Jackson author signs new book ahead of Saturday's book festival. Details here

As final preparations for the Aug. 19 Mississippi Book Festival are underway, one new book creating a buzz throughout the state has just been released by University Press of Mississippi.

Called “The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning,” the book is written by Jackson author Ellen Ann Fentress and is described as a memoir in which Fentress candidly examines her growing consciousness of race, responsibility and community as a white woman in the Deep South.

As a teenager, Fentress engaged in a variety of community volunteer projects. Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband’s business. In short, she followed the scripts she was handed by society.

But within those scripts she describes what she calls convenient lies and silences she conformed to in the name of tradition and convention.

Fentress grew up in the 1960s in Mississippi and was part of the generation that, by junior high school, saw their public schools transform from nearly 100% segregated to racially integrated almost overnight. It was also the era of hastily-built “segregation academies,” and a sudden exit by some half-a-million white children from the public schools.

Details of book festival: The Mississippi Book Festival, a 'Literary Lawn Party,' is coming up. See details here

In 1964, the state had less than 20 private schools. By 1971 the number rocketed to 236.

It is a story Fentress knows well. In 1970 her parents removed her from the public schools and enrolled her in the new, all-white Pillow Academy just outside of Greenwood. She graduated from Pillow in 1974.

To explore and hear from other students affected by the changes of that era, Fentress set up admissionsprojects.com, a website which has since received hundreds of submissions and comments by students of that era — both those who transferred to private schools and those who stayed in public schools.

While some of her contemporaries have welcomed her work, others have viewed it s an act of betrayal, Fentress said. At least one person has characterized her book as the work of a “self-loathing liberal,” she said.

But “The Steps We Take,” isn’t only about school segregation and racial inequality — the book also takes a look at other conventions and expectations of being a woman in the conservative South.

During a reading Aug. 10 at Lemuria Book Store in Jackson (where the book sold out barely 30 minutes after the event had begun) Fentress also shared both serious and amusing anecdotes from her mid-life experiences as a French teacher both at a public school and later for adults.

Lili Anolik, author of “Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.,” calls the work by Fentress both courageous and tough-minded. “Over the course of the narrative, she confronts not only her personal past, but the dark and complicated past of the region of the country in which she grew up and still lives,” Anolik wrote in a recent editorial review.

Lauren Rhoades, host of Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Mississippi Arts Hour, said “Fentress holds a mirror to the archetype (or stereotype) of the helpful, ever-cheerful, and often self-deceiving southern white woman. What results is a meaningful examination of whiteness and womanhood, privilege and charity, all baked into the author’s story of personal transformation.”

Asked by one participant attending last week’s book signing what she thinks her parents would think of the book, Fentress said, “I think they would be very proud — and a little mortified.”

Hardback copies of “The Steps We Take” will be available for $25 at the University Press of Mississippi tent at the Mississippi Book Festival beginning at 9 a.m. The tent will be located in “Booksellers Row” on Mississippi Street on the south side of the Mississippi State Capitol Building grounds.

Fentress will also be on hand to autograph copies of the book at 11 a.m. at the nearby Book Signing tent.

She will also be discussing the book as part of a group panel called “Memoir” at Galloway United Methodist Church just across the street beginning at 9:30 a.m.

Moderated by Stuart Rockoff, executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, the panel will also include Nicole Chung, author of “A Living Remedy: A Memoir;” Lee Durkee, author of “Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint;” and Shane McCrae, author of “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of Kidnapping.”

Fentress is a journalist, filmmaker and podcaster. She produced and directed “Eyes on Mississippi,” a 2016 documentary on iconic civil rights era journalist Wilson F. “Bill” Minor that has screened at universities and institutions across the country. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, Scalawag, story South and New Madrid, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where she was a reporter.

If you go

• What: Mississippi Book Festival

• When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 19

• Where: Outdoors on the south lawn of the Mississippi State Capitol Building and on Mississippi Street.

• Panel discussions: Begin at 9:30 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 12 p.m., 1:30 p.m., 2:45 p.m. and 4 p.m.

• Admission: Free

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Mississippi Book Festival details for Saturday, Aug 19