigor
and the intimacy of a local, Pruitt roves matter-of-factly
between scenes of gilded refinement — the crafted splen-
dor of privilege — and the gruesome violence that makes
that privilege possible. 0
Visuals/In Black and White/By Lauren ChristensenA photo archive reveals a brutally honest perspective on a Jim Crow-era Mississippi town.
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL LIBRARIES
LAUREN CHRISTENSENis an editor at the Book Review.
Men and women pick cotton in what was probably the Black Belt Prairie, in southwest Lowndes County, circa 1920s-30s.Portrait of Oscar West, a janitor and “manservant,” circa 1930. Unidentified woman, boy and man on a front porch. A baptism in the Tombigbee River, circa 1930s.Teenage “hostesses” assemble for an annual spring tour of preserved antebellum mansions, circa 1955.