by Matt Weiland
The doctors gave up on my chances but I had excellent medical care and somehow I survived. In my town, Oxford, you have brilliant gentle folks all around you, and fast friends, along with the sweet beauty of big oaks, magnolias, the mansions on Lamar Street, and broad avenues hugged by sycamores, river birches, dogwoods, Japanese maples, hickories, poplars, and Bradford pear trees, those of the famous chandelier look. Of course I’ve left out a horde of protesting plants—ash, pecans, and giant pines.
I hesitate writing this because our town is growing too fast and slick for us geezers, who puke at almost everything new and at the robotic developments whacking down much of our greenscape. McMansions close together called Wellfleet or something, for godsake, phony “Suthren” culture everywhere. I’ve had a home in Oxford for twenty-five years and do not encourage anybody to come here. Let them think that we are vicious and tacky racists with nothing to show for our culture but Elvis and the great bluesmen of the Delta, which is just an hour from here. How’s this?—there’s even a treeless tract of an enclave with a writers’ theme. It’s got a Faulkner, Welty, Tennessee Williams, Larry Brown, and, yes, a Barry Hannah house. Do I have legal recourse? I don’t know, I’ve been so disgusted by this shithead development that I haven’t explored the law. The company is flattering, the actuality snake oil and carpetbagging scum. Or charm, as you wish.
I fished in Larry Brown’s lake, which had good crappie, Florida bass, and catfish in it. (Brown’s posthumously published novel is called The Miracle of Catfish.) We chatted many times on his pier. Larry was great with his hands. He was finishing a solar-powered writing cabin on the south side of the lake when death by heart attack took him, a young fifty-three years of age. As Charles Bukowski says in one of his poems, “When death comes for him / It ought to be ashamed.” From almost zero resources except the books his mother got him at the lending library in Memphis and Yocona and Tula, Larry made himself a brilliant artist who knew his time would be short, with heart disease on his father’s side killing his pa at forty-nine, I think. His father was also a haunted WWII vet, bad to drink. Larry had 120 rejections before the Mississippi Review, a precious organ out of Southern Mississippi University, guided by Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry, took a short story. Then Shannon Ravenel of Algonquin Books discovered him and served as his exquisite editor and publisher in that fine house begun by Louis Rubin in North Carolina.
Larry was the kind of scrappy and bright Lafayette County denizen that brought me back to my home state and Oxford twenty-five years ago, and though I’ve been several other places—Montana, Iowa, etc.—to make a living, I’ve known where my true home was since one night in 1982 in the Hoka Theater and Cafe, where you could watch movies as you ate delicious sandwiches and salads. It was an old warehouse with a tin roof. A huge storm suddenly boiled up, the rain coming thick and heavy on the tin roof. The best song in the world to me. Outdoors the raging weather, King Lear raving mad and walking the heath out there while you’re dry, warm, safe. I’m home, baby, my heart said. The Hoka was operated by my friend of equal age, Ron Shapiro, a Jew from St. Louis who may come nearer to the example of Christ than any Christian I know. He exults in the happiness of others, and travels widely on a constant mission to find love and music. I believe the Hoka was the only bohemian/hippie eatery/moviehouse in Mississippi.
The Hoka was where I heard my first reggae, Bob Marley, and talked through the night to writers Willie Morris and his guests William Styron and David Halberstam (RIP to all three gentlemen), and historians, painters, and sculptors, with our whiskey brown bagged and sometimes taken in our good coffee. It’s where I met Susan, my wife of twenty-one years now, blond and handsome like Grace Kelly, by god. I was coming down from a two-week drunk that began on the train to New Orleans and the Tulane/ Ole Miss game, which I never saw, winding up on the eastern shore of Mobile around Magnolia Springs, from which I was driven some eight hours to Oxford by a loyal old student from my U of Alabama days. I was wearing bathing trunks and a Harris tweed jacket with tennis shoes. Maybe my legs were good but I know they were skinny. I was blithely eating salad with my hands when I saw her. I proposed immediately on conditions she have a boat and a covered garage. Jim Dees, a friend staunchly for twenty-five years now, interceded for me, telling Susan I was a really good fellow and not always like this.
See? That’s Mississippi—helpers and gracious pals and gals.
This is what heaven is, and you can get through poverty and barely middle-class funds with this help. People love you and stick, baby.
Oxford has a cosmopolitan population and an Episcopal tolerance. Laissez-faire and roulez les bons temps, both. Folks leave you alone or gather quickly to help you or engage in meaningful conversation. The university helps this condition, but the homefolks of the town have their own culture, flowing naturally from each to each as does the help of each other and the “much obliged” mode runs the rural South. You receive constant aid and cheer from easygoing well-wishers all over the place, white and black and international. In fact, for Oxford’s 150-year celebration I wrote a poem in which I called the place the “United Nations with catfish on its breath.”
Catfish is a major industry throughout Mississippi, especially since cotton went bust along with much private farming. This is a sad development in the Delta, which looks like Egypt after a neutron bomb. Many shut-up stores and mansions all over, all gone with a newer wind. Casinos held the local employment somewhat, but not enough. Viking Range Corporation has taken over the chore of revitalizing a whole big town, Greenwood. They’ve brought in a fine hotel, a bookstore, and a bakery in the high-end range. Morgan Freeman, the brilliant actor, lives in Charlestown and owns restaurants and a blues club called Ground Zero in Clarksdale, along with his pal Bill Luckett. Their philanthropy is staggering. Freeman and his wife have given air conditioners to tropically hot schools, large gifts to hospitals, and have sponsored wonderful programs in the arts all over the Delta. A pilot and a master sailor in addition to his acting, Freeman is a genius who would stand an excellent chance of being governor of Mississippi, although when I queried him on this topic he said he had zero ambitions that way.
But Mississippi has changed hugely. Its aristocrats are black—Freeman, B.B. King of Indianola, the late Muddy Waters, and the others who picked up a guitar and sang, rocking the Delta, Memphis, then the world.
It is the green and the water that I recall from having grown up in this state that always seems to need rescuing from something—ice storms, teen pregnancy, illiteracy, black-on-black murder, along with the usual interracial atrocities and appalling cruelties matching those of every other state. My youth was blessed by visits to my cousins, aunt, and uncles at Roosevelt State Park in Scott County, about mid-state, where the CCC and WPA crews of the Roosevelt era had made cabins, roads, a big lodge with dinery and kitchens, and clearings for campers around the exquisite lush banks and pebbled spillways full of freshwater mussels and beavers. Roosevelt State Park and its lake promised a child the world as I knew it, the world at its best. Big bass and bluegill filled the water, and fishing as you waded in the cool water was an unforgettable ecstasy. My Uncle Slim owned the family record, I believe, with a seven- or eight-pound black bass. He fished all his life, as I have. If you got hot, you took to the clear cool water, diving off the many piers or off the low or ten-foot-high spring boards. My cousin Ted was an expert diver and swimmer. I was adequate. He could bop to the jukebox in the lodge at age nine when rock and roll was breaking out—the Coasters, Little Anthony, Fats Domino, then Elvis in ‘56. Old military armaments marked one area of the park, tanks and howitzers and a .20 caliber cannon with shield. You got in these machines and relived the mythology of the War, in which we lost Uncle Bootsy in a B-24 making toward Rommel in North Africa. Bootsy went MIA—the hardest cruelty on loved ones—and I will never forget my mother’s sobbing for years over her handsome baby brother, a captain at twenty-three. But we kids were ready to whip the Nazis, Japs, or whoever all over ag
ain inside those tanks and behind the artillery pieces in Roosevelt Park. My Aunt Bertha set a fine table of fish or game for Slim and her four boys. She was a woman of beauty and intelligence, but also blessed with the rare gift of silence until something important must be said.
Yes, we were living in apartheid with blacks, nearly half the population of the state then, before the exodus up North or to Los Angeles for jobs and better treatment. But we young were oblivious, thinking the black folks were happy with their lot. Listen to their happy music on the jukebox! we thought. And our “maid” seemed mostly happy, as she cooked, ironed, and ran the place, truly.
Then came the atrocities of the Klan when we were in late high school and college. My parents were gentle segregationists, giving much in food and Christmas and Thanksgiving baskets to poor blacks. But then a Jewish client of my father, a life insurance salesman, was the near victim of a bomb on his porch one night. The perpetrators were a man and woman who the FBI and Meridian police shot dead. The woman had been a lovely classmate of mine at Mississippi College, a girl named Cathy with gorgeous legs, from circus people in Miami. She was under the sway of a deeply racist professor at the college, Dr. Caskey, who was our neighbor in Clinton. She taught at an elementary school in Jackson, and indeed taught my niece there. On the nights when her husband was away she rode with the Klan.
I read the newspaper account and could not believe it. I had wanted her deeply but my shyness kept me from saying a word to her. She was a campus beauty.
Later, 1964, came the three civil rights boys killed by the Klan with the collusion of the Philadelphia, Mississippi, police. I wanted out of this stinking, nasty, cowardly state, with its seg scoundrel of a governor, Ross Barnett, who caused the 1962 Ole Miss riot. All the white Baptists backed him or stayed mute. I went off to grad school with a bitter vow never to come near this rot again. (Some of the old race killers are just now being retried and sent to prison.)
But Oxford, the rolling hills, the verdant explosions of everything near, its nearby waters—rivers and inland seas—drew me back. I’m a man happy in his home. My wife and I will be buried in pine boxes here in the cemetery where lies William Faulkner and many of our older friends. I’m lucky in my work, too. Writing books seems a redundant pointless chore when I’m low or depressed. But then I live a few years among my friends old and new here, and I go back to the notebooks and the typewriter as happy about the prospect as I was at age eighteen.
MISSOURI
CAPITAL Jefferson City
ENTERED UNION 1821 (24th)
ORIGIN OF NAME Named after the Missouri tribe whose name means “town of the large canoes”
NICKNAME Show-me State
MOTTO Salus populi suprema lex esto (“The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law”)
RESIDENTS Missourian
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 9
STATE FLOWER hawthorn
STATE BIRD bluebird
STATE TREE flowering dogwood
STATE SONG “Missouri Waltz”
LAND AREA 68,886sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Miller Co., 20 mi. SW of Jefferson City
POPULATION 5,800,310
WHITE 84.9%
BLACK 11.2%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.4%
ASIAN 1.1%
HISPANIC/LATINO 2.1%
UNDER 18 25.5%
65 AND OVER 13.5%
MEDIAN AGE 36.1
MISSOURI
Jacki Lyden
I first came to St. Louis in 1985, as a young NPR reporter, there to chronicle the city’s struggle to stagger back to life. Union Station, a ninety-year-old masterpiece that local residents claimed saw more traffic during WWII than Kennedy Airport on any given day, had just been refurbished for $176 million. An enterprising loft developer, Leon Strauss of the Pantheon Corporation, complained to me in a story I did that “the sense of abandonment in St. Louis is so profound, so uniquely ‘St. Louisian,’ that we’re able to take over 100 acres of the Central West End without a single newspaper or radio station asking a question about it.” Indeed, when Pantheon held a party to open its lofts, which I attended, almost no one came, despite panoramic views of the Mississippi and prices of $625 a month for 1,000 square feet.
Once the fourth-largest city in the United States, St. Louis was a ghost of its former glory. It was as if all the descendants of its pioneers had kept going west, no longer full of adventure but frightened urban refugees, turning their backs on the city as fast as their forebears had come. On the north side of the city, which was mostly black, there were fifteen thousand public housing units for fifty thousand people who couldn’t afford rent or mortgages. Only the architectural grand dames were left to mourn the suburban flight: Union Station, the Forest Park hotel, and the beaux-arts glory of the West End, and its grand, founding-family mansions. These places were the last homage to the era of the steamboat, the fur traders, and the explorers. Elsewhere the city was ghostly, and the spookiness was captured at the time by the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, whose photos showed a forlorn St. Louis, gray and devoid of hope, with a lone inhabitant here and there skulking outside a shuttered bar. Though the soaring Saarinen arch at the western edge of the Mississippi River was beautiful, a 630-foot stainless steel masterpiece, it seemed like a mocking tombstone for a great but dead city, like Carthage.
Since then, refugees of religious and ethnic persecution have helped make St. Louis grow again, just as they did in the nineteenth century. Meet the Bosnian refugees, the biggest wave of immigrants to the city since the Italians came in the early part of the twentieth century. St. Louis is now home to approximately fifty thousand Bosnians—the biggest Bosnian population outside Bosnia itself. Most of them arrived between 1997 and 2003—the period of the official U.S. Bosnian resettlement program. That was part of an era when the State Department was aggressive about relocating war refugees, unlike today, when they are mired in red tape and sandbagged by the Department of Homeland Security. Bosnian Muslims, who had been uprooted by ethnic cleansing in the Balkan war, filed affidavits to sponsor friends and relatives. Through enterprise and pluck, they made the city their own. St. Louis is their unofficial capital, and their unofficial spokesman is named Sukrija “Suki” Dzidzovic. He is the St. Louis pioneer of today, a link to the era of resourcefulness and possibility. It’s a pity he didn’t arrive by raft, like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. But like Samuel Clemens, that son of the Mississippi, Suki is a newspaper man.
I went back to St. Louis last fall to meet him. When he picked me up at the St. Louis airport, I tried to open with a few pleasantries about my early trips to St. Louis and what a sad place it was back then. He cut me off.
“My life is not so simple as yours,” he said, before I’d even uncapped a pen and pulled out a notebook. We were in his SUV, which doubles as a communication center: the Dell laptop with Internet card that lets him follow news articles from Bosnia on the go. He and his wife Mirsada can edit their newspaper while driving, and they do.
Suki, as everyone calls him, is a former captain in the Yugoslav Peoples Army under Tito. He was born in 1957 in a village on the Adriatic coast, and he grew up in Sarajevo. It was never easy for Muslims to rise as officers in Tito’s army, or gain entry into the military school which honed him. He is a lean and handsome man, graying and finely featured with a barely contained energy, and it is easy to imagine him in command. In fact, it is hard to imagine him not in command.
Suki is the founder and publisher ofSabah, the only Bosnian newspaper printed outside of Bosnia in the world. Or so Suki claims. He speaks with the confidence of Dale Carnegie, Charles Atlas, and Donald Trump. By all accounts his newspaper is the voice of the 300,000-strong Bosnian diaspora in America. “Sabah” means dawn, and for Suki, life has dawned again. He came to St. Louis in 2005, following other Bosnians. Missouri is his own private Manifest Destiny, and he intends to conquer it.
“My life has three distinct parts,” he said, veering out onto I-70. I searched for the seat belt as he
careened from lane to lane, smoking and taking phone calls and swearing at the GPS lady. “The first, special military prep school called Rajlovac, for the training of elite officers. I don’t like but 100 percent there is employed after graduating and they hate the Muslim officers. Second part, to Sarajevo. I was under siege in Sarajevo for three and one-half years. Third part of life, I am here, St. Louis. Write that. This is interesting for you.”
And then he floored it. He hates to go less than the speed limit. He’s been known to tempt cops, with some success, to give him tickets.
“I like to break the rules,” he says. “I feel bad when I comply with them, when things are too normal. This gonna show you what I mean. I was in D.C., speed limit is 60 mph. There was police car in middle lane and people in front of me didn’t like to pass him. I pass police car and look at him and he look at me. He put his lights on. My wife turned to me and said, ‘You are crazy’. I say, I am individual. Here is supposed to be country of individuals.”
Mirsada Dzidzovic, who has the dark look and sexy exoticism of a flamenco dancer, is Suki’s layout editor. They have also been married since 1977. In ten years of working on Sabah together, they’ve never missed a newspaper deadline. Their daughter Ertana is Sabah’s advertising manager; her husband is the sports editor.
Suki publishes 20,000 papers weekly. Ertana told me proudly: “Don’t think we are just 20,000 papers. It changes hands four times. That means it is read by 80,000 people.” They threw a huge party for the ten-year anniversary of the paper in September 2007 in St. Louis. The Bosnian ambassador in Washington attended. The president of Bosnia flew in from Sarajevo.
In 1851, St. Louis had more immigrants than any other city in the country. Some 43 percent of the city was foreign born. A woman I know named Anne Taussig, herself a fourth-generation St. Louisian whose great-grandfather came from Prague, read me the following statistic: “Between 1840 and 1860, the city recorded tenfold growth, from 16,000 to 160,000, as a result of its strategic position on the Mississippi. The newly built cross-country railroad added to the thousands.” In the end, of course, the railroads killed those wedding-cake paddle-wheelers. And though St. Louis put on a grand show with the World’s Fair of 1904, by the mid-twentieth century the city’s population had gone into freefall, sliding from being the fourth largest city in the United States to the eighteenth largest today.