Customer Reviews

Ever Is A Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past A Memoir

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
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First, I am a native Mississippian who has lived out of the South for about 10 years. Coincidently, I went to Ole Miss and lived in the same dorm as the author but a year earlier. I did not know Mr. Eubanks but may have had classes with him. Ever is a Long Time is a great look back on activities of both sides of the civil rights movement. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission spied on all citizens of the state and had 87,000 names in its files including Mr. Eubanks' parents. I have found the names of parents of several very good friends; Parents who were on both sides of the segregation question. It is a troubling story for a Mississippian to read and has led to phone calls and extended discussions with old friends. It has also increased my awareness of the times, our abilities to do mindless things, and to find the better way. There are some poignant interviews with past Sovereignty officials, a past member of the KKK, as well as leaders of the civil rights movement. These wonderfully display the frailty of humans, the need to cope, the darker side of man, and the ability to change. The passages about his children that open and close the work are among my favorites. The book is an honest, worthwhile read about cultural changes and the history of yesterday. (My copy did not have any pictures beyond the cover). Mississippi carries a brutal stigma regarding racial history. My time in other parts of the country have convinced me that the emotions of the 50's and 60's were not limited to Mississippi but rather widely held across the country. Mississippi, like other southern states, got the label and historical coverage and will always carry the stigma. It is a fading stigma that should have been widely shared across our healing nation. My heart gives it 5 stars, but objectivity demands 4 stars.

Rarely one reads a book that causes the reader to feel love for its author. I had that experience reading "Ever Is a Long Time." W. Ralph Eubanks' memoir depicts the struggles white supremacy thrust upon him and his family, from his white grandfather, who married a black woman, on down to his own children, whom he must introduce to their father's Mississippi.

Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s -- one imagines lynchings, injustice, heroism, sacrifice, history writ in blood.

Eubanks' memoir, though, is suprising in its quite and restraint. Eubanks's childhood was, in many ways, "idyllic," he reports. His parents were pillars of the community. He grew up on an eighty acre farm. He went fishing and climbed trees.

White supremacy, though, was an unavoidable evil. His father, a college educated professional, was denied simple toilet facilities at his work place. The family did not pave their driveway, so that if an uninvited guest brought trouble, the crunch of gravel would announce his presence. Eubanks' white grandfather's photograph was kept in the closet, lest it rouse questions, and trouble.

Eubanks grew up, and moved away. His sons' questions about Mississippi caused him to go back. In going back, he investigated the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state-sponsored spying agency that kept records of 87,000 of Mississippi's just over two million citizens. Its goal was to thwart civil rights workers and federal integration efforts. Eubanks' parents were included on that list of names.

Eubanks meets with a former Klan member, so torn by his own membership in that evil society that he breaks into tears after their meeting. Eubanks also meets with an unrepetent member of the MSC. Eubanks discovers that people he knew, liked, and trusted, including African Americans, were informants.

It was Eubanks' voice that was most attractive for me in this work. I never thought I'd read a memoir of life in the Jim Crow South, written by a black man, that was so affectionate, and so forgiving, of that South, while expressing appropriate rage and grief.

Eubanks comes through strongly as a very decent man. His book caused me to feel great respect and affection for his father.

It was a very worthy experience to encounter simple human goodness in a memoir of such terrible wrong.

Eubanks is to be thanked for this work.

Eubank's autobiography is fascinating. The segues between his childhood, his investigation into the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, his trip back to Mount Olive and the historical pieces about the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi are sometimes missing or confusing. I also caught a couple editorial mistakes (duplicate words or funny gramatical stuff) that should have been caught by the editor.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading the book and feel I am coming away from it having learned a great deal about a time and place in history I am personally quite removed from. I read it just after having heard the NPR All Things Considered 5 part piece on the Brown vs. Board of Education decission so Eubank's memoir provided an interesting counterpoint.

W. Ralph Eubanks prefaces his first book with his son's innocent question: "Daddy, what's Mississippi like?" Eubanks finds himself torn between protecting his children from the harsh truth of segregation, as his parents attempted to do in his own childhood, and educating them on the bittersweet struggle for civil rights.

Over a period of several months, Eubanks debates how much of his past he should reveal to his children. He recalls his warm, sheltered childhood, but contrasts it against the turbulent backdrop of Mississippi in the Civil Rights era.

He introduces the Sovereignty Commission, the arm of the Mississippi government that kept thousands of files on the state's residents and monitored those individuals for any signs of subversive activity. When the files of the Commission become public in the late nineties, shortly after his son's inquiry, Eubanks searches the files for his parents' names... and reels in shock when both appear on his computer screen.

Thus begins Eubanks' years-long research into the activities of both civil rights activists and those seeking to curtail racial equality. He eventually resolves to revisit the "old home-place," the site of both childhood joy and escalating racial tension.

Eubanks notes that he experienced a very safe childhood, partly as a result of his parents' wise move from the Mississippi Delta to a farm in northern Mississippi. Provincial yet friendly, Mount Olive, or "Mo'nt Ollie," as Eubanks fondly calls it, seems the epitome of southern culture.

Ralph followed his father to work every day until reaching the age to begin attending school. In this formative period of his childhood, he learned from his father how to garner and maintain respect, even in a culture that so often disrespected African Americans.

However, despite his parents' careful shielding, Eubanks slowly woke up to the turbulence around him as he watched protests on TV and read newspapers influenced by the heavy hand of the Sovereignty Commission.

Eubanks encountered further racial division when, in the middle of his eight-grade year, the white school in town was forced to accept all of the students of the suddenly defunct black school. This experience, particularly his interactions with some hard-line segregationist teachers, cast a negative shade over his view of Mississippi, and Eubanks recounts:

"From the time I entered high school, I dreamed of leaving small-town Mississippi. My deepest secret desire was to live anywhere but Mississippi, particularly somewhere that no one knew anything about me."

However, Ralph's father did not want him to leave Mississippi to attend college, so Eubanks attended Ole Miss--yet another site that prompts memories composed of both joy and fear upon revisiting. Eubanks describes a peculiar kinship with the bullet holes punched into the stately architecture of a historic building on the day the first black student, James Meredith, was admitted to Ole Miss in 1962.

This sentiment is an excellent example of the feelings that Eubanks has for Mississippi; a mixture of pride and a deep sense of tradition commingled with a sorrowful regret and almost bewilderment at the darker chapters of his home state's history.

"During my adolescence and young adulthood, living with remnants of Mississippi's lingering past became so unbearable that I had to leave; in middle age, the same forces from the past had drawn me back. Rather than running away again, I had to understand this past that never dies and somehow reconcile it with the present."

Eubanks realizes that he will only learn so much about the history of the Sovereignty Commission, and his childhood, from a distance:

"After months of poring over Sovereignty Commission memos, letters, and correspondence and revisiting Mississippi's tortured past, I began to wonder how much of Mississippi's past remained in the present."

He decides to return to Mississippi to peruse the archives of Jackson and Mount Olive, which contain much more information than he was able to find online, including detailed and shocking "cases" against innocent neighbors that resulted in countless cases of imprisonment and personal loss.

In the archives, he finds reports on his mother from her supervisor in the public school system... a Klansman. Overcoming his trepidation and disgust, Eubanks arranges an interview with the man, only to find that his preconceived vision of a proud, defiant racist is far from the truth of the friendly man wracked by indecision and regret over his past actions.

Eubanks also interviews Ed King, a controversial figure in the Civil Rights movement of Mississippi. After both meetings, he realizes that the actions of those involved on both sides cannot be judged in black-and-white morality.

After years of research and soul-searching, Eubanks is finally able to answer his son's question.

"What is Mississippi like? It's a volatile world with dizzyingly complex social and cultural layers; as I visited more and more, I became accustomed to navigating my way through the tangled world where the past and the present and the sacred and the profane exist side by side."

Eubanks' research offers insight into not only his history but also the wider story of the Civil Rights Movement. He oscillates between relating warm childhood memories and presenting the results of rigorous research.

These and other discoveries, in combination with Eubanks's candid discussion of his life, are part of what makes the multi-layered memoir so endearing. Eubanks struggles to integrate his past and his present even as he relates what integration was like. He attempts to synthesize the two worlds of his childhood - the safety of his own home versus the tumultuous atmosphere of Civil Rights-era Mississippi - with his adult world in Washington, DC.

Eubanks's account, though tinged with sentimentality and occasionally dry research in turns, is an interesting read that sheds a uniquely personal light on "Mississippi's dark past."

W. Ralph Eubanks is a resident of the Van Ness neighborhood and director of publishing at the Library of Congress. Stay tuned for a summary of his Politics and Prose reading of his second nonfiction work, The House at the End of the Road.

This is an excellent book! The author did an excellent job combining his family experiences with what was happening at the time. I highly recommend this book.

This book deserved much more notice than it received when it came out. Ralph Eubanks left Mississippi many years ago, but Mississippi never left him. For decades, he harbored the desire to understand his home state's strange fascination, and the release in 1998 of the records of the state's Sovereignty Commission, which was designed to keep segregation in effect, gave him an opportunity to look back at his past.

Eubanks always knew that his parents intentionally shielded him from the ugliness and the violence of Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, but until he began to delve into the commission's records, he did not know how much shielding had actually gone on. He and his three sisters enjoyed a close family life and nurtured a sense of pride, even superiority, to the white people around him -- even while Klansmen and their supporters were targeting "outside agitators" and "communists," their names for whites and blacks who wanted to end segregation.

Eubanks writes in a clear, straightforward style, mixing memory with present reality. He avoids cliches and brings to life a time long past.

This is an excellent memoir. It combines memories of a childhood in Mount Olive, Mississippi, with current historical research concerning the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Mr. Eubanks is now Director of Publications for the Library of Congress. His account of three years spent trying to reconcile his recollections of growing up in Mississippi with the stark reality of the history of that era makes for great reading. Mr. Eubanks final synthesis is both positive and compassionate. This is a book that every Mississippian who lived through that era should enjoy.

It is right to show children where their father's home was, where he was raised and what it was like. The history of our families must not be lost or taken for granted. The author has written a book which is easy to read but hard to take.

This story is a glimpse into a world influenced by racism. How it manipulated people's lives. How it determined the fate of so many innocent, clean living Americans. It's embarrassing

Going beneath and beyond a personal journaling of narratives Mr. Eubanks' expounds on a system that raised him and his family, and many others living inside and around Ole' Miss's Delta. The title alone hones in on this contention; harmonizing the phrase one of Mississippi's Governors made when answering the question, `...whether the public schools in Mississippi would ever be integrated.'

It, therefore, became a stretch reading this account in a long time ago sequence, when this sequence of events still conjures so much remembrance, and values, and even a reworked system of beliefs and perspectives (albeit, not all negative) that I'd rather learn from, than turn away from. The mannerisms and culture I've come into contact with befriending people as refined as the Eubanks', who lived and lives in Mississippi, probes my mind wanting to know where these auspiciously well-bred customs derived. And honestly, this time, however many would like to forget, (to include those still bearing scars), was not so long ago.

Ever Is A Long Time is a necessary rendering of empowering significance, one I commend Eubanks' for writing.

I purchased the book at a great price and it arrived within a few days!