Coming Home to Mississippi

Wyatt Cooper

61 WyattCooper Wyatt Cooper was born on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi, in 1927, graduated from high school in New Orleans, and attended the University of California–Berkeley and U.C.L.A., where he majored in theatre arts. He was an actor on stage and in television, a screenwriter, and an editor. He was married to the artist Gloria Vanderbilt, and they lived in New York with their two sons, Carter and Anderson, who is now a CNN news correspondent. Going Home O dream of joy! Is this indeed The Lighthouse top I see? Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree? —Coleridge My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe— My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go. —Robert Burns Thomas Wolfe wrote a book and called it You Can’t Go Home Again. That is a catchy title and it caught on. It caught on with people, even, who know nothing of the great autobiographical novel that went with 62 wyatt cooper it. One often hears it quoted, repeated with the half-jocular, half-embarrassed shrug that accompanies axioms from the Bible, Shakespeare, or Poor Richard’s Almanac. As is usual with such popular utterances, it caught on precisely because it is part profound truth and part arrant nonsense. We recognize the truth of it because each of us has at one time or another undertaken that almost mythical journey back to the familiar landscape that used to be home, to confront, instead, a land that is foreign and unfamiliar. That this is so is, of course, not the fault of the place. A place, after all, is only trees, ground, water, soil, and the uses men have put them to. We must credit it, instead, to the heavy burden we lay upon the trip. We go encumbered by an unreasonable demand, unspoken and not even totally formed, that in some mysterious way the questions of a lifetime should be answered there, the hungers of a lifetime assuaged.We hope, perhaps, that we will be able to reach back in time and correct something in our shaping that needs correcting. I dream from time to time that I am making improvements on the house I grew up in, though this house has not existed for ten years.We take with us a troubling sense of longing and of loss. We travel with a haunting mixture of memory and desire. We set out on the nostalgic road with the hope and faith and expectation of the child that once was,with that child’s tenderness and innocence,which are not only not what they were but perhaps never even existed as they are recalled, and which are, in fact, an adult’s poignant, reconstructed, partly calculated, and carefully nurtured idea of what he himself has been. He expects to see the giants of his childhood and to know once more those towering and superhuman parents and teachers, neighbors and friends who gave form and shape to his youth, who seemed to move in a world of assurance and competence, and whose eyes were the mirrors in which he first formed images of himself. He expects or hopes to find them not the ordinary mortals they are, with limited knowledge,primitive notions,and narrow interests,complaining about the rising cost of meat and boasting about the town’s recent erection of a power plant, but the concerned,judicious, all-knowing authorities he remembers, who once gave him answers and quieted his fears. wyatt cooper 63 He expects to find intact and unchanged the church and the school that helped to mold him, which were so much more than wood and stone and once seemed absolute and everlasting and immovable,guardians of all the certainty in the world, where the depth and breadth of his thoughts, feelings, and impulses were first plumbed. He finds that they have vanished. If they are physically there, unchanged even, they have become somehow shrunken, diminished, flat, and devoid of any life he recognizes, peopled by strangers of a smaller and lesser race, a company now of dwarfs whose comings and goings have nothing of the burning passions, swelling ambitions, consuming thoughts, raging fears, strange intensities, compelling laughter, or vexing tears that he remembered in...