Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington

By Robert W. Hamblin

Robert W. Hamblin elevates Evans Harrington (1925–1997), as well as his remarkable achievements and writings, introducing his legacy to a new generation. Harrington continually found himself in conflict with the conservative, and often reactionary, institutions of his society—be they educational, political, or religious. Yet unlike many Mississippi liberals and moderates of his day—white as well as black—Harrington did not leave the state for a freer environment or better opportunities elsewhere. Except for his military service, he stayed in Mississippi his entire life, and his presence made a difference.

In 1962, Harrington openly supported the enrollment of James Meredith, the first African American student to attend Ole Miss. In 1965, he invited African American students from Tougaloo College to attend the Southern Literary Festival hosted by Ole Miss—the first meeting of that organization to be integrated. In 1972, as faculty sponsor of Images, the Ole Miss literary journal, he joined his student writers in a successful suit against the university's attempt to suppress an issue of the magazine that contained controversial content. In 1996, Harrington united with other ACLU members to support the cause of Lisa Herdahl, who had brought suit against the North Pontotoc, Mississippi, School Board for allowing sectarian prayers and devotionals in public school classrooms. Hamblin presents these and other examples, showing Harrington both as an exception to and as a representative figure of his time and place.

This biography also explores Harrington and his writings, which include “Living in Mississippi,” a personal essay about being a white liberal in segregated Mississippi; several short stories; a novel, The Prisoners; and three popular novels issued under the pseudonym Gilbert Terrell: Willa, Missy, and Lily, as well as a number of unpublished manuscripts. Harrington also coedited, with Ann J. Abadie, four volumes of papers presented at the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, which he cofounded.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781496811431

Robert W. Hamblin

Robert W. Hamblin is professor emeritus of English and founding director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. He has authored or edited nineteen books on Faulkner, including A William Faulkner Encyclopedia; Myself and the World: A Biography of William Faulkner, published by University Press of Mississippi; and My Life with Faulkner and Brodsky.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Life

Evans Burnham Harrington was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 5, 1925. He was named after his maternal grandfather, William H. Evans.

The American patriarch of the Harrington side of the family, Evans’s great-grandfather, was Michael Harrington (or Herington), who was born in Ireland around 1814 and emigrated to the United States in the late 1840s, probably as a result of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845. Michael eventually settled as a farmer in Jasper County in south Mississippi, and he and his wife Rebecca had nine children.

The next-to-youngest of these children was Michael Mike Harrington, Evans’s grandfather, who was born in 1862 and was married to Frances Annie Mae Patterson in 1884. This couple produced thirteen children, the youngest being Silas, Evans’s father, born in 1900. In 1910 the family was living and farming in Simpson County, in south central Mississippi.

During his late teenage years Silas Harrington felt a call to preach and left the farm to enroll in the Baptist Bible Institute in Wesson, Mississippi. There he became close friends with Reginald Evans, who introduced his sister Beatrice to Silas. Reginald and Beatrice’s father was Dr. William H. Evans, a distinguished Baptist minister and religious author.

Dr. Evans had been educated at Mississippi College, a Baptist school in Clinton, Mississippi, and had received a Doctor of Theology degree from the Southern School of Divinity in Dallas, Texas. Over the course of his long career as pastor and evangelist, he served in a number of pastorates in Alabama, including the First Baptist churches of Prichard, Fairhope, and Foley. Dr. Evans also authored a number of religious books, including The Queen of the Home (1956) and How to Value Life (1963). A strict fundamentalist, Dr. Evans passed on to his eldest daughter a great love of the Bible and a stern moral code.

Silas Harrington and Beatrice Evans were married by Dr. Evans in the Prichard church in 1924, after which the young couple moved to Birmingham, where Silas enrolled in Howard College (now Samford University), a Baptist school. Their first son was born the following year, and when Evans was only a few months old, his parents moved to Prichard, where Silas became an assistant minister and song leader in Dr. Evans’s church. Two years later, when Evans was three years old, the family moved to Clinton, Mississippi, so that Silas could enroll in Mississippi College to continue his ministerial education.

For his first six years Evans was an only child who enjoyed the undivided attention of his doting father and mother. Under his mother’s guidance he developed a passion for listening to stories, singing, reading, and memorizing Bible verses and poems.

After his graduation from Mississippi College, Silas served as pastor in a succession of small-town and rural churches in south Mississippi, including those in Mount Olive, Gallman, Moselle, Sumrall, and Ellisville. None of these pastorates proved lengthy, and later in his life Evans would count a dozen different schools he attended before he had graduated from high school.

In 1931, when Evans was six years old, a sister, Bettye Love, was born. A brother, Michael McKee, followed in 1935. Michael (Mike) was a blue baby, born with a hole in his heart, which eventually required two surgeries to repair. Because of Michael’s medical condition, the family dynamics shifted drastically, as the parents had to devote more and more time to the care of their youngest child.

Growing up, the Harrington children found themselves, like most Baptist preachers’ kids, in church almost every Sunday, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. As a child Evans belonged to a children’s group, the Sunbeams, where, as he would recall in middle age, he learned to sing, Red and yellow, black and white, / They are precious in His sight. / Jesus loves the little children / of the world (Harrington, An Interview 23). These words came to mean more to Evans than they probably meant to most white Baptist Sunbeams in those years, since on some Sundays, after preaching in his own church, Silas would bring Evans and Bettye with him in the afternoon as he delivered the same sermon in black churches that had invited him to preach. Thus, at an early age, through their father’s example, the children participated in a visible demonstration of the message of the popular song.

Singing was one of the great joys of Evans’s childhood and youth. During the summers he sometimes worked in the fields with one of his uncles, Scott Harrington, and the two of them, like many farm workers of that era, often sang together old spirituals to lend cadence to their chores.¹ Evans also sang in the church choir and frequently presented solos in worship services.

Years later, Charles E. Noyes, provost of the University of Mississippi when Harrington was a professor there, remembered the time the two of them spoke at a community college program that was open to the general public. When Harrington was introduced, Noyes recalled, someone in the audience announced, Why, it’s little Evans Harrington, that used to sing so purty in church (Annotations 12).

Throughout his life Harrington enjoyed gathering around the piano at parties or family reunions and singing old hymns and other popular songs. He frequently participated in an old-fashioned hymn sing, organized by Gerald and Julie Walton, that became a popular feature at an Oxford bar (J. Morris; Walton, Interview [23 July]).

Understandably, since both his father and grandfather were preachers, Evans’s early association with the church made an indelible impression on his life, both positively and negatively. Evans disassociated himself from the church in his adult life, but many of his attitudes and values were shaped by his early years. He abandoned the rituals and much of the traditional theology of the established church, even becoming something of an agnostic on ontological issues, but he never abandoned the ethical principles of love, compassion, and social justice that he found demonstrated in the life and teachings of Jesus.

One summer, after he was old enough to obtain his driver’s license, Evans drove a Coca-Cola truck, making deliveries on the route that ran between Hattiesburg and Laurel. It was while working that job, his sister recalls, that Evans took up smoking. For years afterward, he would never smoke in front of his mother, who would have strongly disapproved; but that summer Bettye and Mike would often find him down by the creek that ran behind the house, stealing a smoke (Steen).

Evans would remember his father as an atypical Baptist preacher. Baptist churches of that time usually preferred loud, passionate, authoritative, even dogmatic sermons (like those of Dr. Evans), and that was not the type of sermon Evans’s father preached.

He wasn’t very effective in Mississippi pulpits because they always said he needed more fire. He was much more an educator and of an artistic temperament.… If he had grown up in another environment he probably would have been a professor or a writer or something like that. He was a very sensitive, thoughtful man.² (Harrington, An Interview 8–9)

Additionally, Silas Harrington impressed his son as an extremely open-minded person. In recollection, Evans would associate his father with Matthew Arnold’s Hellenist:

The Hellenist is always, like the Greeks, interested in learning new ideas and not abiding by strict rules, where the Hebraist is more Puritanical. My mother was more the Hebraist. She believed in rules and that sort of thing. Daddy was always curious to speculate. He influenced me a great deal that way. (Harrington, An Interview 9)

Since many of the churches Silas served were small and could not afford to pay the salary for a full-time pastor, Silas worked as a bi-vocational minister—that is, he held another job in addition to his church work. While in Ellisville, for example, he worked as a Jones County welfare agent. At another time he worked briefly as an accountant. He was a popular evangelistic singer, possessing a very fine tenor voice. As a soloist and song leader, he worked in revival meetings in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

By the time Evans became a high school student at Ellisville Agricultural High School, he had developed a great love of reading. He enjoyed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, standard offerings in high school English classes of that day, and he regularly read popular novels and the stories in the Saturday Evening Post. He did not care at all for his science classes. One day, as a senior, he tossed his physics textbook out the classroom window (Vinson, Email).

Evans’s principal interest in high school was sports. Left-handed, he was a gifted athlete. He was the starting quarterback on the football team and a member of the tennis team. When he was a senior, under rules allowing it in that day, he played football for Jones County Junior College, located near Ellisville. Evans was also a skilled boxer.

As do many rural and small-town southern youth, Evans developed early on a genuine interest in hunting and fishing. He remained an avid and active outdoorsman his entire life. He especially enjoyed going on fishing trips with his dad, continuing these until his father’s death.

After graduating from high school in 1943, during the middle of World War II, Harrington faced being drafted into military service. His father advised him to volunteer for the Navy instead of waiting to be drafted into the Army. Since he had not yet turned eighteen, his father had to sign a petition allowing Evans to enlist.

Harrington entered the Naval Air Corps as a pilot cadet, but he also received training as an aerial gunner and a radioman. He served for a little more than two years at stations in Pensacola, Florida; Syracuse, New York; and Millington, Tennessee; but he never saw any overseas action.

Raised in a provincial, racially segregated society, Harrington first encountered the larger world through his military service, like many white southerners of his era. He would later say, I was oblivious to politics and those things when I was a child and a teenager, and I went into the service as a child, a teenager seventeen going on eighteen. Initially, when confronted by northerners who challenged him about southern anti-Semitism and racism, he reacted defensively, rationalizing the traditional attitudes and behavior of white southerners. But he soon changed his mind.

… it didn’t take me three or four months to realize the position I was in was defenseless. My change of mind and heart happened very early in the first of the two years I was in the service. So when I came out to Mississippi College in 1945 I was already an integrationist and a defender of the blacks. (Harrington, An Interview 23)

It was while in the military that Harrington first discovered his desire to write.

The first time I had any consciousness that I wanted to write was when I went to apply for a commission in the Naval Air Corps; there was a blank there that said What do you want to be? What are your objectives in life, your occupation? And I thought, I love to read. I had always read … and I thought it would be fun to write. Just writer didn’t sound very impressive, and I said, journalist. (Harrington, An Interview 4)

After his discharge in 1945, and aided by the provisions of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the G.I. Bill, Harrington enrolled at Mississippi College, which his grandfather, father, mother, and two uncles had previously attended. In 1946 he married Marion (Mickey) Walters Oden of Ovett, Mississippi, whom he had first met when both were in high school. A year into the marriage, their only child, Donna, was born.

At Mississippi College, Harrington particularly enjoyed classes in sociology, history, and literature. He participated in a drama club, The Tribal Playhouse, and served as sports editor and columnist for the school paper, the Mississippi Collegian. He also covered the Mississippi College athletic teams as a stringer for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. He continued to explore the field of journalism that he had cited on his application for a naval commission, but after a couple of introductory classes he realized that wasn’t the type of writing he wanted to do: literature, fiction was what I wanted to do (Harrington, An Interview 5). So he signed up for a creative writing class taught by Louis Dollarhide, one of the school’s finest and most popular teachers. Evans did well in the class, writing a number of short stories that were well received by both the professor and fellow students. He became an associate editor of the student magazine, the Arrowhead.

Another student in Dollarhide’s creative writing class, as well as a fellow writer for the Collegian and the Arrowhead, was Robert Canzoneri, with whom Harrington would develop a lifelong friendship. As Canzoneri later stated, We met at Mississippi College in 1947, one afternoon, and started talking and didn’t stop for several decades (Canzoneri). Canzoneri would go on to earn his doctorate at Stanford University and become the founding director of the Creative Writing Program at Ohio State University. Author of several books of poetry and fiction, as well as I Do So Politely: A Voice from the South, a personal memoir about Mississippi during the early days of the civil rights movement, Canzoneri died in 2010.

Canzoneri recalled that it was Harrington who put an end to freshman hazing at Mississippi College. In those days it was the practice of upper classmen to shave the heads of incoming male freshmen. But Harrington, an older student and a veteran, thought the practice was silly and refused to allow his head to be shaven. His action became a precedent for others, leading to the termination of the practice. As Canzoneri noted, Evans put an end to the tradition of freshman hazing by refusing to accept it (Annotations 2).

Another college classmate who was particularly impressed with Harrington was Betty Zachry, a drama student. Betty thought Harrington extremely handsome and likeable. He was a hunk, she would say later, adding, All the young women were in love with him. But, of course, he was already married (B. Harrington). Betty would soon marry Louis Dollarhide, the writing professor. The Harringtons and Dollarhides remained intimate friends over the years; in 1971, after both of their marriages had ended in divorce, Evans and Betty were married.

Upon graduating from Mississippi College in 1948, Harrington took a teaching position at the high school in Decatur, Mississippi, where he taught for two years. Even more driven now by his desire to write, Harrington put himself through a rigorous self-directed course in reading and writing. He focused on some of the great writers he had not read in high school and college; one summer, for example, he read Dostoevsky, Dreiser, and Tolstoy. It gave me intellectual indigestion, he joked later. I nearly had a nervous breakdown. But I gorged myself. It was almost a monomania to get hold of literature and writing (Harrington, An Interview 6).

He scoured bookstores and newsstands for every source he could find on the technique of writing. Two books he found especially useful were Writing Magazine Fiction and Professional Writing by Walter S. Campbell (the pen name for Stanley Vestal).

I studied those things and actually worked the drills that Vestal suggested, such as reading stories backward, or typing some good one you admired on your typewriter to get accustomed to seeing good prose coming out of your typewriter. I did everything you could do for two or three years there. (Harrington, An Interview 5)

Harrington also discussed writing with his friend Canzoneri, another fledgling writer who at the time was working as a reporter for Hazel Brannon’s Lexington Advertiser and Durant News.³ In addition to his regular teaching job, Evans was instructing veterans in night classes, assisting them in completing their high school requirements so they could qualify for college or vocational schools. He secured a teaching position in the same program for Canzoneri, and Canzoneri moved to Decatur, boarding with Evans, Mickey, and Donna. As Donna recalled years later, We had a house and Bob had a car. The arrangement worked well for all of us (Vinson, Interview). The two men spent many late evenings talking about literature and sharing their mutual dreams of becoming writers themselves.

Race relations continued to be a point of concern to Harrington during his time in Decatur. One incident in particular reminded him that his views were not those of most of his white neighbors. One day he invited a black woman into his home, and the two sat together on the couch, conversing. We had an old woman renting a room from us, and I thought she was going to get all of her things and walk out (Harrington, An Interview 23–24).

In 1950 Harrington moved his family to Oxford, where he enrolled in the master’s degree program in English at Ole Miss. To help pay his way, he worked on the construction crew that remodeled the Lafayette County Courthouse in Oxford. He completed the degree in August 1951, submitting a thesis entitled "Bernard Shaw and His Early Heroines: Widowers’ Houses through Man and Superman."

During his master’s work Harrington also evidenced an interest in the writings of William Faulkner—an interest that would be developed more thoroughly in the years ahead. He wrote a paper on Faulkner’s short story That Evening Sun in John Pilkington’s Faulkner seminar. The essay, which subsequently appeared in the journal Faulkner Studies, became Harrington’s first academic publication (Harrington, Technical).

Master’s degree in hand, he joined the faculty of University High School (now Oxford High School), a laboratory school directed by the Ole Miss Department of Education. In addition to teaching upper-level English classes, Harrington supervised the English education majors who did their practice teaching at University High. He created a little magazine, The Colonel’s Digest, for the creative writing club. Using the drama skills he had learned at Mississippi College, he also directed the junior and senior plays.

Thirty years later Harrington amusedly but fondly recalled his days of teaching at University High. Living about sixteen hours a day with a bunch of young, healthy barbarians was taxing, even if you loved the barbarians, got tears in your eyes when a peewee end outran the entire opposing team out of sheer fear of being tackled or a girl managed to overcome stage fright in the junior play long enough to say both her lines. Harrington also noted that it was while teaching at University High that he was able to purchase his first automobile: a ’49 coupe in 1952 (Memories).

While at University High, Harrington continued to develop his writing skills, drafting a number of short stories and starting his first novel, The Prisoners, a dramatization of the difficult struggle of inmates to maintain personal dignity and integrity under the dehumanizing effects of penal conditions in a state prison. In the early 1950s, after pastorates in Drew and Tchula, Evans’s father had become chaplain at the Mississippi state penitentiary at Parchman. Evans visited his father there on a number of occasions, and his father told him stories of some of the prisoners he counseled, including the death row inmates