The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning

by Ellen Ann Fentress

Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times , the Washington Post , and The Atlantic . She’s also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. “Women do a lot for free, no matter the era, no matter the location,” she observes in The Steps We A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. As a good southern woman, Fentress felt a calling to help others. As a teenager, she volunteered as a March of Dimes quarter collector and sang hymns at a soup-and-salvation homeless shelter. Later, she married, reared two daughters, renovated a 1941 Colonial home, practiced her French, and served as the bookkeeper for her husband’s business. She followed the scripts she was handed by society.

But there were the convenient lies and silences that she and most southern―make that American―white women have settled on in the name of convention and, to be honest, inertia. For Fentress, her dodges both behind her front door and beyond became impossible to miss. Eventually, along with claiming a personal second act at midlife, she realized the most urgent community work she could do was to spur truth-telling about the history she knew well and participated in. She was one of the nearly one million students in the South enrolled in all-white “segregation academies,” a sweeping movement away from public education that continues to warp the Deep South today. To document and engage with this history, she founded the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools, which has been featured in the Washington Post , Slate , Forbes and other publications.

The Steps We Take tells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.

Genres: Memoir

194 pages, Hardcover

Published August 23, 2023

Reviews

[Sharon Swanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book brought up my own buried angst around the expectations for white Southern women of a certain age. Her insights, delivered with unvarnished honesty and vulnerability, will stick with me for a while. Her words are helpful in reframing my own memories of the world we both knew so intimately.

[Emma Ellard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming & thoughtful! I started reading Fentress’s memoir-slash-essay-collection for her meditations on her career of journalism & advocacy; I stayed for her memorable stories & Welty-esque way with words. In her essays - all vignettes of her own Jackson, MS life - Fentress asks a lot of big questions about race, religion, womanhood, and so forth. In seeking the answers, she always retains a sense of genuine curiosity, humility, & humor. Often comical & always contemplative. Ellen Ann Fentress is a new name on my long-and-growing list of Cool Mississippi Women I Admire.

[Vanessa Graf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bravo Ellen Ann Fentress! I'm not worthy!
Thank you so much for opening the door wide for me to self exploration. With Southern charm, grace, and a wicked sense of humor, you cut through the bullshit peddled to us white women via our schools, colleges, churches and white culture at large. The times call for a deep dive in search and eradication of our subtle and out loud racist, white people paradigms. They are immense. Thank you for holding a flashlight of your self reflection onto my path. May I be better and do better because of your influence!

[Pietje Kobus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inviting recollections told with integrity and self examination. A wonderful read which didn't leave me untouched.

[Harriet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful memoir in essays about growing up white in Mississippi by my friend Ellen Ann Fentress. Acutely aware of her privilege and place in the world, Fentress tells her story with intelligence and insight.

[Aleph · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir provides useful insights into three things. First and foremost, the sensibility of a Mississippi female born in the mid-1950s and raised in Greenwood MS, an eastern delta county seat with a population of around 20,000. Second, the perspective of a person who went to high school at a newly formed segregation academy during the first half of the 1970s. Third and predominant, the experience of a middle-aged divorcer of an abusive alcoholic.

The memoir speaks in an unsettling voice whose raggednesses and reticences communicate in emotion what they conceal or downplay in fact. The central absence in the book is the evidently happier earlier years of the marriage, and the courtship that led to it. Only well into the book does the reader find that even the story of the marriage failure will be told. One other striking mystery is how Fentress went from Baptist to Episcopalian.

The choppy quality of the book as a whole probably attributes to its conceptual origins in various essays.

[Gerry Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poignant, culturally aware, and lovely essays in Ellen Ann Fentress’s The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning will alternately move you to tears and stop you in your tracks. As Fentress navigates the territory of her own upbringing and adult life as a white Southern woman, she taps the stereotypes that still exist for all women, not just those of Southern “extraction.” From what she describes as a Southern woman’s mandate to be perpetually responsible and cheerful, she moves to a deeper understanding of what society still requires of women and how she—and therefore the rest of us—can move beyond it.

A must-read for us Southern women and others, too—including our men!

[Mark Mathes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have followed the journalistic career of colleague Ellen Ann Fentress for several decades: reporter, film documentarian about journalist Bill Minor, author, community leader. This book represents an often sad reconciling for Southerners who grew up with desegregation starting in the 1960s, and often ahead of Northern cities. Some of us grew up in desegregated public schools. Some grew up in breakaway independent schools that employed a subtext of no desegregation now. A few of those academies survive today. And a small number of those survivors have Black or minority students today. This is an important book, no matter where you went to school.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellen's story is one that resonates with me and my current life. I am grateful for her work and for this writing. Her words were inspirational and also real as if describing parts of my personal experiences during this life journey we are all on.

[Syd Sawyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was different for me. I’m glad she had the honesty and courage to tell her story. As someone deeply entrenched in the south, it was interesting to hear her perspective!