Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography

5. "I'm Better Than This Sorry Place": Coming to Terms with Self and the South in College

131 CHAPTER FIVE “I’m Better Than This Sorry Place” Coming to Terms with Self and the South in College WILLIE MORRIS’S DISILLUSIONMENT with college life came early in his freshman year at the University of Texas in the fall of 1952. A Yazoo City, Mississippi, native who went to ut in Austin at his father’s urging—“I think you ought to go to school out there. Can’t nuthin’ in this state match it”—Morris had been desperately homesick when he left home at age seventeen. Though dazzled by this new world in which he found himself—noting that “the life I saw about me was richer, and more flamboyant than anything I had known before” —it was not long before he “would grow progressively more lonely, more contemptuous of this organized anarchy, more despairing of the ritualized childishness and grasping narcissism of the fraternity life.” At a particularly low moment in his social life, wearing a toga and abandoned on a hilltop outside of town as part of an obligatory hazing, Morris got mad, madder than he’d ever been—“at homesickness, at blond majorettes, at gap-toothed Dallas girls, at fraternities, at twangy accents, at my own helpless condition,” all of which led him to declare, “I’m better than this sorry place.”1 Few autobiographers articulated the emotional impact of their transition to college as passionately as did Willie Morris, and yet he is one of many southern white writers who attended southern institutions of higher learning and later wrote about their years there as catalysts or catharses of one sort or another in their struggles for identity and purpose, and in acquiring a sense of the re- 132 ‡ chapter five gion that often proved so integral to both.2 While southerners’ comings-of-age entailed a number of hurdles, as the essays here have demonstrated, for those who went to college that experience seems to have been the most consistently transformative, if only because it inspired such introspection, self-examination, shifting outlooks on the world, or challenges to long-established assumptions. In the preface to his wonderful 1958 anthology The College Years, A. C. Spectorsky described that period as “a unique adventure which, in each generation , brings together the cream of the crop to spend unforgettable years between the end of adolescence and the attainment of full maturity, in a place of its own, where each day spells growth, excitement, interaction of people and ideas, stimulation—and downright good fun.”3 While much of that range of experience is evident in southern white memoirs, they usually include another, often more meaningful, layer of collegiate life not generally evident in the memories of other Americans: in southern memoirs, the self-examination so integral to the college years is accompanied by another, often more problematic dimension —an examination of the South itself. Many, like Willie Morris, found in campus life the worst of southern values and practices, and they reached the conclusion that they must escape the region altogether or, if they stayed, somehow rise above or challenge the status quo as reflected on their campuses and in their classrooms. Others encountered someone or something that challenged their assumptions about themselves and/or southern mores, and through those encounters they underwent what ultimately became a conversion experience in regard to race, region, or both. In both scenarios, higher education represented a significant turning point in their life stories as they recounted them many years later. In a recent essay on American universities in crisis, Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin Faust noted that “universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices.”4 And so it was for most of the writers to be considered here, though it is the doubt that proves the most universal element in their characterizations of those years and their impact—with much of it directed against the institutions themselves. Their accounts make clear the extent to which southern college campuses were as often bulwarks of tradition and repression as they were crucibles for change and enlightenment. In whichever role they played, higher education in southern settings—and the doubts it raised on a variety of levels —affected these authors in significant and meaningful ways, which often resulted in a so- “I’m Better Than This Sorry Place” ‡ 133...