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A young Black “servant” for a White family calls him “Humpy” because of his back deformity. A Ku Klux Klan marches down Main Street, circa 1922. Dressed men at the construction site of the Magnolia Bowl football stadium in 1933. Bard performances, baptisms, carnivals and lynchings. Otis Noel Pruitt used his camera in his portrait studio and around the world to witness the spirit and soullessness of Columbus, Miss.
It’s curated from 88,000 negatives that author Berkley Hudson has saved from “the dustbin of history.” IN PRUITT’S CITY OF POSSUM (University of North Carolina/Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, $49.95) is a “’photobiography’ of time and place”: a Jim Crow-ravaged Southern town east of the Tombigbee River and west of the Alabama border and the Depression. Locals nicknamed Columbus “Possum Town”, a nickname given by the Choctaw and Chickasaw residents who thought an early white settler looked like a marsupial.
Pruitt spent most of his life in Columbus, where his white skin allowed him to move freely in both White and Black spaces: houses, churches, rivers, fields. Many images, especially those of Black subjects, lack identity or context. Are those next to you on the veranda the parents of the injured child? What bothers the old woman lying in bed by an anonymous caregiver? “Regardless,” Hudson writes, “visual recording is powerful and allows readers to provide their own captions.” With ethnographic rigor and local sincerity, Pruitt’s eye wanders between scenes of gilded refinement – the wrought glories of privilege – and the horrific violence that makes that privilege possible.
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