![]() ![]() ![]() Ward writes about two generations of prisoners at Parchman, including two young black inmates in the early part of the century and a white inmate, Michael, who’s just been released. And the danger that I would end up there was a real thing, for me and for people that I know and loved.” “I didn’t know much about it, but I knew it was a place I never wanted to end up. “When I thought about prison, that’s the prison that came to mind,” she said. Growing up on Mississippi’s southern coast, Ward said that Parchman loomed over her childhood. Parchman’s storied history is the basis for the prison farms featured in the movies “Cool Hand Luke” and “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, it’s referred to as “destination doom” in a William Faulkner’s novel “The Mansion,” and it is now a haunted setting in Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning 2017 novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” It’s about 30 miles from where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, and surrounded by uninhabitable swampland. Located about 100 miles south of Memphis in the Mississippi River Delta, the birthplace of the blues, Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, Mississippi, has become as much a historical landmark as it is a penitentiary. ![]()
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