San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Texas poet Estess looks back with ‘Milkwater’
Sybil Pittman Estess has over the years written a book about writing and another about Elizabeth Bishop, but for the most part she made her name as a poet. She has taught at Rice University, the University of Houston, the University of St. Thomas and other Texas institutions, while also serving as a founding organizer for the Houston Poetry Fest. She has published five volumes of poetry and in 2015 was nominated for Texas Poet Laureate.
But Estess’ new book, though rich with lyrical writing about her childhood in Mississippi, is not written in verse. Instead, “Mississippi Milkwater” is a stylish variation on a memoir, with Estess reaching back to the 1940s and 1950s and telling stories through a third-person perspective. The presentation in the book is intriguing: Estess’ stories are her own, but she has changed the names of the players, including herself.
“A lot of people thought I should write it first person; I thought it myself,” she says. “But for some reason, I just didn’t want to do it. It makes sense for Michelle Obama to do that. People are interested in her life as Michelle Obama. But I’m not a famous person like that. I wanted to create a character who was me but who could seem different from me. I thought by creating this character, Sam or Samantha, people might be interested in her story. It allowed me to be a little detached from the experiences I was writing about.”
Estess’ earliest memories touch on visits to her grandmother, “Lola,” a woman unafraid to forcefully remove rattlesnakes that rested between her home and the outhouse. The writing is vivid and visceral and captures the sort of child’s experience that resonates
into adulthood. Estess recalls Lola taking a hoe to a rattler and then tossing the two pieces of dead snake at the child. She also recalls a horrifying moment when Lola accidentally steps onto the hot coals that warmed a wash pot. The book’s title speaks to Estess’ family’s humble means: When times were particularly lean, her mother would cut the family’s milk with water and add just a little sugar and vanilla, hoping to convince the children that the drink was a special treat.
These stories have found their way into Estess’ work previously. She has a poem about her grandmother and the third-degree burns she suffered, which hobbled her for the remaining two years of her life. But she wanted to tell a different story with “Mississippi Milkwater.”
“People have asked me my motivation for writing this book,” she says. “I’d wanted to write some of these stories for 20 years. But it felt timely now.”
She references another poem she’d written about when, as a teenager, she saw blood on the steps of the courthouse in Poplarville, Miss.
That story was the engine for writing “Mississippi Milkwater.” Her vivid childhood memories lead to more vague recollections from when she was 16. Poplarville was the setting for the April 1959 lynching of Mack Charles Parker, a Black man dubiously accused of rape and extracted from jail prior to his trial and murdered. The incident roiled Poplarville, which hosted dozens of FBI agents who secured confessions yet no indictments.
Estess had been at her prom the night Parker was kidnapped and killed.
“My best friend called me the next morning and said a man had been murdered at the courthouse,” she
says. They visited the courthouse steps, saw blood and yet found a community tight-lipped about what really happened.
“I know a lot of people in town knew what happened because it was a very small town,” she says. “They knew who supported the Klan, who was capable of going on a murderous trip.”
But no real justice emerged from the incident. Howard Smead wrote about it at length in his 1988 book, “Blood Justice.” Another poet, Jake Adam York, dedicated a 2010 poem to Parker. The murder haunted Estess long after she decided to leave Mississippi for good.
She continued her education at Baylor University, where she met her husband, Ted Estess. She later earned a Ph.D. from Syracuse University.
Though she lives in Santa Fe now, she spent 37 years in Houston as a writer and educator. She and Ted both worked at the University of Houston; he was a professor of English and dean of the Honors College.
She taught poetry and wrote poetry. Through it all, the story from Poplarville kept whispering to her. So six years ago she began writing about her childhood, worried that as time passed memories might fade. She mentions the friend who drove her to the courthouse that morning now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
She’s at work on her next book, which she says will be a return to poetry.
“I can’t say I won’t write another memoir, ever,” Estess says. “But the next one will be a book of poetry. This time, though, I just couldn’t write these stories as poetry. I needed more space to tell these stories.”