The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  We found our seats, guided by helpful fans who looked at our Ole Miss shirts with more pity than anger. Thanks to StubHub, we had seats in the first row. Everyone seemed to be going out of their way to be welcoming.

  “You know why they are so nice?” Dad asked in a low voice as we got settled. “It’s because they know they are going to win.”

  —

  There was a moment, a not very long moment, when it looked as if all things might be possible on this late Saturday afternoon. Ole Miss received, and the first play was a beautiful Bo Wallace pass to Laquon Treadwell for thirty-eight yards. Then three plays for a fourth and two on the Alabama twenty-nine-yard line, perfect position for a high-percentage field goal.

  “Kick,” my father murmured. “Take the points. It’s Alabama.” But Coach Hugh Freeze didn’t even seem to consider a field goal. He had a gambler’s streak, and Ole Miss was coming into the game undefeated. They could get two yards.

  But they didn’t. The Alabama defense stuffed them with a one-yard gain. The stadium erupted. My father and I groaned. It’s the little moments like this that become game-turning points. I immediately had a bad feeling and felt worse for having it, as if I had let my own team down.

  In eight plays, Alabama drove to the Ole Miss eighteen-yard line. Two short passes and six rushing plays, nothing fancy. This was like arm wrestling. No tricks or deception, just a quick test of who was stronger. It was all about the line of scrimmage, and on every play Ole Miss got pushed back by the huge, confident Alabama offensive line, which methodically did its work.

  When Ole Miss eventually stopped Alabama and forced them to kick a field goal, it felt like a victory. All those years of games with my dad had taught me the lesson all true fans painfully learn, that the essence of sport is disappointment masked by periodic bursts of joy and nurtured by denial. No one is spared. Fans learn to negotiate their way through games, a useful practice in life. The pain of any moment can be balanced against imagining how much worse it could be. So if Ole Miss was unable to score in the first half, we were celebrating that Alabama hadn’t been able to score a touchdown, even if they had made three field goals. To go into the half trailing Alabama by nine to zip is a mere trifle. Like Monty Python’s Black Knight: “ ’Tis just a flesh wound.”

  We stood and stretched at the half, venturing out to the track that surrounded the field. It felt like all those film scenes of the Roman Colosseum, from Spartacus to Gladiator, when the crowd was pulling for the lions. “This,” Dad said, “is really something.”

  On the second play of the second half, the great Alabama back T. J. Yeldon ran sixty-eight yards for a touchdown. “He made it look easy,” Dad said, wincing. And it was true.

  The score was 16–0 when Ole Miss drove to the Alabama six-yard line. They faced a fourth and two, a repeat of their first possession of the game, when they had been in field goal range but opted to go unsuccessfully for the first down. Surely they had learned their lesson and would kick a field goal. It was only the third quarter, and any kind of score would lift their confidence. But being stopped for a first down this close to the goal line and not getting any points would be catastrophic.

  And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. Ole Miss went for the first down and failed. The stadium seemed to levitate with the roar.

  The rest of the game never improved. A perfect Alabama punt put the ball on the Ole Miss one-yard line. On the next play, a safety blitz trapped Wallace behind the line of scrimmage in the Ole Miss end zone. A safety. At that point, the two points were meaningless. It was the humiliation.

  My dad looked at me. “Brutal,” he said.

  “Brutal.”

  It ended 25–0. Games like this that began with so much hope were devastating. We walked all the way back to the car. It took about forty-five minutes; we’d amble about twenty-five yards, then stop and rest a bit. Behind us, the stadium glowed and still exploded with sound. It was a warm night that felt like so many I’d known growing up. In a driveway, five boys, maybe ten or eleven years old, played football. They were tackling each other on the hard concrete. How many nights had I spent like that?

  We lived on a dead-end street in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson. My mother and father had built the house the year after I was born, and we lived there until my sister and I both had moved out and they were empty nesters. My aunt and my grandmother lived alongside us. My aunt had been married to my father’s older brother, my dad’s hero. When he died at forty from complications of childhood rheumatic fever, my aunt went back to work teaching junior high science. She never remarried.

  My best friend, Al Stuberfield, lived just down the street. He had a tree house where we spent most of our time; his older brother, Steve, who had suffered brain damage at birth, was our constant companion. He was fiercely strong, fearless, and gentle as a drowsy cat unless he felt his brood had been threatened; then he was capable of great acts of terrifying intimidation. Once we were playing football with some older kids from St. Mary Street in a vacant lot across the street from Al’s house. One of them didn’t like how hard Al tackled him—he was a tough tackler—and pushed Al when he got up. You’ve seen these sorts of phony playground fights a million times: kids pushing each other, nobody wanting to take a swing.

  In a flash, Steve charged across the street and lifted the older kid over his head as if he were a cardboard cutout. He twirled him around in circles. It was so sudden and so spectacular that after a few breathless moments everyone had to laugh, including the kid being given the ride. After a bit, Steve put him down, both a little dizzy. He looked at us and Al told him thanks, and Steve went back across the street, duty done.

  “Why don’t we get him to play?” one of the older guys said, awestruck. “I want him on my team.”

  “He doesn’t like to play football,” Al said.

  “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t like to hit people.”

  Everybody laughed except Al and me. We knew it was true.

  In Jackson in the 1960s, the city ran trucks through neighborhoods spraying a toxic DDT mix to kill mosquitoes. We all considered it great fun to run behind the trucks and dart in and out of the mist like schooling fish. Al and I and a couple of guys from the neighborhood once played most of a football game while running behind the slow-moving monsters. Later I read that the city backed up the trucks to the Jackson jail during the Freedom Riders days and sprayed the DDT into cells. There were times running behind the trucks that we’d get too close and the mist would burn our eyes and throats. But we could move in and out and stay as far back as we wanted. Being trapped inside a cell with no escape must have been terrible.

  It had been like that one June night in 1963, running behind the mosquito truck, tossing a football, talking about the Rebels. We ran behind it all the way up Piedmont Street, our street, to Riverside, where it turned. We walked and ran back, throwing passes to each other, coughing some after the truck’s mist.

  Our house was almost at the end of the street, just as it dead-ended into a short bit of dirt road before ending at a creek. That makes it sound as though we were out in the country, which we weren’t, but that creek and the bit of woods surrounding it were a hidden world for me for years. Every kid who finds those secret spaces lives a separate life within those boundaries.

  Our house sat on a little rise and had brick steps to the front door. I ran up, dodging phantom tacklers all the way. I walked in and shouted that I was home.

  My dad came out of the kitchen. He was wearing a plaid robe over pajamas. He put his arm around me and sort of hugged me. My sister was spending the night at a friend’s. “You have fun?” he asked in a tired voice.

  Something was wrong. I just nodded, and we walked toward the kitchen. My room was just down the hall to the left, past the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, red-eyed. She smiled when she saw me and got up and hugged me. This was not the usual greeting after I walked in covered in dirt, sweat, and a little DDT. All of
a sudden I felt like crying.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Some bad people did a terrible thing tonight,” my dad said.

  “What happened?”

  He hesitated. “Someone was killed,” my mother said.

  “Who was it?” I said, and I think I did start to tear up. Killed?

  “No one we really knew, but a good man.”

  “We didn’t know him?”

  My mother shook her head and started to cry. Dad walked me out and down the short hall to my room. “Mom okay?” I asked.

  “It’s just sad,” he said.

  “I’m really sorry. I’ll pray for the man tonight.” I said prayers most nights.

  My father nodded. “That would be good.”

  We got down by the bed, side by side, with lowered heads as my father prayed, “Our Heavenly Father, tonight we ask you to rest the soul of a Mississippian who was taken by violence. We ask for understanding and forgiveness for those who did this terrible act and for the peace that passes all understanding for the Evers family in their terrible hour of need. In God’s name, we pray. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  We stayed like that for a moment, then my dad got up and I got up.

  “What was the man’s name?” I asked. “Who was killed?”

  “Mr. Evers. Mr. Medgar Evers.”

  “What happened?”

  My father hesitated. “He was shot.”

  “Shot? Did they catch the people who did it?”

  “Not yet. But they will.”

  It took thirty-one years to convict Byron De La Beckwith.

  5

  Back at Ole Miss, there was a notice in the student union about events commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of Medgar Evers’s assassination. It was sponsored by the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. It startled me to see “50th Anniversary” in print. Time was so strange. It was half a century later, but I could still slip into that moment and relive it. Years would go by without its crossing my mind, and then there it was. It was probably like that for the whole state, for this society called Mississippi. Not just that one horrible murder, but that whole awful, troubled history of blacks and whites.

  My parents and I had moved into the hotel on the Ole Miss campus, and I’d been spending a lot of time in the student union after discovering it had all the critical food groups, from Pinkberry yogurt to Chick-fil-A. The union looked like its counterpart at most every college campus I’d been on in the past twenty years: long-haired kids, short-haired kids, students who looked as if they were on their way to a party and students in sweatpants, athletes, nerds, black, white, Asian. A gay student association table was passing out information under a sign that read WHEN DID YOU DECIDE YOU WERE STRAIGHT?

  A lounge area in the student union overlooked the Grove; students hung out in groups to study or catch naps or argue quietly with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Along one wall hung a series of photographs, mostly black-and-white, oddly formal in the scattered-couch-and-overstuffed-chair frat house feel of the space.

  Dad’s Ole Miss Hall of Fame photograph

  These were Ole Miss Student Hall of Fame portraits from each year dating back to 1930. The half a dozen or so from each class stared out with the frozen intensity of the past. My father was here, class of 1941, black-haired, easy smile, absurdly handsome. A couple of years after him, there was another, more intense portrait, less classically handsome, more sharp edges: William Winter.

  I stared at Winter’s portrait, wondering if the twenty-year-old face of 1943 had any inkling of what was ahead. He had changed my life, but that could be said by everybody in that student union. They just hadn’t been given the chance to understand it as I had.

  When asked why I was drawn to campaigns, I never really tell the truth, if only because so few would understand. How do you explain the power of one foggy night in a Mississippi high school football locker room listening to grown men talk about the odds that one of them might be killed?

  It was 1967 and still the Mississippi Burning season, just four years after Medgar Evers had been assassinated. William Winter, a family friend whom my parents knew from Ole Miss, was running in the Democratic primary for governor as the moderate on race. My parents were trying to help.

  Winter was running against a congressman who had lost an arm in World War II, John Bell Williams. Williams was the “seg” candidate, as everybody said back in those days. On this night, Winter was waiting to talk to a big rally of supporters gathered on a high school football field on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. There had been death threats, explicit ones: if you speak tonight, you will be shot.

  There was no Secret Service, of course, or any formal security at all. My father, a former FBI agent, was among a loosely assembled group of volunteer law enforcement types, both retired and active. They had gathered to try to help Winter, who was unassuming but with a country toughness impossible to intimidate.

  Surrounded by the larger men, Winter cut a slim, straight figure with an unnatural erectness. I’d watched him in this campaign and realized that he carried himself the same way football players did when they got up from injuries and walked back to the bench, eager to show that the hit didn’t hurt, head high, even though everyone knew it did.

  At barely fifteen years old, I could do little more than sit there quietly and take in this scene of quiet courage, as warm-up speakers got the crowd roaring. I sat off to the side, trying to be invisible, worried someone would ask me to leave. I felt terribly privileged and grown up. It was as though a door had been opened between adolescence and adulthood. Much effort and money and, yes, love had been expended shielding me from the uglier side of life, but here I was glimpsing a hint of it, and no one was covering my eyes or trying to paint it with prettier colors than it deserved. Had I not won life’s lottery being born to loving parents in a comfortable world, I no doubt would have seen this earlier. I’d have grown up faster, harder, tougher. Watching these brave men make hard choices made me begin to realize just how sheltered I was. Despite all the efforts to mold me into a successful product of a value system that called good grades and high test scores “success,” my softness was painfully apparent to me.

  The men were all imploring Winter not to speak, but he was insistent. Finally, Winter just held up his hands—a gesture I’d seen him make many times—and said, “Boys, I’m gonna give my speech.” That was it. The finality in his voice was something they understood. One of the men went out to a car and came back with a bulky bulletproof vest. With a sigh, Winter agreed to wear it and began strapping it on while his wife tried not to cry.

  Some of the men tried to hide rifles and handguns under their coats. My father didn’t carry a gun; at least I don’t think he did. He hated guns. Winter started to go out, but one of the men pulled him back by the shoulders, and they said the Lord’s Prayer together in low voices. Then Winter turned and went out, silhouetted in the light, a perfect target. A few steps later, a couple of the largest men followed, their guns shielded from sight. Then my father walked out with Mrs. Winter and another man.

  Winter survived that night but lost the election. Years later he would find another moment and win. Me, I was hooked. What could be greater than watching a brave man go out and put his life on the line to win in the name of what he believed was right?

  I walked precincts for Winter that summer in 1967, knocking on doors and leaving door hangers. My mother traveled some with his wife, Elise, and sometimes I’d get to go to events, where I’d hand out brochures and say, “Vote for Winter!” I’d been doing that one morning, early, at a shift change at the Pascagoula shipyard, and a lean fellow in his twenties grabbed me by my nice sport shirt and pulled me close. “I wouldn’t vote for that nigger-loving son of a bitch if God almighty asked me to.” His friends laughed and pushed him along, one slapping me on the back and saying, “Sorry, kid, he had a rough night.” I’d like to say I pushed him back or challenged him, but I just stood there, taking
it.

  That 1967 election was also the one in which Byron De La Beckwith ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi. He had been tried twice for the killing of Medgar Evers, both trials ending in hung juries. He used that publicity to launch his political campaign for lieutenant governor.

  Beckwith’s slogan: “He’s a straight shooter.” He came in fifth with just over 34,000 votes.

  —

  I turned fifteen during that election, and by then I already had a complicated relationship with my Mississippi identity. I was nine when I first left the state for any extended period, a two-month stint at a camp in the North Carolina mountains. That was the first of five summers spent at the same camp, and even then I think I understood it was intended to be more than just a fun place to spend the summer but also an entry ramp to a different world. The camp selected by my parents, which really meant my mother, was called Camp Yonahnoka in Linville, North Carolina, at the base of Grandfather Mountain. It was owned and run by an ancient Mr. Chips sort of figure from Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia. And that was the key. It wasn’t so much a summer camp as a training ground for Episcopal. The counselors were almost all EHS students or graduates, and it was run like a mini-EHS, with the day divided into the same breaks as class times using the same bell-ringing codes. It was inevitable I’d want to go to EHS.

  My parents couldn’t afford a camp like Yonahnoka, but my mother helped pay for it by working as a camp representative, giving presentations around Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Yonahnoka sent her slides of the camp with Grandfather Mountain towering in the background. There was a clear, alpine lake at the camp as different from my Mississippi brown swimming holes as a High Latin Mass from a deep-woods Pentecostal service.