Love in the Driest Season Page 2

  We lived in Lexington, a community of about two thousand, and later outside the larger town of Starkville, eighty miles east, where we raised sheep and cows. My father, Duane, was the local assistant county agent working his way up in the Cooperative Extension Service, a state and federal agency that helped farmers with crop and livestock problems. My mother, Elizabeth, whom everyone called Betty, played piano or organ in the Southern Baptist church. My older brother, Duane junior, whom everyone called Shane, and I would sometimes tag along with my father in his pickup truck as he went from farm to farm, turning from the narrow paved highways to gravel roads, the long trails of red and brown dust swirling out behind us.

  Late at night on our small farm, I would curl beneath my sheets to listen to the train whistle blow for the clearing. I would sneak outside and watch it pass in front of our house in the moonlight. I stood in the yard, dew soaking my feet, and looked up past the oaks and pines to the stars above, feeling the earth rumble with the train’s passing. I loved the place at such moments, I truly did. The sway of the trees and the whisper of the wind created a language all their own, and the night seemed warm and beautiful and secret.

  On the long summer days and endless evenings, on rainy winter afternoons, with nowhere to go and not much to do, I began to lose myself in books and stories, imagining a world far from our sleepy pastures. I would start turning the pages and our house would fade away, replaced by another world that came from nowhere. Before I was thirteen, I read Treasure Island and Huck Finn and all of the Hardy Boys books and the Old Testament (when I was bored in church, which little boys often are) and Lord of the Rings and things that were way over my head, including Ernest Hemingway and Papillon, the memoirs of Henri Charrière, a French inmate who escaped from Devil’s Island.

  Those worlds seemed as real and important as anything going on in our little town—and a lot more exciting. I longed not just to watch the train go by our house, but to catch an armload of the next freight train running and ride it out of there, traveling to some of the places I read about. Then I would go sit on the railroad tracks and wonder what the real fairy tale was. For at least 150 years, with the exception of one or two great-aunts, everyone in my family had been a farmer in rural Mississippi.

  But an era was coming to an end, and even the Magnolia State’s “closed society,” as one landmark book described it, was finally opening itself to the larger world. As the calendar pages fell and the years turned into the late 1970s, the Deep South’s more vicious forms of racism began to ebb. The racial confrontations that roiled the country moved to the urban North. With the civil rights crusades fading into memory, with southern apartheid at least officially dismantled, small-town black and white teenagers in Mississippi began to try something none of our ancestors had—to grow up together. It was painful, it was odd, and sometimes it was surreal.

  The most bizarre example of the latter could be found on the college football field, the Deep South’s Saturday afternoon altar. In the 1970s, the University of Mississippi’s football team was integrated, but the school still proudly went by the nickname of “Ole Miss” (the phrase slaves used for the plantation owner’s wife in the antebellum days—as opposed to his daughter, who would be the “young miss”). The school’s teams were called the Rebels, a reference to Confederate soldiers. That moniker, selected in the 1930s, came into play when the student body’s other popular choice of the era, the Ole Massas (as in the slaves’ name for the plantation owner), proved to be something of a tongue twister: the Ole Miss Ole Massas.

  Nearly half a century later, a football game in Oxford looked like this: A black descendant of slaves with “Ole Miss” written on his helmet would score a touchdown for the Rebels. The lily-white school band would burst into “Dixie,” the battle song of the Confederacy. Thirty thousand white fans would start waving the red and blue Confederate banner, the battle flag beloved by the Ku Klux Klan. And nobody acted like we all needed to be committed.

  It could be profoundly weird off the field too. My family and our kind didn’t care for Ole Miss (we were Mississippi State fans, a far more blue-collar crowd that rang cowbells after touchdowns), but in elementary and high school my parents scraped together the dollars to send me to one of the “private” all-white academies set up after integration, the last-ditch creation of the White Citizens’ Councils. The irony was in the music we played at our all-white homecoming dance: Earth, Wind and Fire; Kool and the Gang; Rick James; the Gap Band. The most popular comedian, with no one in second place, was Richard Pryor. When I took to the football field on Friday nights, I wore a bandana under my helmet, like J. C. Watts, the star Oklahoma quarterback, and a pair of wristbands emblazoned with number 22, which I had cadged from my hero, a Mississippi State wingback named Danny Knight. Watts and Knight were black, I idolized them both, and neither could have come to see me play because the only black person allowed on our school grounds was the janitor.

  After school, I worked in a grocery store called Market Basket, stocking shelves and carting out groceries, and it was one such working afternoon that finally opened my eyes and ended my youthful career as someone who tossed off racial epithets. I was stocking shelves with a guy named Theron Lawrence, a student at the public high school. Theron was black, older, and infinitely cooler than I had any hope of being. We decided to get a Coke, punch out on the time clock, and take one of our allotted fifteen-minute breaks. It turned out we had both seen the horror movie Alien the previous weekend. We were doing what teenage guys do, talking it up, laughing, retelling the scary stuff, when I brought up the part in which actor Yaphet Kotto slugged the creature.

  “Boy, did the nigger knock the shit outta ’im or what?” I chortled.

  Theron’s laughter stopped.

  I was aghast. You were supposed to use the N word only among white people. Jesus, but I knew that. Theron looked down for a minute, then glanced up at the clock. “Looks like break time about through,” he said, standing, and then he was gone.

  Sitting in that chair, my blue store apron on and a stupid look on my face, I think I understood for the first time that the word I used had said nothing about Theron, about the actor, or even about black people in general. It said boatloads, however, about me. And I didn’t like what that said at all, because I liked Theron. I thought of him as my friend. I liked bagging groceries for Mary Banks, the store’s chief clerk. She was funny, warm, and personable in the way that southern women are. She called me “honey” or “sugar” (pronounced “shugah”). And yet she was black, and that meant a whole raft of things that existed in a universe parallel to my own, none of which I was supposed to consider good or admirable.

  When I put down my adventure stories and started reading about my home state, books by William Faulkner and Richard Wright and Eudora Welty and Willie Morris, I began to get a sense of where I was. It would eventually form one of the central lessons of my personal and professional life: I had been raised in the heart of the most racist state in America, and as a child, I had accepted the perverse as normal. This is not a happy thing to learn about yourself or about the place where you grow up.

  So while Mississippi was changing, I was too, and in ways I couldn’t always name. The small-town lethargy, the religious hypocrisy, the racial chasms and complaints, the numbing poverty—all of this was home, and it came to weigh on me a great deal. I began to drive my beat-up car around late at night, down little country highways and dirt roads and back down shuttered Main Street, and nothing had changed except the night was an hour older, and I would wonder if I was ever going to go anywhere or do anything.

  But fate is sometimes kind, and I had the good fortune to meet Willie Morris, the famous Mississippi author, at a college baseball game. He was the first person I ever met who wrote books for a living, and he had made a career for himself far outside the state’s borders. I thought that was the summit of ambition. I told him I would like to write and travel as well. He and a professor named Tommy Miller steered me to a job a
t the Oxford Eagle, the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi (circulation 2,500). I covered high school sports, murders, child abuse cases, city council meetings, factory layoffs, local elections, and a death penalty trial. I investigated a murder-suicide in a little town called Water Valley with such vigor that Yalobusha County sheriff Lloyd Defer tipped back his hat and interrupted me to ask, “Son, what kinda flesh-eating ghoul are ya tryin’ to be?”

  When I wasn’t working, I was taking classes at Ole Miss on a scholarship. (They had the state’s best English program, no matter what I thought about their symbolism, and out-of-state tuition was a number beyond my imagination.) At graduation, I was named the university’s most outstanding journalism student. The stories I wrote for the Eagle had won all the regional awards for which they were eligible. I had job offers from something like a dozen newspapers.

  It wasn’t difficult to choose—I picked the one farthest from home. This turned out to be Florida Today, a little daily on Florida’s east coast. I worked all the time at my new job, seven days a week, and moved from that paper to Gannett’s national wire service to the Miami Herald to the Detroit Free Press, all in three years. When I wasn’t interviewing people, I was on my motorcycle, or climbing mountains out West, or dancing at clubs until four in the morning. I let my hair grow out into a ponytail. I got an earring, a couple of tattoos, and a new set of clothes. My accent faded. I was out of Mississippi and had my foot flat on the gas pedal, heading anywhere at a hundred miles an hour.

  2

  LET’S STAY TOGETHER

  ALL ESCAPE PLANS have a flaw, and mine was so totally conventional, so boring, that I never saw it coming. I fell in love with the girl next door.

  It happened when I was living in a loft in downtown Detroit. The six-story building was an old warehouse. It housed a Greek pizzeria on the first floor, a small dance club on the second, and four more floors of unvarnished lofts. A noisy college student lived in the loft next door to mine on the fifth floor for a time; when he moved out, I posted a note on the employee bulletin board at the Free Press, mentioning that an apartment was available close to work.

  No one responded for several days. Then a clerk in the paper’s library whom I knew slightly asked if she could take a look during lunch hour.

  “I just want to see if it’s someplace better than where I’m staying now,” Vita Gasaway explained.

  She was a widow, outgoing and funny, a five-foot-two black woman who exuded a certain Motown attitude just walking down the street. She had long braids, pride in her dark complexion, and an easy, infectious laugh. She was eleven years older than me and had come of age in Detroit in the 1960s, when some of the city’s musically inclined black teenagers were revolutionizing popular music. Most any Saturday you could go to the Motown Revue at the Fox Theater, right there on Woodward, and see Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Temps, the Four Tops, and, best of all, Marvin Gaye. These many years later, she was bemused by the fact that she lived next door to a white boy from Mississippi. We were friends for two years before we thought of dating. She worked almost more hours than I did—as a paralegal by day, and at the Free Press library in the evenings. One Saturday night in the summer, when it was too hot to sleep, I pulled an old chair out on my fire escape. I saw her sitting at her window, taking the breeze too. Her loft had no fire escape, and thus no way to sit outside.

  I waved to get her attention.

  “I’m not trying to be cute,” I said, “but do you want a drink? It’s cooler out here.”

  “Just what a girl needs,” she said. “A fresh breeze and a glass of wine.”

  She came over, and I helped her step out of the huge, wide windows onto the steel fire escape. There were crowds of people in the parking lots and streets below, streaming out of the clubs and bars. The lights of the Renaissance Center spiraled up sixty or seventy floors a few blocks over. The Detroit River lay just beyond it. The lights of Windsor winked from across the water.

  “This isn’t bad at all,” she said, and I relaxed, leaning against the rail.

  It became a steady date. In the summers, we would pull a couple of old chairs out there, cook hamburgers on a diminutive grill, sip wine, and watch the people below. In Michigan’s bitterly cold winters, we rented movies on Sunday afternoons and hooted at the screen, throwing popcorn at bad dialogue. In between, we took the motorcycle for afternoon rides to Ann Arbor. There was a jazz dive called Bo-Macs a few blocks from our lofts, a place where I ran a tab. Vita would come in there on a Friday evening, wearing a killer red dress, her braids falling down her back, and say, “Hey, baby love,” in such a way that I would nearly forget my name.

  I listened as she told me her family history, which also had its roots in the Deep South. Her father, Phil Griffin, grew up in south Alabama, a postage stamp of a place called Enterprise. There was not much of what you might call upward mobility for a black man in those days. So Phil, already in his twenties when the Depression hit, joined the Great Migration of rural blacks to the urban north. Married, with three children and more on the way, he moved to Cincinnati and then to River Rouge, a suburb of Detroit, before moving into the city proper. He was a painter of cars at a time when almost every other automobile manufactured anywhere in the world came out of Detroit, and he moved his family from house to house as his salary improved. His wife, Ida Helen, was a seamstress of leather covers for car seats and then of softer fabrics for sofa cushions. They had fish fries on Friday evenings, played cards with friends, and kept a small vegetable garden in the backyard.

  When Vita was a little girl, they would make the meandering trip down south each summer to visit relatives. Once across the Mason-Dixon, her father would sometimes stop the car when he saw black prisoners on a chain gang. He would offer cigarettes to the boss man, asking that they be distributed to the inmates. He would urge his children to smile and wave at the hammer swingers, offering them some small moment of kindness. He told his children of the injustice that led many of the men to be in stripes. These roadside courtesies ended abruptly at the Mississippi state line. In fact, Phil Griffin refused to stop his car in the Magnolia State at all.

  “You had to pee in Memphis and hold it all the way through Mississippi,” Vita remembered. “That place was so bad that, as a black person from Detroit, you were actually grateful to get to Alabama.”

  It would occur to me, sitting there beside her, that she had been scared of all the people I had grown up with and loved. It was an unpleasant sensation, but we came to share an unspoken understanding that the past did not have to dictate the future. We let our relationship develop—in fits and starts, with breakups and reunions—like most any other couple. Of course, some people gave me grief for dating a black woman—did I have some sort of Deep South fetish? Was I trying to prove something? This bothered me a great deal at first, but I learned to ignore it. Once people know you’re from Mississippi, I discovered, they tend to place you in a box. (The number one thing people have said to me at dinner parties all over the world: “You don’t look/act/sound like you’re from Mississippi.” It’s as if, even in Beirut, people expect me to walk around barefoot in overalls, whistling “Dixie.”) Such generalizations lead to misunderstandings, because most people not from the Deep South assume that white and black cultures there are polar opposites, which is inaccurate. Things were perverse for more than three centuries, they were violent and disturbed, but daily life among whites and blacks was and is not in diametrical opposition. In fact, it seemed to me there was a distinct cultural overlap between white and black rural southerners, from the foods they ate to what they did for a living (farm), the land they worked, and the ponds they fished—even to a type of personal warmth that other people in the nation simply didn’t share. Exhibit A in this theory is Bill Clinton, a small-town Arkansas boy affectionately (or sardonically) referred to by black comedians, and even Toni Morrison, as the “first black president.” He’s even in the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.

  I had never
really thought about this before I moved to Detroit. But the longer I dated Vita, the clearer it became that I often had more in common with her and many of Detroit’s working-class black residents than I did with most of Michigan’s white folks. What they called soul food in Detroit, for example, collard greens and black-eyed peas and corn bread and baby-back ribs and fried chicken, was the same fare I had grown up on. (The last meal my grandmother cooked for me was pork neck bones and collards; the first dinner I ate at Vita’s mother’s house was fried catfish and collards.) The sense of humor was similar, as was the pattern and pace of the spoken language, something more languid and indirect and expansive than the clipped English of many of my white compadres. Baptist was the most common religious affiliation, for better or worse. And I came to notice that black people (particularly those of a certain age) tended to nod or say hello or somehow acknowledge one another in passing, just the same as white rural southerners did. Northern urban whites most certainly did not. In high school, I had worked at our small-town radio station on Sunday mornings, running the control board for black gospel groups who would fill the studio with terrific live music. When I went to church with Vita at Third New Hope Baptist in Detroit, almost always the only white face in the crowd, I didn’t feel as out of place as I might have looked. I already knew almost all of the songs, the arrangements, and the style of preaching.