Coming Home to Mississippi

Willie Morris

41 WillieMorris Willie Morris, a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, graduated from the University of Texas and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar . He was editor of The Texas Observer, and served as editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine from 1967 to 1971. He authored sixteen books, including The Courting of Marcus Dupree, winner of the Christopher Medal, and North Toward Home, winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Morris died in August 1999. M y people settled and founded Mississippi—warriors and politicians and editors—and I was born and raised into it, growing up in a town, half delta and half hills, before the television culture and the new Dixie suburbia, absorbing mindlessly the brooding physical beauty of the land, going straight through all of school with the same white boys and girls. We were touched implicitly, even without knowing it,with the schizophrenia of race and imbued in the deep way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought with the tacit acceptance that Mississippi was different, with a more profound inwardness and impetuosity and a darker past not just than that of New York, or Ohio, or California, but of Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, which were next door. This was a long time before anyone deigned to think that a southerner could be elected president of the United States with everything that this would imply—not only elected in large measure with southern votes but, four years later, turned out resoundingly with southern votes as well. I went away to college in Texas, and in England, and ran a news- 42 willie morris paper in Texas, and sojourned in California, and edited a national magazine in NewYork City and, having served my time in our cultural capital as many of us must,moved out to the eastern tip of Long Island to a village by the sea. I did not know then that I was an exile, almost in the European sense. When I met a fellow Mississippian by chance, the exchange of tales about family and places, the stories about football or fishing or some long-vanished preacher were signs of a strange mutuality. I would meet black Mississippians in the North who were more similar to me in background and preferences than the Yankee WASPs I saw every day. I often dwell on the homecomings I have made—the acutely physical sensations of returning from somewhere else to all those disparate places I have lived. To the town of my childhood—Yazoo—it was the precarious hills looming like a mountain range at the apex of that triangle known as the Mississippi Delta, the lights of the town twinkling down at night in a diaphanous fog. To the city of my college days— Austin—it was the twin eminences of the University Tower and the grand old state capitol awash in light from very far away.To the citadel of my young adulthood—Oxford University—it was the pallid sunlight catching all in filigree the spires and cupolas of that medieval city on the Thames. To the metropolis of my ambition it was the Manhattan skyline that seemed so forbidding yet was at once so compact and close at hand.To the village of my gentlest seclusion, on Long Island, it was the Shinnecock Canal opening onto that other world of shingled houses, flat potato fields and dunes, and the blue Atlantic breakers. It was in the East that I grew to middle age. I cared for it, but it was not mine. I lived nearly twenty years there, watching all the while from afar as my home suffered its agonies, loving and hating it across the distance, returning constantly on visits or assignments. The funerals kept apace,“Abide with Me” reverberating from the pipe organs of the churches, until one day I awoke to the comprehension that all my people were gone. As if in a dream, where every gesture is attenuated, it grew upon me that a man had best be coming on back to where his strongest feelings lay. An acquaintance in Yazoo County writes me of the Big Black Swamp, where he has just been deer hunting.“I felt in a sacred spot,” willie morris 43 he says,“a kinship not only with my forebears, but with the land.” His father and his uncle hunted there. So did his grandfather and greatgrandfather...