Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

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1 I have a moviemaker friend in New York, a somewhat cranky and conservative exile from Louisiana, who told me he was emigrating to London. "It's not just the robots in the subways," he said, "or the surly manners, or the pollution, or the noise. I'm gettin' away from the spades." I once lived in England for almost four years, I told him. He would love London for about six months, but after that it would start to get awfully boring. "Why?" he asked. "Because after six months you'll start missing the spades," I said. He gave this some thought. "Well," he said, "you may be right." This conversation took place shortly after I had published a magazine piece about the changes I had observed in Mississippi. My flamboyant and irascible friend, who had spent a considerable amount of time in Mississippi drinking mint juleps with the cousins of Sartorises and Compsons and de Spains and who was quite conversant with all the Southern literature, 165 Willie Morris looked at me and began shaking his head. "You're crazy," he finally said, repeating it louder next time. "Crazy/"We were having a drink in the Empire Chinese bar on Madison, our magazine's hangout, and even the Chinese waiters-who by then were accustomed to strange outbursts from my steady clientele of writers, editors, agents, sexologists, sports columnists , mistresses to Black Panthers, advertising men, graduate students looking for scholarships with built-in retirement plans, hippie ministers, literary critics with socks that don't match, stylish poetesses in deep analysis since 1959, foreign correspondents, soil erosion experts, Russian emigres, insurance salesmen, former advisors to Presidents, moderate revolutionaries (or makers of medium-sized fire bombs), ex-Existentialists, congressmen, draft dodgers , female political pundits, plantation owners, defrocked priests who live outdoors, and perambulating bums-turned their heads to listen. Mr. Suey Hom, the owner, came over and said, "Come on, let me buy you another drink, hah?" "But this man is crazy," my companion persisted. "Why is he crazy?" Mr. Suey wanted to know. "Because he's a writer, but he wants to change Mississippi . Can you imagine? There he is with the most messed-up state in the Union, the most fertile ground in America for a writer to write about. The place of his own forebears. The most beautiful land in the whole damned country. The Goddamnedest people in 166 Yazoo the hemisphere, and all of them fucked up. Cruelties right out of the Old Testament. Relationships that would make Freud give up before he started. Emotions run wild. Romanticism gone amuck. Decadence . Decay. Incest. Filth. Complexity. Rank perversion . Miscegenation that is the envy of Brazil. Charm. Openness. The courage of noble fools. So much hospitality you have to beg them to stop. And he wants to change it. Why, if I was a writer I'd use all the influence I had with the politicians and get them to put up big-assed green signs at every point of entry into Mississippi, all along the borders, saying, 'Posted. No Trespassing.' " I will have to admit that the dark and secret part of me was touched by this, and since my Louisiana friend had worked himself into a high fever, I told him so. "Besides," he said, "who gives a damn about the South any more? It's out of fashion everywhere. With these people it's up one year and down the next. They'll use it next time they need it. They've lost interest ." He leaned across the table, narrowing his eyes conspiratorially, and whispered, "But we know it's there, and that's where we've got the bastards beat. " Who gives a damn about the South any more? Who, for that matter, gives a damn about integration? Back in the days of the Movement, that lost, lyrical time of innocence when the better part of the nation saw in167 Willie Morris tegration as the goal and fulfillment of our deepest impulses as a people, the South had once again been the symbol of our ills, the terrain on which to fight our noblest battles. To exorcise the South of its evils was to cleanse the nation of its simple politic hesitations. Then we could all go forward; we would overcome. But even before Martin Luther King was shot down in Memphis, articulate blacks were realizing Faulkner 's prophesy-a prophesy everyone...