Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

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3 November 17, 1970 The last night I was in Mississippi, I had dinner with Hodding Carter III, editor of the paper in Greenville, the Delta Democrat-Times. Hodding's father, whom people call "Big Hodding" or sometimes just "Big," had retired now from the paper; he was one of my special heroes back when I was editing the daily at the University ofTexas. Big Hodding had made a stop in Austin then on a lecture tour, and before an overflow crowd had said: "There is a young man from my native state who is the editor of your newspaper. It is an outstanding paper and he is doing a good job. All Mississippi boys are mean and rambunctious, so don't play around with him. He is in trouble now because all editors worthy of their calling get into trouble sooner or later." Then he proceeded from personal experience and with much gusto to defend the beleaguered notion of independent and courageous newspapers. 184 Yazoo Shortly before I met young Hodding on my final night in Mississippi, I had driven from Jackson to Greenville for a visit in that remarkable, civilized river town. I had started out on the narrow old highway which parallels the river into the delta, and my rented Hertz had skidded and bumped all the way, and seemed to be balking a little at entering this ghostly terrain. Only a few miles into the delta, just as the sun disappeared out over the river, a storm descended, the rain came down in great torrents driven by a terrible whistling and moving wind, and beyond the edges of the highway I could see nothing but bayous and gullies and an occasional brutal little creek or river suddenly swollen and eddying with the rain. This, I knew from my boyhood, was one of the most desolate and treacherous drives in the whole state. My gasoline gauge pOinted to empty, and I beseeched the Lord that I would not be stranded here in a storm, with not even a road shoulder to drive the car to, much less a Seven-Eleven or a Bun 'N Burger. I drove for miles in a mindless fright until, praise eternally be His name, there was the town of Onward, Mississippi, with a general store plastered with patent -medicine posters and a gas pump sitting precariously on the edge of the swamp. Back in the car again, stopping every so often to read in the eerie glow of the headlights the historical markers about the early Indians , the Spanish explorers, or the French settlers, I felt for the hundredth time the pull of that powerful 185 Willie Morris and unremitting delta land, its abiding mysteries and strengths-retrieved from the ocean and later the interminable swamp-and the men of all colors and gradations known to the species who had fought it into its reluctant and tentative submission. No wonder there is no other state remotely like this one, I thought, no other so eternally wild, so savagely unpredictable , so fraught with contradictory deceits and nobilities; societies are shaped by the land from which they emerge, and on this night in a dark and relentless November storm, the land from which I and my blood-kin had emerged was scaring the unholy hell out of me. N ow young Hodding and I were in the old Southern Tearoom in Vicksburg, being served catfish by Negro mammies dressed for the role, only a few hundred yards from the great battlefield where 20,000 American boys-average age 20-died in Vicksburg's gullies and ravines and swamps 107 years before. We had refused the "Yazoo Razoo," the "Mississippi Grasshopper," and the "Rebel on the Rocks" and had settled down with some serious Yankee Martinis. Hodding and I are almost precisely the same age, but he came back and I went away, so we approach our common place like two radiants in the same prism, but with the same impetuosity, and the same maniacal blend of fidelity, rage, affection, and despair. I had my plane out the next day, and so I was loosening up 186 Yazoo with no effort at all, for now as always I felt, on the eve of departure, the lifting of some terrible burden, almost physical in its intensity. I had been back six times since my first trepidations about death on native soil; I had not...