Curator Statement

It would make sense to date the genesis of this project to the year 2006, when I first began to conceptualize an oral history project that recorded the stories of my people, the Lebanese in Mississippi. Thinking on this differently, though, I can also date the start of this project to the 1970s in Leland, Mississippi, where, as a young boy, I would sit with my many cousins and listen to stories that my Lebanese father and his Lebanese mother and brothers and sisters would tell about growing up and living in the Mississippi Delta. The food we would have just finished eating at my grandmother’s dining room table would have reinforced that understanding of their Lebanese past and my Lebanese present. But this may still be too late of a beginning date. Thinking about the long Lebanese history in Mississippi, I think the more appropriate start date would be sometime in the 1880s, when the ancestors of the participants in this study began making the arduous journey to America, and later to Mississippi, to find a better life for themselves and their families.

I remember, early on in my life, riding in the backseat with my younger brother, Richard, making the winding drive down Highway 61 to Port Gibson, where my grandmother Victoria Ellis Thomas grew up and where so much of our family still lived. We would drive through the Delta to participate in the usual events: family reunions, weddings, and sometimes funerals. We would always meet at the house of my Uncle Wadie Abraham and Aunt Rosalie Ellis Abraham, and I’d marvel at how much my grandmother and her sister Mildred Ellis Nasif looked and sounded alike. I was fortunate to have the foresight to interview Aunt Mildred for an earlier project that included her experience of growing up in Port Gibson, Mississippi, the daughter of an immigrant father and a first-generation Lebanese-American mother. I recorded that interview on cassette tapes, but I can still listen to it when I want to. If I listen hard enough, I can still hear the voice of my grandmother, whom I called, using the southern vernacular, Mamaw, rather than Sitti, an Arabic term that many Lebanese Mississippians use to refer to their parents’ mothers.

After the passing of several of the narrators of these stories, including my father in March of 2019, I found my work on this project all the more necessary. I recall, with a continued sense of urgency, the stories that so many of my own now-passed family members told. Bill Ferris, our founding director here at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, is known for relating the old African proverb, “Every time an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.” With this project, I’m doing my best to put out that fire, to hang onto those old stories that have shaped who we are and that still define the Lebanese as part of this community today.

This project is rooted in history, but the stories that I’ve collected not only fit into that narrative, they go a long way to inform it as well. These oral histories help bring this history to life, to put recognizable voices in the narrative, and to give voice to an otherwise rarely told tale.

At its core, The Lebanese in Mississippi: An Oral History is a collection of memories. It is a collective oral record, either recalled or passed down across generations. Each of the participants in this project contributes an inherited piece of a puzzle, and the themes that emerge from this collection demonstrate a collective understanding of why such a large number of Lebanese-Syrians left “the Mountain” and traveled west as far as the Americas. They illustrate an understanding of how and why these people came to Mississippi, what their lives were like living in a segregated society, and how they chose to make a living and find a place within that place, all while maintaining an ethnic identity. This project is dedicated to them and to their ancestors whose voices have contributed to this project as a way of retaining a part of Mississippi’s past.

—James G. Thomas, Jr.

The Ellis family, Port Gibson, ca. 1920. The young girl sitting in the center is Victoria Ellis Thomas, grandmother of James G. Thomas, Jr.

Originally from the Mississippi Delta, James G. Thomas, Jr. is the associate director for publications at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy, a master’s degree in Southern Studies, and an MFA in Documentary Expression, each from the University of Mississippi. He began work at the Center in 2003 as managing editor of the twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and is editor of numerous works on southern history and literature, including Conversations with Barry Hannah; co-editor of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, with Jay Watson; and an editor of The Mississippi Encyclopedia, both in print and online. He began the MFA in Documentary Expression program in 2018 and completed this thesis project in April 2020.