Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

4

4 November 16, 1970 Yazoo again. "The mimosa tree is turning Daddy upside down," my mother said. But I had already found that out. The first thing I had done when I got there from Jackson this time, in a still and wonderful November twilight in a rented Hertz, was to drive once more into the cemetery to his grave. For the cemetery had always been the most beautiful place in town for me, and in some ways the most sensible; I have always walked among the new gravestones to see who had died since the last time I was here, knowing that if I do not find them here I will probably see them drinking coffee at Danrie's, or in front of the Bon-Ton or the Delta National Bank. The tree, which we had planted the day after my father was buried and which at first seemed as sickly as the sorriest pup in a litter, had put its roots deeply into the ground, tilting the gravestone at an angle and 151 Willie Morris digging up the earth around it. So it was at an angle that I read the inscription on the tiny stone: Henry Rae Morris Tennessee PVT STU Army TNG Corps Jan. 8, 1899 Sept. 2, 1958 I stood alone on the hill where he is buried, hearing the lonely echoing whistle of a late-afternoon Illinois Central down below in the town, and the same old barks of the delta dogs who have always seemed to become alive or horny or simply communicative in this dying hour. All around his grave on the hill were the graves of his friends the American Legionnaires who sponsored and coached our championship baseball teams when I was a boy: Herman Nolte, "Red" Hester, Charlie White, Sammy Moses, whose son is now catcher with the California Angels, and all the others. We buried him here two days after I was married , my wife and I making a maddening trip against time from a honeymoon on one of Lyndon Johnson's artificial lakes somewhere in Texas: the police chief, Mr. Ardis Russell, had stood at attention with his cap on his heart as the hearse made its way through the streets of the town; the firemen, domino players, hunters, and fishermen mourned him the most; and I was sorry I had not told him, the last time I saw him in the hospital before I went off to Texas to get mar152 Yazoo ried, that if I ever had a son I would give him his name. He had made a baseball player out of me, and had taught me to hunt. When the time had come for me to go to college, he had traveled five hundred miles on a Southern Trailways bus to look over the University of Texas, and when I telephoned him one cold December night in 1955 from New Orleans to say I had won a Rhodes scholarship, he had said, for he was a simple man, "Boy, you'll never have to worry about a good job the rest of your life." He was making fifty dollars a week when he died. Twelve years had passed since he was buried and we planted this indefatigable mimosa tree. My marriage was gone, and I had become a member of the New York literati. Sorrow had embraced me like a small madness. It had settled into my taste buds, and had a territorial stake in my gonads. Overnight, so it seemed, I lost not just a wife who had been my college sweetheart, but also a New York apartment, all my books, an old farmhouse with six acres on a hill, and my 85-pound black Labrador retriever named I. H. Crane-as fine a dog as I ever had; I loved to watch his big old ears flopping in a summer's wind, the way he rooted around in the snow and humped the leg of the table in the kitchen and jumped over waves in the ocean-lost! I remembered Christmases in the farmhouse with the eighteenth-century beams, a yule log in the fireplace like the fireplace in Patrick Henry's kitchen, an evergreen high as the ceiling: my six 153 Willie Morris acres, my books, and myoid dog I.H. But all that was far behind; I was now the age my father was when I was born...