Fred Roberts and Larry Leo Johnson are sitting in a golf club outside Jackson. Roberts holds a roster, with little marks next to some of the names. “We lost seven guys,” he says.
The first to go was center Richard Ross, in a plane crash. Six others have followed, and the survivors always show up, stooped and a little wider around the middle, standing in dark suits at funerals, just as they once stood in light suits at weddings.
One afternoon not so long ago, Billy Champion’s phone rang. It was Wes Sullivan, his old roommate and running buddy, Wes Sullivan of the Pat O’Brien’s fountain, of hunting squirrels in the Grove. He’d been sick for a long time, a rare blood disease, and he’d fought it hard. Champion and Sullivan talked about the old days for about an hour, Sullivan sounding as good as he had in a while. They talked about the old games and the nights out together raising hell, about a time when both were young and invincible.
Champion hung up and turned to his wife. “I think Wesley just told me goodbye,” he said.
Two days later, Sullivan died.
After his heart attack, Vaught stayed in Oxford, on his farm, playing golf, visiting with his old players when they’d come back. The stadium was renamed for him: Vaught-Hemingway. In 2006, at the age of 96, he died. His funeral took up the entire church and an adjacent building. Outside the South, the newspaper story said, nobody paid much attention.
3. HIJACKED BY HISTORY
The Mississippi they knew as children no longer exists. The little towns where they grew up have blown away, cracked open by the decline of agriculture and bled dry by a political system that disenfranchised a third of the state’s citizens for a century. Integration meant a chance at equality, but for a lot of guys on the 1962 Ole Miss football team, it also meant that the world they knew as children no longer existed, an effacement of memory, a past shameful and best forgotten in a place where the past is the bedrock of identity. It has left a generation of Mississippians drifting. They have a hard time expressing this, knowing exactly how it sounds, careful with their words, lowering their voices and looking to see whether their wives are listening before whispering, “The blacks . . .”
When he returns to his hometown of Greenwood to visit, Buck Randall likes to drive around alone, past his old school, down the streets where he grew up and played. “Where I used to live,” he says, “they’re all black. Our whole neighborhood. Everything’s gone.”
Mitch Terrell sits in the lobby of the swank Alluvian Hotel in Greenwood, part of one Delta town’s fight against the fate of so many other places in the state. Terrell is getting chemo after having some cancer removed. He’s hoping to get his taste back; even the two or three glasses of Old Charter when the sun goes down taste dull. It’s given him time, and license, to think. Done a lot of that lately. “All the little Delta towns are going,” Terrell says. “Shaw, Drew, Shelby. It would break your heart to drive through Shaw, Mississippi. Back when I was growing up, it was a thriving place. Now everything’s gone.”
The guys from the ’62 team want their state back, their youth. It’s not segregation they miss—“I’m not a black hater,” Terrell says—but a thriving place existing before the collapse of the rural economy. They’re not economists. They haven’t really thought about how segregation effectively ensured that Mississippi would have to claw its way into the 21st century. Instead of working to enfranchise black citizens quickly, many towns began figuring out new ways to segregate. Many towns opened all-white, private high schools. I went to one and never shared a classroom with anyone of color there. Problem is, my hometown of Clarksdale can’t really support one successful school. Now it has two, and both struggle. Mississippi’s children sink further behind, pulled down by the residue of past prejudices.
Sometimes I worry we’ve already made our decisions and have no hope of undoing them. There is just such a profound disconnect between whites and blacks from that era, and many have taught their children and grandchildren so many unfortunate lessons, handing off old ideas to the young. Even something as simple as “Dixie” creates an unbridgeable gap. I’ll be honest. I like it when the band plays it. It reminds me of my daddy, and I cry a little bit when they play it slow. All the former players share that sentiment. “I have never thought one thing negative when I hear that,” Owen says. “Just how much I love Ole Miss and that Grove and those trees.” Then I talk to Wadlington, for whom the song brings back different memories: Ole Miss fans driving past his home after a game, blaring “Dixie,” waving flags, screaming at his family. “I remember,” he says. “I remember the cars. I remember the flags. I remember being the brunt of a lot of racial slurs.”
The guys from that team have a hard time understanding the other side’s point of view. They feel as if their past and their accomplishments have been hijacked by history, and it bothers them in ways they know better than to say aloud. They just want the little grocery stores and the guy pushing burgers off a griddle and the safe streets back. They want to remember when it was OK to be proud of Mississippi.
Terrell starts to cry, wipes his eyes, apologizes for getting emotional. “I hate to think what my grandchildren are gonna grow up in,” he says. “I know you can’t live in the past, but I sure like to recall it.”
4. BUCK RANDALL: KNOCKED DOWN BUT UNBOWED
I pull up to Buck Randall’s home in Clinton. This is my second trip here, and after hearing so many stories, I’m a little scared of him. He has done hard work since leaving football, including a stretch repossessing cars, carrying a piece for protection. The first time I met Randall, I had to help him stand up, his socked feet sliding on the floor, him sinking back into the couch. That made me sad. He’d been the most feared man in the Delta, but time hasn’t been kind to Randall. He has had five operations on his knees, then had them both replaced, suffers from chronic back pain, had three heart attacks, had a stroke, has diabetes, wears a hearing aid. “I hurt every day,” he says. One thing has remained untouched by time: His eyes are still a brilliant shade of blue.
I’ve returned to ask Randall a hard question. See, all the stories about the riot start with him being dragged into the Lyceum. There’s no real explanation about why he was there or what he was doing. His teammates snicker when telling the story, hinting they know exactly what he was doing out there. Reporting a story makes you myopic sometimes, and I’ve come to believe that I need at least one member of that team to admit being an active member of that riot. Then I can ask whether they’ve repented, whether that night has changed them at all. My best chance, I figure, is Randall. Was he throwing bricks? Was he that football player the priest negotiated with? One history book says he was.
So I get to his house and see his wonderful wife, Sandra, who takes such good care of her husband. I talk with him about the old days. “Hell,” he says, “it seems like I’ve been fighting all my life.”
Finally, I ask him. What was he doing when Chief Tatum grabbed him?
“I went over there in front of Lyceum,” he starts, “before the riot broke out.”
That’s as far as he goes, and sitting in his home, I stop too. The past few weeks have been hard on me. I found a photo of a young man screaming at Meredith. The face looks familiar. I think it’s a family member. I show it to my mom; she says I’m wrong. I’m not sure. But I do not ask the relative; I do not press. There are questions that Mississippians won’t ask because we are not prepared to hear the answer. So I decide, looking at Buck Randall, that it is unfair for me to demand a confession from him that I am not willing to demand from a family member. Some things seem best left buried.
5. THE SELF-PROCLAIMED MOST SIGNIFICANT MAN ALIVE
I pull up to James Meredith’s home in Jackson. He raised cash for his house, in a middle-class neighborhood, by cutting down and selling those trees his father planted.
Time hasn’t been that kind to Meredith either. He was shot in 1966 making a “Walk Against Fear” across Mississippi. Marti
n Luther King Jr. finished the walk for him. He’s gotten a reputation for being a bit off. Tell someone you’re going to see Meredith and you’ll get a look that says: Have fun with that. He worked for Jesse Helms. And David Duke. Nobody could figure out what he was thinking there.
Sitting in a little room off the side of the house he has turned into an office, he says, “You see, what most people have never understood is why . . . the Ole Miss school thing, the white-black school thing, has such force and power . . .”
He is interrupted by one of his granddaughters, who wants some milk. Meredith finishes his thought—“it’s about not accepting white supremacy”—then walks slowly to the house to get her a glass of milk.
When he returns, he holds forth, about the books he has read, about reading War and Peace in Russian, about Churchill, about the great moments of Western civilization, about Barack Obama. He says he has hope for Mississippi because his going to Ole Miss killed the tree limb of white supremacy and it has been dying ever since. It’s still hanging on to the tree, he says, but it’s rotted and hopeless. Mississippi will one day be different. As he talks, I think I understand the weirdness people associate with him, the grandiosity. He’s not crazy. It’s just that, in his mind, he’s one of those people who’ve changed the course of history. When he talks about Churchill, it’s not as if he’s discussing some distant leader but, rather, an intimate. A peer.
He remembers his actions, and the wave they unleashed on the South, and, well, he has been chasing greatness ever since. What’s the second act when you change the world at 29?
“Not only am I more significant than Barack Obama,” he says, “I’m more significant than anybody living. I ain’t never not thought that, but you are the first person, and if you hadn’t told me you were from Clarksdale and 31 years old, I wouldn’t have told you. You’re the first person I’ve ever told that. It doesn’t really matter after a time whether it’s true or not. Tell you the truth, most of the things that guided me, I never knew if they were real or imagined. I got to where I couldn’t tell the difference at all between a dream and something I thought up wide awake. To me, it was the same thing. Became the same thing.”
As we talk, a roach crawls out onto the floor, headed toward his shoes, then moves away, making its way around the room. The weirdest thing happens. He doesn’t mention it. Neither do I. My eyes stay straight ahead. It just seems unfair to make him stop talking about Churchill and his own historical significance to address a roach crawling around his small, cluttered office.
6. “NOTHING EVER LASTS FOREVER”
Glynn Griffing makes a familiar walk, from the dining area toward the Lyceum. The former star quarterback, who was born near my family farm, is wearing gray slacks, a blue shirt, and a blue tie. He’s 68 now. It’s a beautiful fall day, and the leaves are turning, the coeds showing their legs, the lights of the football stadium peeking above the tops of the buildings. He looks at the faces coming and going and can’t believe he ever looked that young. An Ole Miss football player, a burly African American, passes him and doesn’t pause to look at the older man sitting near the flagpole. Once upon a time, Griffing was the most famous person on this campus. Time marches on. “Nothing ever lasts forever,” he says. “I knew it wouldn’t last forever. But I never expected it to end as quickly as it did.”
He remembers the night of the riot, the Confederate flag flying where he’s sitting now, the tear gas. Now there are white and black faces here, walking together, going to the same classes, living in the same rooms. There have been so many changes. Robert Khayat, the former football star, is now the chancellor. One of the first things he did was make fans stop bringing the Confederate flag to the stadium. He, too, got death threats. He banned Colonel Rebel as the official mascot. He has overseen the university through millions of dollars in improvements and spearheaded the campaign to bring the presidential debate to Oxford. Understandably, Khayat is proud of the new Ole Miss.
Griffing stands, walks past the James Meredith statue behind the Lyceum that Khayat installed. There’s a quote on it: “Yes, Mississippi was. But Mississippi is.” That seems about right. He walks slowly, in color, not in black and white like those old photographs, a man who once knew glory but doesn’t dwell on it. He’s through talking to me about the past. The tear gas has faded away. He moves along the sidewalk beneath the oaks and magnolias. Nobody glances twice.
EPILOGUE
Reporting this story took me places I’m not sure I wanted to go. I’ve always loved Mississippi, but each new layer I unearthed made that love a more difficult and complex thing to maintain. I read James Meredith’s hate mail. Not photocopies, the actual letters. I found my relative’s name in the notebook, though never an explanation of why, and later, a photo of another great-uncle urging citizens to fight the feds. I realized for the first time how these symbols of Ole Miss football—the flag and “Dixie” and even “Hotty Toddy”—were once used as weapons. How for a third of my fellow Mississippians, those images bring back fear. I found myself wishing I didn’t know any of this. That scared me.
But I did know, and now I had an answer to a question first asked in the library: What is the cost? I won’t ever look at a Rebel flag the same again. Although I like “Dixie,” especially when it’s played slow, if it were never played again, I would be OK with that. Strangely, my biggest fear was that I’d be unable to enjoy Ole Miss football games, that I wouldn’t be able to forget the images in my head from a time when these games served as a symbol of something else.
This past fall, the Rebels went a month without a home game, and that’s when I did most of the library work on this story. I began to worry about the Auburn game. What if it was ruined for me? That morning, I got to my seats and searched inside for the first pangs of discomfort. I’m not sure what this says about me, but I still liked being there. Yes, it’s OK to love Ole Miss football. It’s part of me, just as the events of 47 years ago are. We are all of these things. They are our history. They are us. I didn’t just feel shame researching this story. I felt pride in that group of guys, in Glynn and Sam and Louis and the rest. I am proud to have met them. I am fully aware that this will be the second story I’ve written ending with the Ole Miss band playing “Dixie.” The first ran two years ago, an ode to Southern football, and that song made me think about my family. I still mean every word of that, as I do what I’m writing now, and believe that both can be true. Difficult and complex are not necessarily bad things.
Kickoff’s close. I look up at the south end zone and see, in gigantic letters, “1962 National Champions.” Seems some obscure poll voted the Rebels first. I read all the local coverage of that season, and there was no mention of this poll. But there it is, in huge letters. There’s such a blurry line between fact and fiction about 1962 that nobody seems to mind that the university has rewritten history. Not only do we not like to talk about the past, but we like to rearrange it to fit with our own ideas of what should have happened. This strikes me as dangerous: If we don’t look at our flaws and culpability and learn from them, we seem doomed. The truth? The 1962 team was good, really good, especially considering the obstacles, but that year, USC was better.
The sign also brings me to the final question: What is the cost of not knowing? Many of the students here have no idea what really happened that night in front of the Lyceum. They know what I knew: brushstrokes and a few comfortable anecdotes. Maybe their families are different, but in my family, it wasn’t discussed. I suspect their families are not different. Students here mostly believe what their parents believe; it’s the reason The Daily Mississippian was the only daily student newspaper in America to endorse John McCain. Thoughts are handed down like monogrammed cuff links and engraved shotguns.
The band starts playing “From Dixie with Love.” The moment’s coming, one that makes me cringe, for the black students who have to hear it and for the white ones who have no idea what they’re actually saying. The song s
peeds up near the end, and the crowd shakes once more. I don’t know when this began, or why, but as it finishes, many of the students, some of them the grandchildren of those here in the long fall of 1962, yell, The South . . . will . . . rise . . . again!
FEBRUARY 2010
Shadow Boxing
Muhammad Ali fought 50 men. Only one disappeared.
MIAMI, FLA.—The old man opens the door and shuffles into a familiar room. The air smells of stale beer and discount-brand cigarette smoke. The tables are taken by men with no names. They are all friends. They are all strangers. A different journey brought each of them here, to the pool hall on Northwest 2nd Avenue, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Their journeys are over. Most don’t share the details, not even their last names. Some don’t remember the year, or how long they’ve been coming here. They have no past.
The old man walks clumsily to a table. He has a story. The act of telling it, of having people hear it, keeps him from disappearing forever. One night, he says, he fought Muhammad Ali. Almost won, he brags. Some believe him. Some don’t. Most don’t care. He’s just another wacko wandering the streets with some tale about how his life could have been different.
They ignore him, pretending he’s not even there. He’s got to show them.
The old man gets up and throws punches into the air.
The people around him laugh.
He sits back down, invisible again.
I. LOST
IN THE BEGINNING
The search began six years ago with a phone call.
The man on the other end is Stephen Singer, a New Hampshire car salesman who collects things in his spare time. Most of all, he collects all things Muhammad Ali. It’s a fetish. He prizes the light box he keeps on the wall of his office. With the flick of a switch, you can see an X-ray with a thin crack: Ali’s broken jaw.
The Cost of These Dreams Page 10