The Early Posthumous Work

Mississippi: Idiosyncratic, Incomprehensible, and Air-Conditioned

77 Mississippi: Idiosyncratic, Incomprehensible, and Air-Conditioned The other day we stopped by Sam’s Club to pick up one of their rotisserie chickens, and two young butchers were standing back behind the counters shooting the breeze when we walked up. The nearer of the two guys, who looked to be Indian or Pakistani, asked if he could help us, and I said, “Well, we were wondering which of these—” I waved at the plastic boxes on stainless steel shelves under the heat lamps—“which is the most recent to arrive here.” “They’ve all been set out within the last half hour,” the guy said. My wife and I looked at each other, examined the chickens, which all looked pretty savory, discussed a couple in detail, hesitated. The butcher stepped up and selected the last package on the upper row of plastic boxes, and lifted it slightly. “Carl,” he said, “would be an excellent choice.” We took Carl. This is Mississippi, 2003. Another day last week, as we left the Home Depot parking lot, I noticed in the sky a bird, big and flying erratically. Close your eyes and imagine: Home Depot behind us, the main post office over there to the right, Eckerd’s to the left, other stores here and there, fifty-five SUVs coming, going all around, and up above, the bird, flying in its peculiar pattern. Suddenly it dropped straight down like a—it wasn’t like a rock, it was faster than a rock, more like a bullet, say—and disappeared from view. 78 The Early Posthumous Work There was probably an SUV in the way. So we pulled to a stop behind several of them in the left turn lane there, intending 40th Street, and looked over to the Floyd’s Formal Wear and Buckos Dry Cleaning parking lot where stood in the parking space next to a Ford Explosion some kind of small hawk, kite, or kestrel balanced on top of, and with his talons deep inside (it took a few seconds for the brain to focus this picture), some kind of very white victim bird, might’ve been a pigeon or a dove. Feathers scattered around there. You could see their eyes, the hawk with an irritated stare, for being gawked at, and the dying bird with a sort of bizarrely quiet, uncomprehending look. This is Mississippi , 2003. The front page of the coast newspaper, the Sun-Herald, recently reported the plan for a new Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. It is to be built next door to the Beau Rivage, known locally as “the Beau,” a junior cousin to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, opened in 1999 by Steve Wynn’s old outfit and currently the fanciest of twelve casinos on the Mississippi coast. One day last month, I pulled out of another casino’s parking lot at 5:00 a.m., gazing across the street at a giant Catholic church looming up in the dawning light, wondering what there was to say about Mississippi in 2003, and it came to me. Schizophrenia. Today the local paper’s front page offers a photograph spreading across four of its seven columns. It is a picture of bareshouldered women, a beautiful white one hugging a beautiful black one who has just become the first African-American to become Mississippi’s “Miss Hospitality,” and in the background other smiling women. There were tears, too. It’s apparently a title of some consequence. I don’t make anything of the various participants’ apparent joy—their sincerity and insincerity about the same admixture as at the conclusion of all such pageants. In the Miss America competition the first black to be Miss Mississippi won in 1987, sixteen years ago. It’s the Sunday newspaper. The point of these four brief items is only that I don’t have to look very hard to find them, and beyond that, that the fabric of life here is as idiosyncratic, rich, painful, incomprehensible, and Steven Barthelme 79 air-conditioned as anyplace else; but no more so than anyplace else. If you live in some other part of the United States, and the Mississippi that you have in imagination is the clown place drawn in books and (mostly) movies, high and low, well, that’s okay, and we hope y’all enjoy it. Just don’t come down here looking for it. Apologies to Faulkner, but today...