The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure

Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography

by Norma Watkins

Raised under the racial segregation that kept her family's southern country hotel afloat, Norma Watkins grows up listening at doors, trying to penetrate the secrets and silences of the black help and of her parents' marriage. Groomed to be an ornament to white patriarchy, she sees herself failing at the ideal of becoming a southern lady.

"The Last Resort," her compelling memoir, begins in childhood at Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Life at the rambling hotel seems like paradise. Yet young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat.

Once integration is court-mandated, her beloved father becomes a stalwart captain in defense of Jim Crow as a counselor to fiery, segregationist Governor Ross Barnett. His daughter flounders, looking for escape. A fine house, wonderful children, and a successful husband do not compensate for the shock of Mississippi's brutal response to change, daily made manifest by the men in her home. A sexually bleak marriage only emphasizes a growing emotional emptiness. When a civil rights lawyer offers love and escape, does a good southern lady dare leave her home state and closed society behind? With humor and heartbreak, "The Last Resort" conveys at once the idyllic charm and the impossible compromises of a lost way of life.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published May 9, 2011

Reviews

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a miracle of time travel this memoir is! With the deliciously specific recall of a loving inquisitive child, Norma Watkins places us inside the Mississippi in which she grew up, yet she exposes at the same time all the suppressions and silences that held it in place. Watkins writes with the irresistible honesty that led her to become the woman who couldn’t be quiet anymore.

[Ginny Rorby · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don’t have to be a child of the 50s and 60s, Black or White, female rather than male, Straight or Gay, to relate to this masterpiece. Perhaps it’s better if you’re young, full of dreams, and excited about all you can be. Hindsight is 20/20. This book reveals the traps society and a culture out to protect itself, have set for you. Anyone who, as a child felt eager for life, but is grown now and has had them crushed by the times and culture you live in will feel yourself cheering for the one of us—who against huge odds—made a dash for it.

Norma Watkins calls herself a coward but she did what millions of women have lacked the courage to do—leave what is intolerable. In this reviewer’s opinion, Watkins is right up there with the Suffragettes, the first women to go to law school, medical school, write a novel under her own name, all while fighting through the obstacle course of prejudice and bigotry.

One of my favorite lines in The Last Resort is when everything at the dinner table appears the same as it has always been, an ordinary evening, except her mother is drunk, and her father is disgusted. “It was like seeing the dark ropey backstage of a play.” This metaphor sums up the entire book. Watkins takes us backstage for a behind the curtains look at the racially segregated South, and exposes the fallacy of racial harmony when one group suppresses another.

Repression cripples the mind and spirit. Read this to understand your mother, and yourself.

[Sidna · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a newspaper review, this book was compared to The Help, although the author started writing it long before The Help was published.

I don't feel that The Help is a good comparison because this is Norma Watkins' autobiography. The book begins in 1943 when Norma was 7 years old. Her father, an attorney, volunteers for service in World War II. Norma, her 4-year-old sister, Mary Elizabeth, and her mother move to Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa owned by Norma's mother's family. Norma's mother grew up in the resort, which is now run by Norma's aunt Hosford and her husband John Fontaine. The first section details the two years her family spent at Allison's Wells while her father served in the war.

Norma's father gets a leave during the war and her mother joins him in California for a few days. Nine months after she returns, her mother gives birth to Norma's sister Sydney. The mother's doctor tells her that her heart cannot survive the delivery of another baby so the mother has a hysterectomy. Norma's father decides he no longer loves her mother now that she cannot give him a son.

Norma's mother is an alcoholic and her father is a womanizer. When her father finally returns, her family moves back to an nice home in the better part of Jackson, Mississippi, also the location of The Help. He brought another woman and her son, the family of one of his service buddies, with him. He wants to move to Miami with the other woman, but she and her son finally leave to join her husband when he is released from service. Norma's father then starts an affair with his secretary and eventually moves out of the family home.

Norma's mother is embarrassed to have her bridge and Junior League friends know that her husband is having a public affair with his secretary. She gets family members and clergy men to talk to him and they finally convince him to move back home. However, he does not speak to Norma's mother and he goes back to the office every night immediately after dinner.

Norma finally grows up, attends college at Ole Miss for two years, but finds college grey so marries a home builder. They buy a home in the nice part of town and Norma joins the Junior League, as she was raised to do. Her husband is a terrible lover so she feels she is justfied in having sexual affairs with a variety of men. She also gives birth to four children with her husband.

Norma's father becomes the attorney for Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and fights integration. Norma has become enlightened and favors integration. Her husband does not express an opinion, but also seems to be in favor of segregation or "separate, but equal."

Norma begins an affair with Bruce, an integration organizer. After several months, Bruce gets a job in Miami and convinces Norma to go with him, leaving her four children in the care of her in-laws and Marie, the woman who raised her. Norma's three older children are in elementary school, but the youngest one is still at home. Bruce tells her they will send for her children. They never get the children, but Norma gets her Master's Degree and teaches at a community college.

This book leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Who are we supposed to root for in this book? Norma is not a likeable character. Out of nearly 80 years of living, she chooses to include a childhood episode in the book that does not do her credit. As an adult, she puts her own wants ahead of the needs of her young children.

The Epilogue discusses her mother's death in 1970. By that time she has divorced her first husband and married Bruce. The book was published in 2011 so her children are adults now, but she does not mention how any of them turned out, even though she claims to have seen them four times per year. We have no idea if she and Bruce are still married or if she has moved on to someone else. She uses her maiden name so there is no clue there.

A couple of times in the book she mentions that her sister Mary Elizabeth is mentally unbalanced, but she gives no evidence of that. Her sister married and stayed in Jackson to take care of her parents. Her other sister Sydney is barely mentioned in the book and we have no idea how her life turned out.

Norma says that in her efforts not to be like her mother, she has become her father. That statement pretty much sums up her life.

I am lending my copy of this book to a friend who grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, but I'm not sure that I would recommend it to anyone.

[Barbara Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read. Every masterfully written paragraph imprints feelings and events that resonate. Norma's remarkable memory takes the reader on a journey through the lives of flawed and heroic people in a culture of bigotry and suppression. A revealing testament to courage.

[Lynn Shurden · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a good book! I really enjoyed it and wish that I could remember Allison Wells Resort. It reads like fiction and is an insight into black/white relations during the late 50's and early 60's in Mississippi. I could relate to so much that is written.

[Sherese · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really don't understand the comparison's to "The Help". From the jacket and summary of the book on my reviews I thought Mrs. Watkins would have spent more time discussing race relations and her relationship with the black domestics in her life. I felt this was a secondary element to this book instead focusing on Mrs. Watkins struggle as a White Woman in the South desperate to exert her independence from family including her parents and later her husband/children, tradition, and society who rejected her more liberal views (opinions with no action or contribution to the movement to improve the status of women or blacks in her life) on race relations during time where woman were expected to be submissive, wives and mothers who did not have advance education or careers. This was more of feminist perspective on Southern White Women's life than anything else.

Just my opinion so don't jump down my throat on this one, but I have to say that I have a very hard time swallowing Mrs. Watkins decision in the end to leave her children in order to escape her marriage and begin relationship with another man in Florida. Any woman leaves their children just because they crave more independence, happiness and freedom thoroughly disturbs me. It's one thing to leave mentally or physically abusive partner but even then you take the kids with you. Children should be priority no# 1. They are more important than any man and if you are not willing to scarifice your life for them then don't have them.

[Craig Derian · Rating 5 out of 5]

NORMA WATKINS has written a most insightful and exquisitely detailed memoir of the era of critical social and political transformation in the South (Mississippi). THE LAST RESORT was developed over many years and reflects a deep, experienced-based understanding of the contradictions, hypocrisy, angst engulfing the black and white communities. While The Help has received well-deserved attention throughout 2010 and 2011, THE LAST RESORT offers a genuine and unbelievably funny lens to the slowly developing heart of the mid-20th Century South and a much more nuanced rendering of infuriating racists, transitioning values, fear, loathing and hope for change.

[Vicki Skywark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir, called a real-life version of "The Help”, provides granular detail to a historical moment in time, 1940’s and 1950’s segregated Alabama. Watkins is a gifted storyteller and reveals herself unflinchingly against the historical backdrop of the Civil Rights era. Southerners, especially Southern historians, should get this title and dive deep into its eye-witness revelations.

[Jan]

Interesting story about a health/spa resort in Mississippi from the 40's through the early 60's and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. This young girl grows up, her family relationships and how she evolves. Not as engaging characters as The Help.

[Deborah McCabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written memoir. The sense of place is wonderful in this book and the characters are quite believable.

[Susan O · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great great book - sleeper of the year!

[Marianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found out about this memoir because it is set partially against the backdrop of her childhood days at Allison's Wells, a resort and spa north of Jackson, MS, which was started by my great-great-grandparents after the Civil War, and later purchased and further developed by Norma Watkins' ancestors. It was interesting to read what the place was like. But the book ended up being much more for me: Everyone who is interested in how white segregation and privilege in the South played out should read this book. I am grateful to Norma Watkins for her memoir. The details are so fine, and the characters so well drawn. What an observer she is: I don't think I can remember such detail about my own childhood. As she comes to live among black people as yardmen, cooks, nurses, servants, she slowly begins to formulate questions of fairness. Her father is a successful attorney, and becomes the personal attorney for the segregationist governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, Jr. He is one of the genteel racists of that time--not violent, but every bit as convinced of the inferiority of people of color, and every bit as determined to resist de-segregation. As she watches civil rights struggles unfold, such as James Meredith enrollment as the first black student at Ole Miss, she begins to realize she is not on the same side as her family, nor of anyone else in her social milieu. She is trapped. Some people seem to burn to be free more than others--and their freedom becomes a matter of survival, even at great cost. There is only so long that such people can try to will themselves to be in a situation that is killing them from the inside out. The external pressures, whether voiced from without or within, outweigh the desire to act--until they don't--and then the soul just bursts forth. I will not share the choices she made--but I will say that I admire her for telling her story in an undefended and self-responsible way. I see that other reviewers judge her--and this is the 21st century--I can't even imagine what it was like for her in the 1960's. I think she is unflinchingly honest, and she is driven by her intelligence, and conscience, and so she is able to break through the choke-hold that her culture and all its conventions had on her.

I think of this book as kind of a real-life version of The Help. Reading it, I begin to see how The Help failed to capture just how insidious the forces against change were for women like her, and makes Skeeter Phelan's transcendence less than believable. Watkins does not portray herself as the grand self-actualized heroine that Skeeter Phelan was. She stumbles through the dark the best way she knows how, and she breaks free, and it is messy, and hard--but she is out.

You may end the book saying, "well? Then what?" She has a sequel, "That Woman from Mississippi," and that's next on my list.

[Lisa C Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her stunning memoir, The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure, Norma Watkins weaves a tale of yearning, heartache, love, and racism in the segregated South during and after WWII.

The memoir opens with seven-year-old Norma standing on a train platform, with her mother and younger sister, saying goodbye to her father, who is leaving to voluntarily serve in the Navy during WWII. Little Norma is devastated as her young world is uprooted. Not only has her beloved father left, but with his reduced income, the family can no longer afford their house in Jackson, Mississippi. So, Norma’s mother moves the girls to Allison’s Wells, where her family runs a combination hotel, restaurant, and spa, famous for its healing waters.

Norma misses her old life, and laments that she’s not old enough to make her own decisions. She daydreams about her former home as she struggles to find her place in this new, vastly different world. Yet Norma forges ahead with courage and determination—traits that will continue to serve her as she navigates the contradictions and conundrums of the world around her.

When her father finally returns, life doesn’t magically return to Norma’s idyllic vision. Instead, it gets more complicated. And as Norma continues to mature, she becomes increasingly aware of the pervasive racism and segregation embedded in the culture that surrounds every aspect of her life. As she develops opinions that clash with her community, and arguments with her father grow more heated, Norma is left to grapple with the crucial question of what to do when a place that has always been “home” no longer feels like a fit.

Norma Watkins’ engrossing narrative style immerses readers in a multi-sensory world that is filled with fascinating characters and explores important issues of the times. One of the most compelling elements of this memoir is the generous invitation into the narrator’s mind as she contends with her own expanding views and opinions, which often clash fiercely with the people and culture surrounding her.

[Edmund Vale · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Last Resort felt to me like a quiet exploration of what happens when familiar lives are confronted with change, loss, and unexpected possibility. The story isn’t driven by dramatic twists; it unfolds gently, with attention to how people think, hesitate, and quietly adjust when life nudges them off course.
What stayed with me most was the sense of place not just the physical setting, but how it shapes mood and memory. Watkins has a way of portraying environment as more than backdrop; it becomes a companion to the characters’ internal rhythms. That gave the story a kind of reflective space where emotion could unfold without haste.
The characters are ordinary people facing ordinary struggles, decisions about belonging, loyalty, and what it means to start again. I appreciated how the novel treats their uncertainty with respect rather than judgement. Their choices feel real and complicated, and the emotional landscape feels familiar in its mix of hope and hesitation.
Reading this felt like slowing down and paying attention to nuance: the quiet corners of regret, the subtle turn toward possibility, and the resilience that doesn’t announce itself, but reveals itself in small, steady steps.

[mary allison cates · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was endorsed by Lee Smith, one of my very favorite authors. It also contains some of the stories I used to hear from my grandmother, who was also a Jackson, MS Watkins. I don’t think my family curiosity is the only reason this book drew me in, though. It’s a tale of how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go. The characters and the story itself are at once unique and emblematic of how decent societies harbor gross indecencies.

[Will Godwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms Atkins was the niece of Hosford Fontaine who ran the Allison Wells resort which my Mother took us to numerous times in our early years before it burned down. I loved this telling of the story and the memories it stirred.

[RACHEL · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watkins' memoir is brutally honest with herself and the South during the '40s, '50s and '60s. Our current times have echoes in our past.

My copy was a gift through Goodreads First.

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best memoirs I have ever read!

[Beckie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of meeting Norma Watkins and hearing her read from "The Last Resort" this past winter. She is a dynamic lady and a gifted writer. "The Last Resort" is primarily the story of her childhood in civil-rights era Mississippi.
Watkins spent a good part of those years at a hotel and spa run by her aunt, and this hotel, Allison's Wells, provides a vivid backdrop to Watkins's story of grappling with race, family dynamics, and her sexuality in a place that was changing too quickly for everyone else but not fast enough for her.
Though her mother and aunt expected her to be a proper Southern lady, Watkins disagreed with the way the hotel's black workers--some of whom raised her--were treated, and with the limited orbit in which a woman of her upbringing could move. She did not want to end up like her mother, who propped up an unhappy marriage because she put appearances over personal fulfillment. So instead, she ended up more than a bit like her father, who almost left his family to follow his desires.
Watkins is a very likeable storyteller--it's hard not to root for her even when she describes her darkest moments. This likeability comes in part from her willingness to explore her own foibles from the somewhat objective distance time can provide to a reflective person. Naturally, her disdain for the racism and sexism she was raised to accept only enhances the reader's affection for her.
And yet, when Watkins reaches the point in the story when she has her real moment of rebellion, I felt let down. It's the one part of the story--and I won't ruin it--when I wasn't convinces she was giving us the whole story, or fully owning up to the consequences of her choices. To be fair, I can see how writing about one's children is quite a bit dicier than writing about one's elders. After all, the historian's children are expected to outlive her. But still, it struck me as a cop out from an otherwise courageous writer.
I will add two unrelated points. First--"The Last Resort" is a solid piece of narrative nonfiction, with all the best elements of a novel. Watkins has a fascinating story, but also the talent to tell it well.
And second, reading this book is like hearing a shocking bit of family history, and realizing that all the people who've always been old to us were young once--but that doesn't mean the times have not changed.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some memoirs, such as political ones, relate historical facts, events. Others, such as this one, seem to help the author to analyze and come to truths about her life. The Last Resort, a post-bellum spa in Mississippi, serves as a metaphor in Watkin's life. She spent some of the WW II years with her mother's family and their African-American servants at the resort when her father was in the Navy. After the war the family returns to Jackson where she and her sisters grow up in the shadows of the failed, but intact marriage of their parents. Divorce was not an option in the polite, Southern culture of their time.

Watkins grows up in the shards of the former slave culture, marries and becomes a young mother of four children as the Civil Rights Movement is moving into Mississippi. It is a culture awakening for her. Her husband and family staunchly resist the movement while she sees it as necessary. She has seen the terrible injustice of racism. In addition, she lives in a sexually repressive society where she must be a "good girl". She isn't. This causes additional confusion for her. Finally, as a last resort, she leaves her family, a shocking thing for a good wife to do.

There are things we don't know and never will about those who enter her story. But this is her story, full of humor, objectivity, and self criticism. Her writing is good and I was gripped by her tale. I, a Northern woman, more than a decade younger than Norma, can remember those times. Her tale is one so many woman have told, of standing between two cultural worlds during those turbulent years of the '60's. It had been a white man's world and these women, along with their African-American brothers and sisters, were looking for freedom.

[Candida Pugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norma Watkins is an amazing writer and she captures beautifully the way in which large, close families deny their Achilles' heels while weaving nearly inescapable traps around each member. Watkins' shows how these traps function not only on a personally crippling level--she enters and stays for 10 years in a bad marriage--but how the traps keep people silent in the face of horrors in the public arena. In general, I hate stories that begin in childhood. Watkins' writing is so fine, I was drawn in completely. At times, this book is laugh-out-loud funny. My sole reservation was that, even though I could understand what kept her from joining those who protested segregation, I kept thinking of black Mississippians who risked everything, including their lives (and sometimes lost them) to fight for justice. To her credit, Watkins recognizes the place of privilege that allowed her to turn her back on a system she knew was wrong (to put it mildly) and she doesn't spare herself for going along with it, even as a very little girl--a time when no one could be expected to see the world at odds with the way their family sees it. Still, there was 12 year old Janie Miller who went out of her father's store to give water to the Freedom Riders fleeing the burning bus at Anniston, Alabama. Her father was a member of the Klan and the Klan discussed punishing her for her action. Those stories keep me from giving Watkins five stars. Even so, I hope lots and lot of people will read this book, especially those who were too young (or not even born) in the 1960s to experience American apartheid.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

***Spoiler Alert***

I feel the story is unevenly presented. The first two thirds describes her early childhood and teenage years at the resort. The images she presents here are lush and vivid. The pacing slow and serene like a southern summer day. I was completely transported to that era and to the place where she spent so much of her time. The last third of the story, describing her marriage, her interest in civil rights affairs (segregation, specifically), and her growing resentment of her bigoted family seemed rushed. The dust cover description focused on this latter angle, but so little time was spent discussing these topics. Then, at the very end of the tale, she leaves her husband and 4 children abruptly and rides into the sunset with a young attorney she has only known a few months. I am not making a judgement, but I am wondering what happens next? I think she could have written this book in three parts: 1. Her early years at the resort, 2. her married years and growing disillusionment with her southern segregated upbringing, and 3. what the hell happens after she leaves. I think she has some more important things to say.
Overall, I did enjoy the book if not for only the first part.

Update* Norma must have read my review because there is a sequel. LOL!

[Maureen · Rating 2 out of 5]

An unapologetic view into the dysfunctional family of a woman who struggles with her "coming of age" during turbulent times within her extended family as well as the political/social environment in the South during the 50s and 60s. While the book is engaging and interesting, I was disapppointed in the latter third of the book as Norma marries and has a family. While the first two thirds of the book gives an in depth look at her childhood, there isn't enough depth toward the end of the book, which makes the ending disappointing. While it is admirable that Norma is finally able to stand up for herself and her personal beliefs, despite the fact that it means disappointing her extended family, I was left at the end of the story feeling like the author was more of a coward in the way that she handled her decisions and how they would affect those who loved her. Perhaps if she had continued the story beyond 1970, I might have come to understand why she made the decisions she did, or at least whether she was at peace with them. Instead, I had to go to her website, but even there, little is said about what became of her beyond the brief bio.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful women's story and a powerful civil rights story from a white perspective. I have used excerpts from this book with high school students when we were reading personal narratives from the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. As a child she is an observer of the black help at the resort owned by her aunt and uncle. As she matures into an adult she begins to reflect and ask questions about these relationships with black people that she saw as family, yet she realizes she knows nothing about the lives of these people she loves. This leads her want to confront her parents, but finding herself unable to do so. I used this story with my students to illustrate the conflict faced by those who wanted to speak up, but were paralyzed by the fear of what the consequences might be.

At the same time this is a woman's story. Unhappy at college she follows the only path she feels is open to her as a woman in the 1950's, she seeks out and lands a husband. In this story, as well as the Civil Rights story she struggles to find to find and be the person she wants to be.

[Sterlingcindysu · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I checked this book out, I did't realize that it was nonfiction (autobiography) and it dealt mainly with Watkins, not the spa. The writing was good, lots of details, great characterizations and if it would have been fiction I'd rounded up a star. I'll give Watkins credit for writing some things that were TMI (if such a thing is possible in an autobiography) and thinking, "geez what did her kids think when they read this?" Since there's only about 10-15 years between us I could identify with some situations of the time, but one scene I thought rather odd--when she was 9, she wanted a fancy dinner party, linen tableclothes and had a corsage. Really? I thought popsicles were an ideal birthday treat when I was nine.

I certainly didn't agree with any of her actions in the last 50 pages or so and would have liked a more complete "rest of the story" epilogue.

[Sarah C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Norma Watkins's book is beautifully written, and includes entertaining and interesting anecdotes within a strong narrative. I found that the book lacked a lot of the reflective quality of many memoirs, though, and never made it clear what Norma learned from her adventures. Because of that, I was unable to figure out Norma's mission - I didn't know what the character wanted and was therefore somewhat dissatisfied as a reader.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first half of this memoir. But by the end I was outraged at the author. She seemed to abandon her four children under false pretenses - claiming that she needed a "break" and not divulging that she was having an extra-marital affair and was actually running away with this man. I can appreciate that she was frustrated with the bigotry and racism in Mississippi, but her handling of her situation seemed selfish and immature.

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Last Resort is absolutely, positively one of the very best memoirs (and books) I've ever read. It is a deeply resonant tale of growing up in the 1940-1970 period in the south with an honest exploration of racism, feminism, and love. Norma Watkins has carefully crafted an honest, soul baring examination of family, feelings, and faithfulness to one's own truth in spite of consequences. A must read for women of a certain age....and you know who you are!!

[Justine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Something about this book didn't ring true. It may have been the author's predilection for pointing out the obvious, or it could have been the disjointed narrative. The first, and best, half of the book is about growing up in Southern resort hotel, while the second devolves into her quest for an orgasm and marital fulfillment, which results in her leaving her children and husband for a new life. This isn't The Help, it is one woman's therapy.

[Judith Federico · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book but the title led me to believe that there would be more concerning the resort itself, and, as a person who spent much of her childhood with her parents staffing a summer resort, I would have found that very interesting. I also was sort of puzzled as to how she had come by her beliefs concerning segregation since it didn't appear that anyone in her sphere had the same opinions.