John Michael “Mike” Tonos, Jr.
Greenville
Mike Tonos was born on August 3, 1952. Today he lives in Oxford but grew up in Greenville attending St. Joseph Catholic Church and St. Joseph Catholic School.
His maternal grandfather, Shakralla Sam Alracy, came to the United States from Syria, immigrating through El Paso in 1906, when he was thirteen years old. In 1915 he married Mike’s grandmother Nazira Marie Hallal, who was born in New York City. Mike’s mother’s family made their way to Coahoma County and settled in Clarksdale, and eventually moved the family to Shaw, Mississippi.
The immigration story of Mike’s paternal grandfather, Mike Saliba Tonos, is less-well documented, but the family believes that he came to America with his mother, Martha, and her father’s mother, Elmaz, and worked in a factory in Upstate New York until they could earn enough to travel to the Delta. They settled in Greenville and opened a grocery store. In fact, both of Mike’s grandfather’s owned grocery stores, his mother’s father also owning a dry goods store and a hotel.
As a child, and into his teens, Mike worked in his father’s small neighborhood grocery store, Tonos Grocery, in Greenville. “We sold beer, cigarettes, and Coke in a bottle,” he recalled. “Dry goods, and Daddy was a butcher, so he cut meat.”
Both sets of his grandparents were “distinctly Lebanese,” Mike said. The farther time took the Tonoses away from Mount Lebanon, though, the less distinctly Lebanese the family remained. “There was some Arabic spoken in [my grandparents’] houses, but my daddy’s generation were assimilated, and so they would speak mostly English. They could understand some of it, but they didn’t walk around the house speaking Arabic.”
There are ways, however, in which the Tonoses have held onto their Lebanese identity. Mike’s parents’ families were Catholic, which has traditionally been a common religion, if not the predominant faith, among Lebanese families in Mississippi. His mother, Billie Rossie Tonos, taught school at St. Rose of Lima Academy—a predecessor to St. Joseph School—in Greenville, which was staffed by the Sisters of Mercy until the school was replaced by St. Joseph Catholic School in 1950. Mrs. Tonos taught for several decades thereafter.
Working in communications for more than forty years now, Mike has served as executive editor of the Sun Herald in Biloxi-Gulfport and managing editor at the Sun Herald, the Vicksburg Post, and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo. He now teaches in the Department of Journalism at the University of Mississippi. Mike’s sister is Mary Tonos Brantley and his son is Matthew Tonos. Both of their oral histories are also included in this study.
This interview with Mike Tonos took place on the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford on December 6, 2017.
AUDIO (Click to listen):
Having arrived in Mississippi, business ownership—grocery stores, dry goods stores, hotels, and rental houses—was a desirable trade for the early Lebanese. Fathers passed the skills of the trade—and the work—down to the children. Like other Lebanese children, Mike Tonos spent much of his youth tending to the cash register in his father’s grocery store in Greenville.
Families were spread out across the Delta and beyond, and Tonos remembers traveling the Mississippi highways and back roads to places like Shaw and Memphis, Tennessee, to see relatives, much like his parents had done when they themselves were young.
Even in the early to mid-twentieth century, the Mississippi Delta was a place of ethnic diversity, and because of that concentration of cultural diversity, Lebanese difference, such as it was, felt like a shared fact of life by the youth of the first American-born generations in Greenville. Because of these close connections, socializing among Lebanese families took on the air of the familial.