Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

2

2 January, 1970 My grandmother had survived the stroke, and this time, in January and later in March, I went back to Yazoo for different reasons. The United States Supreme Court had ordered thirty school districts in Mississippi* to completely integrate their schools immediately -a harbinger, sixteen years after the Brown decision, for the rest of the South and, presumably , the nation. Compliance with the latest Supreme Court decision, or even a substantial degree of compliance, meant, as any Southerner would tell you, the beginnings of a true revolution, revolution of a kind that had not so much as touched the South, not to mention other Americans. Yazoo, sitting incongruously on the edge of the great delta, half white and *Under Alexander v. Holmes, October 28, 1969, the existence of any all-black school in a school district was proof that the old dual system was still in effect. The "all deliberate speed" of the 1954 Brown decision was no longer permissible. 8 Yazoo half black, was one of the thirty districts. I did not want to go back. I conjured many elaborate reasons, a dozen dramatic interior motives, for avoiding it. At least five times I promised myself, firmly and irrevocably, that I would not go. My office friends will testify to these curious emotional gyrations, these jolting peregrinations of a vainglorious heart, which tormented me relentlessly during a grim wintry Manhattan fortnight. I did not want to go. I had written a book a couple of years before, North Toward Home, which was about myself and about the people I had grown up among in Yazoo, and except for the one brief secret nocturnal visit, I had not been back since. My book, as such things always do in our country, had deeply disturbed the town. Many people there thought I had damaged and condemned it. One person wrote me that I had besmirched the memory of my father. * Another wrote a letter published on the front page of the Yazoo Herald that I had embarrassed my church, my school, and my friends. My mother received a few threatening calls. I got pointed warnings about what would happen if I ever came back. Since Yazoo did not have a bookstore, the publishers had placed a substantial number of copies in *In fact, the gentleman who wrote me this had been encouraged to leave town quite a few years before for taking off his trousers, in the most flourishing manner, in front of a little girl, so now he was living elsewhere. I wrote him back: "Dear--, I profoundly disagree that I besmirched the memory of my father, but you certainly did your damnedest to besmirch - - --." 9 Willie Morris the P & S Pharmacy on Main Street, which had sold out in short order. MyoId friend Bubba Barrier, my best friend since we were three years old, who now helps run his father Hibbie's plantation, telephoned me long distance in New York. Bubba said, "I just want you to know one thing. This book of yours is the biggest thing to hit town since the Civil War." You couldn't walk twenty feet, Bubba said, without hearing an earnest conversation about it. People were standing in line to get it at the library. "I think half the people in town kind of likes it," Bubba said, "and may be a little proud of it. The other half of the town is extremely agitated." Bubba went on to say he had the impression that the half which was so agitated consisted mainly of the people who were not in the book. After a while, I believe, this reaction, which amazed, baffled, and for a time deeply disturbed me, though I of all people should have appreciated its origins, softened considerably. This too is a very American phenomenon. For a number of people there-Bubba, and myoId English teacher Mrs. Parker, and the editor of the paper, and the librarian, and especially the good old boys with whom I grew up, some now scattered all over the South (Henjie Henick, Muttonhead Shepherd, Ralph Atkinson, Big Boy Wilkinson, Peewee Baskin, Honest Ed Upton, Van Jon Ward, Robert Pugh, Billy Rhodes, Moose Moorhead, good ole Mississippi boys)-realized, I belD Yazoo lieve, that my book had been written as an act of love; sensed, perhaps, Faulkner's understanding that one loves a place not just because of but despite. Yet all this...