Bill Bryson Page 7

  Behind the desk sat a large, exceptionally well dressed black woman. This surprised me a little, this being Mississippi. She wore a dark two-piece suit, which must have been awfully warm in the Mississippi heat. I asked her the way to Rowan Oak.

  "You parked on the square?" she said. Actually she said, "You pocked on the skwaya?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay, honey, you git in yo' car and you makes the skwaya. You goes out the other end, twoads the university, goes three blocks, turns rat at the traffic lats, goes down the hill and you there, un stan'?"

  "No."

  She sighed and started again. "You git in yo' car and you makes the skwaya-"

  "What, I drive around the square?"

  "That's rat, honey. You makes the skwaya." She was talking to me the way I would talk to a French person. She gave me the rest of the instructions and I pretended to understand, though they meant almost nothing to me. All I kept thinking was what funny sounds they were to be emerging from such an elegantlooking woman. As I went out the door she called out, "Hit doan really matter anyhow cuz hit be's closed now." She really said hit, she really said be's.

  I said, "Pardon?"

  "Hit be's closed now. You kin look around the grounz if you woan, but you cain't go insod."

  I wint outsod thinking that Miss Hippy was goan be hard work. I walked around the square looking at the stores, most of them selling materials for a country club lifestyle. Handsome, well-dressed women bounded in and out. They were all tanned and rich-looking. On one of the corners was a bookstore with a magazine stand. I went in and looked around. At the magazine stand I picked up a Playboy and browsed through it. As one does. I was distressed to see that Playboy is now printed on that awful glossy paper that makes the pages stick together like wet paper towels. You can't flick through it anymore. You have to prise each page apart, like peeling paper off a stick of butter.

  Eventually I peeled my way to the main photo spread. It was of a naked paraplegic. I swear to God.

  She was sprawled-perhaps not the best choice of words in the context-in various poses on beds and divans, looking pert and indisputably attractive, but with satiny material draped artfully over her presumably withered legs. Now is it me, or does that seem just a little bit strange?

  Clearly Playboy had lost its way, and this made me feel old and sad and foreign, because Playboy had been a cornerstone of American life for as long as I could remember. Every man and boy I knew read Playboy. Some men, like my dad, pretended not to. He used to get embarrassed if you caught him looking at it at the supermarket, and would pretend that he was really looking for Better Homes and Gardens or something. But he read it. He even had a little stash of men's magazines in an old hatbox at the back of his clothes closet. Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about. Once in a while we would swap our dads' magazines among ourselves and then imagine their perplexity when they went to the closet and found that instead of last month's issue of Gent they now possessed a two-year-old copy of Nugget and, as a bonus, a paperback book called Ranchhouse Lust. You could do this knowing that your dad would never say a word to you about it. All that would happen would be that the next time you went back the stash would be in a different place. I don't know whether women in the fifties didn't sleep with their husbands or what, but this dedication to girlie magazines was pretty well universal. I think it may have had something to do with the war.

  The magazines our fathers read had names like Dude and Swell and the women in them were unappealing, with breasts like deflated footballs and hips of abundant fleshiness. The women in Playboy were young and pretty. They didn't look like somebody you'd meet on shore leave. Beyond the incalculable public service Playboy performed by printing pictures of attractive naked women was the way it offered a whole attendant lifestyle. It was like a monthly manual telling you how to live, how to play the stock market and buy a hi-fi and mix sophisticated cocktails and intoxicate women with your wit and sense of style. Growing up in Iowa, you could use help with such matters.

  I used to read every issue from cover to cover, even the postal regulations at the bottom of the table of contents page. We all did. Hugh Hefner was a hero to all of us. Looking back now, I can hardly believe it because really-let's be frank-Hugh Hefner has always been kind of an asshole. I mean honestly, if you had all that money, would you want a huge circular bed and to spend your life in a silk dressing gown and carpet slippers? Would you want to fill a wing of your house with the sort of girls who would be happy to engage in pillow fights in the nude and wouldn't mind you taking pictures of them while so occupied for publication in a national magazine? Would you want to come downstairs of an evening and find Buddy Hackett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joey Bishop standing around the piano in your living room? Do I hear a chorus of "Shit, no's" out there? Yet I bought it whole. We all did.

  Playboy was like an older brother to my generation. And over the years, just like an older brother, it had changed. It had had a couple of financial reversals, a little problem with gambling, and had eventually moved out to the coast. Just like real brothers do. We had lost touch. I hadn't really thought about it for years. And then here suddenly, in Oxford, Mississippi, of all places, who should I run into but Playboy magazine. It was exactly like seeing an old high-school hero and discovering that he was bald and boring and still wearing those lurid V-neck sweaters and shiny black shoes with gold braid that you thought were so neat in about 1961. It was a shock to realize that both Playboy and I were a lot older than I had thought and that we had nothing in common anymore.

  Sadly I returned the Playboy to the rack and realized it would be a long time well, thirty days anyway-before I picked up another one.

  I looked at the other magazines. There were at least zoo of them, but they all had titles like Machine Gun Collector, Obese Bride, Christian Woodworker, Home Surgery Digest. There was nothing for a normal person, so I left.

  I drove out South Lamar Street towards Rowan Oak, having first made the square, following the tourist lady's instructions as best I could, but I couldn't for the life of me find it. To tell you the truth, this didn't disturb me a whole lot because I knew it was closed and in any case I have never managed to read a William Faulkner novel beyond about page 3 (roughly halfway through the first sentence), so I wasn't terribly interested in what his house looked like. At any rate, in driving around I came across the campus of the University of Mississippi and that was much more interesting. It was a handsome campus, full of fine buildings that looked like banks and courthouses. Long shadows fell across the lawns. Young people, all looking as healthy and as wholesome as a bottle of milk, walked along with books tucked under their arms or sat at tables doing homework. At one table, a black student sat with white people. Things had clearly changed. It so happened that twenty-five years ago to the very week there had been a riot on this campus when a young black named James Meredith, escorted by 500 federal marshals, enrolled as a student at Ole Miss. The people of Oxford were so inflamed at the thought of having to share their campus with a Niggra boy that they wounded thirty of the marshals and killed two journalists. Many of the parents of these serene-looking students must have been among the rioters, hurling bricks and setting cars alight. Could that kind of hate have been extinguished in just one generation? It hardly seemed possible. But then it was impossible to imagine these tranquil students ever rioting over a matter of race. Come to that, it was impossible to imagine such a well-scrubbed, straight-arrow group of young people rioting over anythingexcept perhaps the number of chocolate chips in the dining hall cookies.

  I decided on an impulse to drive on to Tupelo, Elvis Presley's hometown, thirty-five miles to the east. It was a pleasant drive, with the sun low and the air warm. Black woods pressed in on the road from both sides. Here and there in clearings there were shacks, usually with large numbers of black youngsters in the yard, passing footballs or riding bikes. Occasionally there were also
nicer houses-white people's houses-with big station wagons standing in the driveways and a basketball hoop over the garage and large, well-mowed lawns. Often these houses were remarkably close-sometimes right next door-to a shack. You would never see that in the North. It struck me as notably ironic that Southerners could despise blacks so bitterly and yet live comfortably alongside them, while in the North people by and large did not mind blacks, even respected them as humans and wished them every success, just so long as they didn't have to mingle with them too freely.

  By the time I reached Tupelo it was dark. Tupelo was a bigger place than I had expected, but by now I was coming to expect things to be not like I expected them to be, if you see what I mean. It had a long, bright strip of shopping malls, motels and gas stations. Hungry and weary, I saw for the first time the virtue of these strips. Here it all was, laid out for you-a glittering array of establishments offering every possible human convenience, clean, comfortable, reliable, reasonably priced places where you could rest, eat, relax and re-equip with the minimum of physical and mental exertion. On top of all this they give you glasses of iced water and free second cups of coffee, not to mention free matchbooks and scented toothpicks wrapped in paper to cheer you on your way. What a wonderful country, I thought, as I sank gratefully into Tupelo's welcoming bosom.

  CHAPTER 7

  IN THE MORNING I went to the Elvis Presley birthplace. It was early, and I expected it to be closed, but it was open and there were already people there, taking photographs beside the house or waiting to file in at the front door. The house, tidy and white, stood in a patch of shade in a city park. It was amazingly compact, shaped like a shoebox, with just two rooms: a front room with a bed and dresser and a plain kitchen behind. But it looked comfortable and had a nice homey feel. It was certainly superior to most of the shacks I had seen along the highway. A pleasant lady with meaty arms sat in a chair and answered questions. She must get asked the same questions about a thousand times a day, but she didn't seem to mind. Of the dozen or so people there, I was the only one under the age of sixty. I'm not sure if this was because Elvis was so burned out by the end of his career that his fans were all old people or whether it is just that old people are the only ones with the time and inclination to visit the homes of dead celebrities.

  A path behind the house led to a gift shop where you could buy Elvis memorabilia-albums, badges, plates, posters. Everywhere you looked his handsome, boyish face was beaming down at you. I bought two postcards and six books of matches, which I later discovered, with a strange sense of relief, I had lost somewhere. There was a visitors' book by the door. All the visitors carne from towns with nowhere names like Coleslaw, Indiana; Dead Squaw, Oklahoma; Frigid, Minnesota; Dry Heaves, New Mexico; Colostomy, Montana. The book had a column for remarks. Reading down the list I saw, "Nice," "Real nice," "Very nice," "Nice." Such eloquence. I turned back to an earlier page.

  One visitor had misunderstood the intention of the remarks column and had written, "Visit." Every other visitor on that page and the facing page had written, "Visit," "Visit," "Re-visit," "Visit" until someone had turned the page and they got back on the right track.

  The Elvis Presley house is in Elvis Presley Park on Elvis Presley Drive, just off the Elvis Presley Memorial Highway. You may gather from this that Tupelo is proud of its most famous native son.

  But it hadn't done anything tacky to exploit his fame, and you had to admire it for that. There weren't scores of gift shops and wax museums and souvenir emporia all trying to make a quick killing from Presley's fading fame, just a nice little house in a shady park. I was glad I had stopped.

  From Tupelo I drove due south towards Columbus, into a hot and rising sun. I saw my first cotton fields, dark and scrubby but with fluffs of real cotton poking out from every plant. The fields were surprisingly small. In the Midwest you get used to seeing farms that sweep away to the horizon; here they were the size of a couple of vegetable patches. There were more shacks as well, a more or less continuous line of them along the highway. It was like driving through the world's roomiest slum.

  And these were real shacks. Some of them looked dangerously uninhabitable, with sagging roofs and walls that looked as if they had been cannonballed. Yet as you passed you would see someone lurking in the doorway, watching you. There were many roadside stores as well, more than you would have thought such a poor and scattered populace could support, and they all had big signs announcing a motley of commodities: GAS, FIREWORKS, FRIED CHICKEN, LIVE BAIT. I wondered just how hungry I would have to be to eat fried chicken prepared by a man who also dealt in live bait. All the stores had Coke machines and gas pumps out front, and almost all of them had rusting cars and assorted scrap scattered around the yard. It was impossible to tell if they were still solvent or not by their state of dereliction.

  Every once in a while I would come to a town, small and dusty, with loads of black people hanging around outside the stores and gas stations, doing nothing. That was the most arrest ing difference about the South-the number of black people everywhere. I shouldn't really have been surprised by it. Blacks make up 35 percent of the population in Mississippi and not much less in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. In some counties in the South, blacks outnumber whites by four to one. Yet until as recently as twenty-five years ago, in many of those counties not a single black person was registered to vote.

  With so much poverty everywhere, Columbus came as a welcome surprise. It was a splendid little city, hometown of Tennessee Williams, with a population of 30,000. During the Civil War it was briefly the state capital, and it still had some large antebellum homes lining the well-shaded road in from the highway. But the real jewel was its downtown, which seemed hardly to have changed since about 1955. Crenshaw's Barber Shop had a rotating pole out front and across the street was a genuine five-and-dime called McCrory's and on the corner was the Bank of Mississippi in an imposing building with a big clock hanging over the sidewalk. The county courthouse, city hall and post office were all handsome and imposing edifices but built to a small-town scale. The people looked prosperous. The first person I saw was an obviously well-educated black man in a three-piece suit carrying a Wall Street Journal. It was all deeply pleasing and encouraging. This was a first-rate town. Combine it with Pella's handsome square and you would almost have my long-sought Amalgam. I was beginning to realize that I was never going to find it in one place. I would have to collect it piecemeal-a courthouse here, a fire station there-and here I had found several pieces.

  I went for a cup of coffee in a hotel on Main Street and bought a copy of the local daily paper, the Commercial Dispatch ("Mississippi's Most Progressive Newspaper"). It was an old fashioned paper with a banner headline across eight columns on page one that said TAIWANESE BUSINESS

  GROUP TO VISIT GOLDEN TRIANGLE AREA, and beneath that a crop of related single-column subheadings all in different sizes, typefaces and degrees of coherence: Visitors Are Looking At Opportunities For Investment

  AS PART OF TRADE MISSION

  Group to Arrive in Golden Triangle Thursday

  STATE OFFICIALS COORDINATE VISIT

  All the stories inside suggested a city ruled by calmness and compassion: "Trinity Place Homemakers Give Elderly a Helping Hand," "Lamar Landfill Is Discussed," "Pickens School Budget Adopted." I read the police blotter. "During the past 24 hours," it said, "the Columbus Police Department had a total Of 34 activities." What a wonderful place-the police here didn't deal with crimes, they had activities. According to the blotter the most exciting of these activities had been arresting a man for driving on a suspended license. Elsewhere in the paper I discovered that in the past twenty-four hours six people had died-or had death activities, as the police blotter might have put it-and three births had been recorded. I developed an instant affection for the Commercial Dispatch (which I rechristened in my mind the Amalgam Commercial Dispatch) and for the town it served.

  I could live here, I thought. But then the waitress came over and said, "
Yew honestly a breast menu, honey?" and I realized that it was out of the question. I couldn't understand a word these people said to me. She might as well have addressed me in Dutch. It took many moments and much gesturing with a knife and fork to establish that what she had said to me was "Do you want to see a breakfast menu, honey?" In fact I had been hoping to see a lunch menu, but rather than spend the afternoon trying to convey this notion, I asked for a Coca-Cola, and was enormously relieved to find that this did not elicit any subsidiary questions.

  It isn't just the indistinctness with which Southerners speak that makes it so difficult to follow, it's also the slowness. This begins to get to you after a while. The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. Living there would drive me crazy. Slowly.

  Columbus is just inside the state boundary line and I found myself, twenty minutes after leaving town, in Alabama, heading for Tuscaloosa by way of Ethelsville, Coal Fire and Reform. A sign by the highway said, DON'T LITTER. KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. "OK, I the will," I replied cheerfully.

  I put the radio on. I had been listening to it a lot in the last couple of days, hoping to be entertained by backward and twangy radio stations playing songs by artists with names like Hank Wanker and Brenda Buns. This is the way it always used to be. My brother, who was something of a scientific wizard, once built a shortwave radio from old baked-bean cans and that sort of thing, and late at night when we were supposed to be asleep he would lie in bed in the dark twiddling his knob (so to speak), searching for distant stations. Often he would pick up stations from the South. They would always be manned by professional hillbillies playing twangy music. The stations were always crackly and remote, as if the broadcasts were being beamed to us from another planet. But here now there were hardly any hillbilly-sounding people. In fact, there were hardly any Southern accents at all. All the disc jockeys sounded as if they came from Ohio.