Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  The first time we met, Joe said, in his coded way, “We get along, but we don’t talk.” He meant his father. He had paused. “I inherited all his personality traits. More than anyone else in the family, I’m like him.”

  Almost everyone in Oxford who has any connection with the university goes to Square Books—it’s probably the best-known meeting place in the immensely livable and attractive college town. The café and bookstore are on the square, opposite the courthouse that figures in so much of Faulkner’s fiction. It’s a short walk from the campus. Joe had never heard of Square Books, didn’t know where it was. We sat on the upstairs veranda. It was an afternoon in late April, and there was a soft breeze. The muscled, blocky man in the blue polo shirt and Tommy Hilfiger jeans kept looking down at his athletic shoes, kept moving his head and shoulders in a rocking motion, side to side, almost as if he were blind. There were names and numbers written in blue ballpoint ink across the back of his hands. The word “fat” was spelled in capital letters. Not far away was a bookcase devoted to works on race and Southern literature. There was a new one by Constance Baker Motley titled Equal Justice Under Law. His father’s picture was on the cover. There was another recent one, by Nadine Cohodas, entitled The Band Played Dixie: Race and the Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss. His father’s face was on that one, too.

  “The student newspaper called me up once,” Joe said. “They wanted to do a story. I said, ‘Give me a year and call me back.’ They won’t. I put them off on purpose.” He said that by his estimates about 40 percent of the students at Ole Miss “are just numbskulls, and the rest aren’t doing the work.”

  “They’re partying?”

  “Well, whatever. But I wouldn’t want my daughter to come here.”

  Two and a half years later, in the summer of 2001, when we agreed to meet at the bookstore again (we’d met elsewhere in the interim), Joe had turned thirty-three and was finishing his studies. (He was born in March 1968, the same year as Ty Ferrell, the same year that Joe’s dad got his law degree from Columbia and the same year that Billy Ferrell came back into office after his four-year interregnum.) Joe had not been back to Square Books since the spring of 1999, although he said he had gone out once or twice to eat at inexpensive Oxford restaurants. He was the father of a five-year-old daughter named Jasmine Victoria, who was living in Austin, Texas, with her mother. Joe’s talk could still lapse into a “That’s hard to say” or an “I don’t know” or just silence itself. And yet there seemed a willingness in him to try to say the truths of his life, if in code. He’d swing open the door to things—and then close it. “As you know, our family is plagued by a lack of normalness,” he said. He told several awkward and painful family stories—and yet there was a protectiveness there for his father and his family. It was clear that he would tolerate no disdain about his family from other people; if there was any disdaining, it would be his. Later, he asked quietly if some of the personal stories he had told about the family could be kept out of whatever I was writing. But he didn’t demand it.

  The divorced father was spending days and evenings in his small, cluttered apartment on Riverside Place, running figures and spreadsheets on a computer, while the TV played behind him. He would have it on all day, liked it for its white noise, the sense of company it gave. He said he had no real friends in town, although there were a few friends down in Jackson with whom he could still go out and have a beer now and then when he was visiting his father and stepmother. He didn’t appear to feel sorry for himself. Indeed, there seemed a lack of bitterness in him about anything—even though, it was true, he could flash with momentary anger about things that had happened to him in his life. Mostly, he seemed amused at how insane the world was. This was a few weeks before the September 11 terrorist attacks on America.

  His pattern was to rise about 9:30 A.M. His computer was against a wall in the dining room. He always made sure to tape Fox Morning News. He’d find out what was going on in the world and eat his breakfast and then get going on his keyboard. At 11 A.M., he’d pause in his calculations and spreadsheets to watch The Young and the Restless. Jerry Springer’s talk show came on at mid-day, and Joe would again turn around to watch “the part near the end when the Springer trailer trash starts yelling at each other. I always enjoy that.”

  What he missed was being able to exercise. It was the ongoing struggle with lupus, he said. Lupus is a disease that affects the skin and inflames the joints and often attacks other systems in the body. The illness causes a breakdown of the body’s immune system. “Your body thinks something’s inside. You never know. It ebbs and flows. It’s a chronic, invisible illness,” Joe said. His lupus had been diagnosed in his senior year at Harvard. He’d come down with a 104-degree temperature and had landed in the university hospital. A dozen years later, in Mississippi, he was still taking heavy doses of steroids to fight it. The old prep school and collegiate wrestler could no longer lift weights or go running. Even to jog half a mile through the streets of Oxford brought pain to his insteps. His stomach was getting large, and he hated that, because his athleticism had long been a part of who he was. As long as he got proper rest and didn’t overstress himself, the disease could be controlled, he said.

  In John Ed Bradley’s 1992 Esquire piece, published two years after Joe had finished Harvard, Joe had been quoted as saying: “I am fighting a fungal infection. Lupus destroys your organs, and there are immune implications. I always thought I’d make it, but the chances that I won’t are good. I did some research on the subject when others wouldn’t give me the truth.” He had paused and looked away and then said to the author, “I learned that only two of ten people who are treated with this infection live. The mortality rate is eighty percent.” Joe was living then in a garage apartment behind his father’s house in Jackson. He was working toward his MBA at Millsaps. His father had recently driven to Metairie, Louisiana, to spend a day with David Duke. They’d gotten their pictures taken together. The subject of the photo op had come up in the Esquire piece.

  “Yes, but only sitting down. I never would’ve had my picture made standing up with David Duke,” James Meredith said.

  “What’s the difference?” Bradley asked.

  “Authority, power, who’s in charge.”

  Later, when Duke was making his scorned bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Meredith suggested that he should run as Duke’s vice president.

  After he got his MBA, in the mid-nineties, Joe took a job at Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He got sick again. Was it the stress of the workplace, the stress of living at home? “Stress? I can’t really say. Was it stress? Mmm, that’s an interesting question,” Joe told me at dinner in Oxford, dragging out each word, sighing, head bopping.

  In the summer of 2001, the finance student at Ole Miss, older than most of his fellow grad students, impecunious, about to start his fourth year in town, said: “I have a high tolerance for pain.” It didn’t seem as if he was talking about lupus. That evening, as we ate, he said, “I have an on-off personality.” He was trying to explain how he’d once found the wherewithal to ask someone to marry him. He took three packets of sugar and placed them on the table in a diagonal. The first packet was real sugar. “Now this little white packet is the ultimate situation for Joe Meredith. It’s the highest spot in the grid. I’ve got a social life, I’ve even got a girlfriend. I’ve clicked it on.”

  The second packet was a blue packet of artificial sugar. “This Equal, this one’s in the middle. I opt for the work. The TV. It’s safe. I don’t go out, I don’t like it this way, but it’s okay. It’s a life.”

  The third packet was a pink packet of Sweet’n Low. “This is the bottom of the barrel,” he said. “You get up your nerve and go to a bar and say hi to somebody and get rejected. They look at you and say, ‘Who’s this loser?’ ” He laughed very loudly. A minute later: “You know, most people who’ve ever known me for years feel they’re lucky to get just a yes or no out of me.”

  He talked about a li
terature seminar in college. Every student was required to give a five-minute presentation about a short story. “What happened was that the teacher was so uncomfortable that I was so uncomfortable that he never called on me once. I went the whole term without presenting or speaking. He kept going around the room, skipping me. He knew. I read the material and never talked about it once. We had the exam. I got an A or an A-minus for the course.”

  He had lived in Eliot House at Harvard, which is one of the beautiful old residential dorms down by the river. What were his weekends like? “Kind of wandering around Cambridge by yourself. You could crash a party, but that’s terrible because then you’re just sitting by yourself.”

  After we had ordered and were waiting for our food (there had been the awful silence while he tried to pick something from the menu and while the waitress stood by with her pad), Joe spoke about a civil rights documentary he’d caught a few nights earlier on cable. He’d been channel surfing. It was late. There was his father on the screen. One part of the film concerned Meredith’s 1966 March Against Fear through Mississippi. Meredith had started out the march from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis on June 5. The first day, he walked twelve miles to the state border dividing Mississippi and Tennessee. The following day, he got sixteen miles into Mississippi before he was shot by a white man. A semireclusive Ole Miss grad student with a resonant name stood in the middle of his Oxford apartment and watched some grainy footage taken before he was born “where the police grab the guy out of the bushes. They ask if he did it to my father. The guy says no. The cops say, ‘Okay, why don’t you get in the car.’ I mean, they don’t cuff him or anything. They just ask him if he’d mind getting in the car. That’s what got me. Fair, huh? That’s America.” Joe guffawed.

  He said of his father, “He always has to start off by saying something like, ‘The truth is this.’ He’s driven by this overwhelming need to be ahead of Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King or whoever, and the only way he thinks he can do it is by saying absolutely what ‘the truth is.’ ” The words were tough, but the tone wasn’t. A few minutes later, in a similar vein: “My father has an overwhelming need to be famous and so will do whatever he thinks will provide that and get him attention—Jesse Helms, David Duke, you name it, even if it’s only for a day.”

  In the Esquire piece, Joe had been quoted as saying of his father’s effect on the family: “Silent, almost telepathic. He has had a great influence on me without being overbearing. He has never told me what to do. Everything I’ve ever done is because of his strength.”

  Joe said he was hoping to have the bulk of the research and writing done on his dissertation by the following spring. He wanted to leave Oxford and to win a tenure-track position on a business school faculty at a good university, preferably in Texas or Oklahoma, so that he could be close to his child. His dissertation had something to do with the corporate uses of derivatives to hedge energy price risk. It involved lots of math equations and a concept called “regression.” He had earned all A’s except for two B’s in grad school, he said, “and here’s a guy who never presents in a conference, never talks in class.” He said that the business school held graduate mixers in the Grove, but that he had almost never been able to go. “I want to go. It comes time, I just can’t leave my apartment.”

  On our way out of the restaurant that evening, Joe stopped to look at some mounted black-and-white photographs. One was of a rural lane, lined with trees and shrouded in fog. “It looks like Andover,” he said. He said he had been back to his Massachusetts boarding school just once since he graduated in 1986, to teach a summer course in precalculus. During our dinner he had talked—briefly—of how lonely he’d been at boarding school, even though his twin brother was also there. “Packages come, for a holiday or whatever, the other kids are opening them, and you got nothing.”

  Did his father and stepmother come to the graduation?

  “Yes.”

  How about Harvard?

  “No.” Then: “Maybe forty percent them, sixty percent me. I kept it from happening, basically. You could say I preempted it. Because I didn’t want to be hurt.”

  He had also talked—again, elliptically—of his real mom, Mary, who’d died when he and his twin were eleven.

  “What was she like?” I’d prompted.

  “Monster. Harsh,” he said, declining to go on.

  When we shook hands goodbye, I said I really couldn’t see much resemblance in personality between his father and him. Well, it might be the same pain, he said, “just expressing itself a different way.”

  By the summer of 2001, having come to like and respect him a lot, there was an equation in my head. It was an emotional, not a math, equation: What they did to his father, he had to carry, more than his siblings. Why? Possibly because it was the last fate on earth James Meredith would have wished for his most inwardly turned child.

  There were something like 100 minority students—blacks and Hispanics—out of an enrollment of about 1,200 when the Meredith twins, Joe and James Jr., boarded at one of the most affluent secondary institutions in America. (No one seems to be able to say now how the tuition was afforded, other than the fact that there seems to have been substantial scholarship help.) Both are remembered as highly intelligent. James is remembered as the far more outgoing. Joe is remembered as the athlete: varsity wrestler and defensive back on the football team. (James ran some track.) In the small world of New England prep school sports, Joe stood out. His wrestling coach was Jim Stephens, who teaches and coaches now at an academy in Ohio. Stephens said he had no visual memory of Joe. “Quiet is maybe all I can remember,” he said. “I remember nothing about him in class. He must have been very smart. I am trying to see his face.” But in the next phone conversation, the coach remembered something: “Of all the wrestlers I’ve worked with, he was one of the only kids who could do the arm drag well.” In an arm drag, Stephens said, “you’re trying to get yourself set up for a takedown. You’re trying to take advantage of the other wrestler’s reaction.” The opponents face each other. “You’re going to try to get in on me, and I’m not going to let you. Here’s how it works. I am controlling your right wrist with my left hand. While I do that, I reach across with my other hand, grab your tricep. Then I pull you across in front of me. Basically, I’m exposing your side. And then I go into the takedown.” The move, the coach said, is all about protecting yourself, a defensive idea, by initiating a sudden offensive move.

  Half a dozen teachers from the Andover years were queried about Joe. The consensus was that both brothers were “pretty normal if quiet kids running around just being the usual teenagers,” as a longtime history teacher, Tom Lyons, put it. But this, too, was remembered after a little while by most of the faculty members who were asked about Joe: In 1982, when his sons were ninth-graders, James Meredith came to Andover to speak. It was a disaster, beginning with the drive from the airport to the school. Two faculty members picked him up. Meredith was arrogant and angry. His much-anticipated address was full of condescension and impenetrable statements.

  In 1997, a year and a half before Joe matriculated at Ole Miss, his father announced that he was going to give his personal papers to the university. This made headlines in Mississippi. There had been delicate backstage maneuvering to get the papers, which amount to 250 linear feet of clippings and printed material. It was thought for a long while that Meredith was going to donate his papers to Jackson State University. The university archivist at Ole Miss and the provost and a history professor, Charles Eagles, made trips to Meadowbrook Lane. They convinced Meredith that his papers belonged at Ole Miss. On the other hand, it might have reasonably been asked by an outsider, what had Ole Miss ever done to earn the gift? As a seminal figure in the university’s history, Meredith was out of view. A man named Ed Meek—a former assistant vice chancellor for public relations and marketing—taught at the school for years. “Every year I’d bring up James Meredith,” he said. “Those classes of mine, including blacks, had no idea who
James Meredith was.” In 1992, three decades after the riot, the university put up a small plaque in Baxter Hall, the redbrick dormitory where he had lived. The plaque reads: “Baxter Hall was the home of some distinguished Mississippians—one of them being James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962.”