Ten Point

Ten Point: Deer Camp in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi, 1997)

From 1927 until 1962, a group of friends including the author’s grandparents, P.K. and Florence Huffman, gathered to hunt, fish, socialize and savor good times in the vanishing southern wilderness. They convened at the Ten Point Deer Club in Issaquena County, the last large, wooded stronghold of the Mississippi Delta, where the Huffmans lived until the last redoubt of the woods made famous in Faulkner’s novella The Bear were destroyed by developers and the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. Florence Huffman, known by her family as “Mama Florence,” took most of the photos for the book, for which Alan Huffman wrote the narrative.

For more than three decades Mama Florence, and occasionally her husband, photographed and filmed the people who came to the camp. The pictures, at once intimate, visually intriguing and, in hindsight, historically significant, document a world in which two powerful forces coexisted — the relentless drive of progress and the persistent draw of nature. Few other photographers of the day chose to document hunting and fishing scenes, and the pictures testify to her eye for unique subjects and to her sympathetic view of both the characters of the camp and the natural world around her.