MU professor sifted a treasure trove of photographs to capture his Mississippi hometown

Steer off the main drag in someone else's hometown. Turn through unfamiliar neighborhoods. The risk of getting lost often is outweighed by the reward of what you encounter — the chance to take a place on its own terms.

A new book from University of Missouri emeritus professor of journalism Berkley Hudson recreates this sensation. Leading you through his Columbus, Mississippi, Hudson proves a worthwhile guide. He isn't losing his way like you are — he recognizes these streets; he understands Columbus as a dynamic collection of routines and rhythms.

But Hudson is learning as well, willingly paying attention to what often goes overlooked, so together you might see the community from the very inside out.

Hudson labels "O.N. Pruitt's Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South" (University of North Carolina Press) the "photobiography" of a specific place and time. It's told through the lens of its titular figure, one community's "picture man." Pruitt, who lived from 1891 to 1967, documented Columbus' finest points and greatest transgressions.

He passed along an unwitting inheritance of more than 88,000 negatives, which Hudson and several friends sought to preserve and handle with proper care. If a picture is worth approximately 1,000 words, they had a nearly-incalculable amount of narrative detail on their hands.

"They represent a range of photographic categories: floods of biblical proportion, portraits of people in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, traveling troupes of entertainers or locals devising their own diversions, family reunions, postmortem photographs and more," Hudson writes of the Pruitt Archives in the book's introduction.

The book weds more than 190 images to Hudson's interstitial essays, offering a tide of detail and just a fragment of Pruitt's output. Columbia residents also can experience Pruitt's body of work in complementary exhibits at the State Historical Society of Missouri and MU's Reynolds Journalism Institute, which run through November.

A tour of Possum Town

Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples in Mississippi referred to a white settlement between bodies of water as Suqua Tomaha, the book notes; the two words translate "Possum Town," a nickname which stuck to Columbus.

"This early nineteenth-century name derived from the local trading post's wizened-looking manager, Spirus Roach," Hudson writes. "His face reminded people of a possum's."

Pruitt chronicled the Possum Town he knew with a "photographic eye (that) was straightforward and puritanical," Hudson writes. While dispassionate, Pruitt's gaze upon the people, places and things of Columbus is detail-rich. You want to look each person in the eye — and you want to look beyond them, to the table settings, the trees, the license plates.

Written across the face of each person, a backstory neither Pruitt nor Hudson could fully plumb but draws viewers in all the same. Portraits of the young and old, well-off and wage-earners, Black and white sit side-by-side — sometimes in very similar poses — underscoring what is different and similar to all of us.

Before we reach the title page, a Black boy with bloodied nose and stained white shirt stands on the left side of the layout, while an image of two white men parking a 1937 Ford V8 in a grain field occupies the next page. Questions are left unanswered by each photography, varying by degrees of intensity.

Elsewhere, we see newsboys, bellhops and string bands; teen girls posed beside a swimming hole; a radio broadcaster interviewing a young Soap Box Derby driver — who seems to have brought his pet rabbit along for luck.

A group of young college women dance "Grecian-style" by a pool in one image while, in another, a quietly befuddled businessman sees something like the future, shaking the hand of "Miss Air Express," decked in a pageant sash and standing between two mannequins. One photograph centers on a blind gentleman, face fixed to whistle a low blues, seeking spare change on the corner; on a later page, three men handle a swarm of bees on Main Street.

All these scenes make the mosaic of Columbus in the early 20th century; all would dissipate, lost to time, without Pruitt.

Photographs of places are no less resonant: buildings and storefronts whose ever flyer, every box suggest a story. A bar with walls constructed from beer cans beckons viewers to wonder what happens inside. And a foldout panorama of Main Street merely hints at Columbus' everyday hum of activity.

Juxtapositions are always intentional, some more stark than others, hinting at relationships — or a lack thereof — between people of different classes and races. A Black woman cares for her bedridden counterpart on one page; on the next, a group of well-dressed white women form Macon's Dramatic Club. Three successive pages show a white barbershop, a Black barbershop, then a Black woman with a gorgeous hairstyle. Another series of pages shows baseball and basketball teams of different races.

Hudson never ties these images together with language, not immediately at least. He seems to want the viewer simply to see — as Pruitt did — that these people are neighbors in the Biblical sense.

Columbus culture

Among the more fascinating sequences in the book are those which display distinct cultural practices — the ways Columbus related to itself and the wider world. Faith is exhibited in tent revivals and Jewish ceremonies; church Halloween parties that feel strangely frightening and the dripping baptismal clothes of a child being hoisted from a river.

We learn through images and text how Columbus' history is also caught up in the histories of figures such as Franklin Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey and Truman Capote.

In a section on Catfish Alley, we experience a "one-block-long strip of flourishing Black businesses" that no doubt will remind local readers of the Sharp End. Photos of white children in blackface stare back at the reader, and the most damning images within the book capture moments during and after a lynching. The viewer rightfully wants to look away, but cannot subtract these scenes from Possum Town's history.

'A collective effort of reflection'

Throughout, Hudson seeks clarity about what his book can and cannot do, about the capacity of Pruitt's images.

Forthright about his own history as a white Mississippian, and the inherent challenges of portraying a complicated, often painful racial history, he invites those who lived the history — and those who experience it on these pages — into the process.

"I alone cannot tell the stories of Pruitt's photographs," he writes. "That requires a collective effort of reflection and conversations among all kinds of people with all kinds of background and beliefs. As part of that process, I do not desire to tell anyone specifically what to think; rather I want to suggest what to ponder or, perhaps, to dream."

Hudson cites historian Barbara Norfleet before we reach page number 1: "Photographs are better at raising questions than answering them; they can reveal what you do not understand, and also what you take for granted."

Reading Hudson and gazing alongside him, one comes to their senses. If every picture both tells a story, and forms a larger narrative, you can never have enough context or clarity. So keep looking. Keep seeking. Toward that end, Hudson relates a number of resources that have helped him, and can aid us, in the act of "Reading Pruitt."

Peers and several generations of journalism students know Hudson as a master storyteller, and this posture explains why. His craft is not one of omniscience, but of gathering and sifting details — then heading right back into the story for new layers of meaning and understanding. Hudson knows tales of "Possum Town" didn't begin with him, and won't end with his book. But he guides us toward their depths, their personalities, and a chance to lose and find something of ourselves therein.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. Find him on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.