After a painful breakup with a girlfriend named Lulu, I decided to get in my car and go. The car in this case was a light blue Ford Pinto, and my destination was Mississippi. That state is not generally considered a place for tourists. On the contrary, it is more often cited as a place to be from. It has long been the poorest state in the union, and due to its bleak history of slavery and racism, many of its black residents have wanted only to get the heck out.
Sometime in the spring, I left Austin and drove 200 miles up Interstate 35 to Dallas to see my family. After one night, the tour itself began. My first stop was Monroe, Louisiana, where I spent 24 hours with my brother’s mother-in-law. We drove around the local canebrakes and listened to the police talk to each other on her special radio, and then I continued east to the Magnolia State.
I crossed the Mississippi River and stopped at Vicksburg, the site of a major battle during the Civil War. It was actually a six-week siege in which the Yankees prevailed. Vicksburg, like several other Mississippi cities, would not celebrate July 4 (American Independence Day) again until the end of World War II.
So there I was in the Mississippi Delta, where huge cotton plantations once sprawled for mile after mile. Our twisted, convoluted history is almost too painful to look at, but it’s a fact. This is where so many black people worked the fields, subject to the slave owner’s lash. In no other part of the USA was racism so overt until not too long ago. Although I had ancestors who fought on the losing side of the Civil War and my great-grandfather was an overseer on a Louisiana plantation in the late 19th century, my sympathies reside with the victims of these awful crimes for which we are still paying a price. OK, enough editorializing.
I headed up Highway 61 and went through Greenville, Cleveland and Money (where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955) before stopping in Clarksdale. Wow, you talk about the heart of the Mississippi Delta, there I was. Clarksdale is the home of the Delta Blues Museum. The blues, of course, is the musical form that originated with black people in the Deep South with its roots in field hollers, shouts, chants and field songs; the expression of melancholy and sadness—and yet triumph over those emotions—are at the core of this gripping music. Mississippi is where Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and so many others sang and played the blues.
Further up the road in the northwest corner of the state was Tunica, reputedly the poorest city in the United States. I can attest that it was not too pretty, but other communities could contend for that dubious distinction. Almost adjacent to Tunica was a place called Little Texas.
The next place on the itinerary was Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi. I spent half an hour walking in the stands at Hemingway Stadium, where the Rebels play football. I know this sounds smug, but the place seemed tiny in comparison to Memorial Stadium back in Austin. I stayed longer at the Lyceum, the center of the campus. It is most famous for the events of 1962, when some of the European-American students and rioted because the university was being integrated. The man who forced that precipitous change was James Meredith, with whom I did a telephone interview in 1982 as part of the 20-year celebration of the integration of Ole Miss. I have a vague recollection of trying to find the house where William Faulkner, Mississippi’s greatest writer, lived.
From Oxford, I traveled east to Tupelo. This is where Elvis Presley was born in 1935. He lived in a simple whitewashed house there until the age of 13 when his family moved north to Memphis. Then it was down to Philadelphia, the scene of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Many of the European-American people of Mississippi—and other southern states—were terrified at the notion that their black brothers and sisters would be able to vote and have a measure of justice. I remember staring at the Neshoba County Courthouse, where the trial took place in 1967.
I turned in a westerly direction and came to Jackson, capital of Mississippi. There were a couple of interesting incidents there. One took place on the campus of Jackson State University, an all-black institution. I was wearing an Ole Miss T-shirt I had bought in Oxford when I asked a student for directions to the football stadium where Walter Payton had once played. He looked at me and my attire and asked, “Why do you want to know?” The other was at a store called Chic Afrique, which was dedicated to African culture. I got into an interesting discussion with the proprietor about the reasons why such a place was necessary. He patiently explained what it was like to constantly see Caucasian faces on television, in power, everywhere. What he said stayed with me.
I made one last stop in Mississippi, at Natchez, a historic old city on the river. I savored a plate of barbecue. It, too, was chock full of former plantations and mansions where the former masters had lived in comfort while other people worked day and night, without pay. I hurried back to Dallas because my sister-in-law was about to deliver my nephew. Whenever I recall my 1986 trip to Mississippi, I connect it to Tyler. Interestingly enough, I had driven through Tyler, Texas in the early part of the journey.
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