Paper Man: Chasing the Truth in the Mississippi Delta
“This is a riveting story, written with precision and grace.”
—Steve Yarbrough, Novelist and winner of the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award
A new memoir, Paper Man: Chasing the Truth in the Mississippi Delta (Nautilus, $34.95) launches this September. Paper Man tracks the 38-year career of Jim Abbott, editor and publisher of the Enterprise-Tocsin (Indianola, Mississippi), as he searched for the truth, fought for justice, and battled systemic, institutional, and personal racism in efforts to make Indianola—birthplace of both the White Citizens’ Council and B.B. King—a better place to live for all its residents.
Told in anecdote-rich vignettes, the book chronicles Abbott’s front-row seat to history and his encounters—in church pews and grocery-store aisles—with the very characters he wrote about each week.
Abbott, who was raised in a segregated community in Greenwood, Mississippi, stood among the throng of students jeering James Meredith in 1962. But his time away from the state—a job at Disneyland, service with integrated troops in the Vietnam War, and befriending activists in the mid-1960s—slowly chipped away at his views on race.
Kathy McCormick, a writer for Law & Order, said, “Growing up white in the Jim Crow south, you had options. You could accept your racial privilege as natural and live your life accordingly. You could say “hell no” and leave. Or you could stare clearly at the injustice—and stay anyway, determined to contribute what you could to your community. Your whole community. Jim Abbott stayed.”
Columnist Sid Salter wrote, “A son of the Mississippi Delta, Jim Abbott was no crusading interloper. He was a Mississippian who knew which political and social anthills not to kick—yet he kicked them anyway because they needed to be kicked.”
During Abbott’s rich life, he crossed paths with likes of James Meredith, Walt Disney, Duke Ellington, Robert Kennedy, B.B. King, Brooke Shields, Craig Claiborne, Pops Staples, John Fogerty, and Gene Hackman, among many more.
Ralph Eubanks, author of When It’s Darkness on the Delta, said, “Jim Abbott’s Paper Man is the story of one man’s love of the Delta and Mississippi, a love he professed by bravely practicing journalistic integrity as well as human kindness.”
Paper Man takes the reader from the Ole Miss riot to the jungles of Vietnam and from hiking the Grand Tetons to a deserted, post-Katrina New Orleans, but it is Abbott’s years behind the editor’s desk in Indianola that gives the book its greatest charm—and its lasting lessons about the power and the necessity of local journalism.
Paper Man: Chasing the Truth in the Mississippi Delta is available now at independent bookstores throughout the South.
Abbott will read and sign Paper Man at Off Square Books, Tuesday September 8 at 5:30 pm.
About the Author
