During the twirling exhibition I fell into conversation with a couple of graduate law students, and afterward went along with them to the campus coffee shop, the “Rebel Devil”—nearly all shops there have the word “Rebel” in them—and we had an interesting talk. Ole Miss prides itself, among other things, on having the only law school in the state which is accredited by the American Bar Association—so that these two graduate law students were not without some claim to representing a certain level of relative advancement in the community of scholars. They were clean-cut young men in their mid-twenties, dressed in summer suits of tasteful cut. In answer to a question of mine, we talked about Constitutional Law for ten minutes before I realized they were talking about State Constitutional Law. When it became apparent what I was driving at, however, they were quick to face the issue squarely.
“We nevuh had no Negra problem heah,” said one of them, shaking his head sadly. He was a serious young man wearing glasses and the mien of a Harvard divinity student. “Theah just weren’t no problem—wasn’t till these agi-ta-tors came down heah started all this problem business.”
They were particularly disturbed about the possible “trouble, an’ I mean real trouble” which would be occasioned by the attempted registration of a Negro student [James Meredith] which was threatening to take place quite soon, during that very summer session, in fact. As it happened, the authorities managed to delay it; I did, however, get a preview of things to come.
“Why they’ll find dope in his room the first night he’s heah,” the other student said, “dope, a gun, something—anything, just plant it in theah an’ find it! And out he’ll go!”
They assured me that they themselves were well above this sort of thing, and were, in fact, speaking as mature and nonviolent persons.
“But now these heah young unduhgraduates, they’re hotheaded. Why, do you know how they feel? What they say?”
Then to the tune of John Brown’s Body, the two graduate law students begin to sing, almost simultaneously: “Oh we’ll bury all the niggers in the Mississippi mud . . .”, singing it rather loudly it seemed to me—I mean if they were just documenting a point in a private conversation—or perhaps they were momentarily carried away, so to speak. In any event, and despite a terrific effort at steely Zen detachment, the incident left me somewhat depressed, so I retired early, to my cozy room in the Alumni House, where I sipped the white corn and watched television. But I was not destined to escape so easily, for suddenly who should appear on the screen but old Governor Faubus himself—in a gubernatorial campaign rant—with about six cross-purpose facial ticks going strong, and he compulsively gulping water after every pause, hacking, spitting, and in general looking as mad as a hatter. At first I actually mistook it for a rather tasteless and heavy-handed parody of the governor. It could not, I thought, really be Faubus, because why would the network carry an Arkansas primary campaign speech in Mississippi? Surely not just for laughs. Later I learned that while there is such a thing in television as a nationwide hookup for covering events of national importance, there is also such a thing as a Southwide hookup.
The Institute’s mimeographed schedule, of which I had received a copy, read for the next day as follows:
7:30 Up and at ’em
8–9 Breakfast—University Cafeteria
9–9:30 Assembly, Limber up, Review—Grove
9:30–10:45 Class No. 4
10:45–11:30 Relax—Make Notes
11:30–12:45 Class No. 5
1–2:30 Lunch—University Cafeteria
2:30–4 Class No. 6
4–5:30 Swim Hour
6:30–7:30 Supper—University Cafeteria
7:30 Dance—Tennis Court
11 Room Check
11:30 Lights Out (NO EXCEPTIONS)
The “Up and at ’em” seemed spirited enough, as did the “NO EXCEPTIONS” being in heavy capitals; but the rest somehow offered little promise, so, after a morning cup of coffee, I walked over to the library, just to see if they really had any books there—other than books on Constitutional Law, that is. Indeed they did, and quite a modern and comfortable structure it was, too, air-conditioned (as was, incidentally, my room at the Alumni House) and well-lighted throughout. After looking around for a bit, I carefully opened a mint first-edition copy of Light in August, and found “nigger-lover” scrawled across the title page. I decided I must be having a run of bad luck, as a few minutes later, I suffered still another minor trauma on the steps of the library. It was one of those incredible bits of irony which sometimes do occur in life, but are never suitable for fiction—for I had completely put the title-page incident out of my mind and was sitting on the steps of the library, having a smoke, when this very amiable gentleman of middle age paused in passing to remark on the weather (1020) and to inquire in an oblique and courteous way as to the nature of my visit. An immaculate, pink-faced man, with pince-nez spectacles attached by a silver loop to his lapel, nails buffed to a gleam, he carried a smart leather briefcase and a couple of English-literature textbooks which he rested momentarily on the balustrade as he continued to smile down on me with what seemed to be extraordinary happiness.
“My, but it’s a mighty warm day, an’ that’s no lie,” he said, withdrawing a dazzling white-linen handkerchief and touching it carefully to his brow, “. . . an’ I expect you all from up Nawth,” he added with a twinkle, “find it especially so!” Then he quite abruptly began to talk of the “natural tolerance” of the people of Mississippi, speaking in joyfully objective tones, as though it were, even to him, an unfailing source of mystery and delight.
“Don’t mind nobody’s business but yoah own!” he said, beaming and nodding his head—and it occurred to me this might be some kind of really weirdly obscured threat, the way he was smiling; but no, evidently he was just remarkably good-natured. “ ‘Live an’ let live!’ That’s how the people of Mississippi feel—always have! Why, look at William Faulkner, with all his notions, an’ him livin’ right ovah heah in Oxford all the time an’ nobody botherin’ him—just let him go his own way—why we even let him teach heah at the University one yeah! That’s right! I know it! Live an’ let live—you can’t beat it! I’ll see you now, you heah?” And his face still a glittering mask of joviality, he half raised his hand in good-by and hurried on. Who was this strange, happy educator? Was it he who had defaced the title page? His idea of tolerance and his general hilarity gave one pause. I headed back to the grove, hoping to recover some equilibrium. There, things seemed to be proceeding pretty much as ever.
“Do you find that your costume is an advantage in your work?” I asked the first seventeen-year-old Georgia Peach I came across, she wearing something like a handkerchief-size Confederate flag.
“Yessuh, I do,” she agreed, with friendly emphasis, tucking her little blouse in a bit more snugly all around, and continuing to speak in that oddly rising inflection peculiar to girls of the South, making parts of a reply sound like a question: “Why, back home near Macon . . . Macon, Georgia? At Robert E. Lee High? . . . we’ve got these outfits with tassels! And a little red-and-gold skirt? . . . that, you know, sort of flares out? Well, now they’re awful pretty, and of course they’re short and everything, but I declare those tassels and that little skirt get in my way!”
The rest of the day passed without untoward incident, with my observing the Strut platform for a while, then withdrawing to rest up for the Dance, and perhaps catch Faub on the tube again.
The Dance was held on a boarded-over outdoor tennis court, and was a swinging affair. The popular style of dancing in the white South is always in advance of that in the rest of white America; and, at any given moment, it most nearly resembles that which is occurring at the same time in Harlem, which is invariably the forerunner of whatever is to become the national style. I mused on this, standing there near the court foul line, and (in view of the day’s events) pursued it to an interesting generalization: perhaps all the remaining virtues, or let us say, positive traits, o
f the white Southerner—folk song, poetic speech, and the occasional warmth and simplicity of human relationships—would seem rather obviously to derive from the colored culture there. Due to my magazine assignment, I could not reveal my findings over the public-address system at the dance—and, in fact, thought best to put them from my mind entirely, and get on with the coverage—and, to that end, had a few dances and further questioned the girls. Their view of the world was quite extraordinary. For most, New York was like another country—queer, remote, and of small import in their grand scheme of things. Several girls spoke spiritedly of wanting to “get into television,” but it always developed that they were talking about programs produced in Memphis. Memphis, in fact, was definitely the mecca, yardstick and summum bonum. As the evening wore on, I found it increasingly difficult, despite the abundance of cutie pieness at hand, to string along with these values, and so finally decided to wrap it up. It should be noted too, that girls at the Dixie National are under extremely close surveillance both in the grove and out.
The following day I made one last tour, this time noting in particular the instruction methods for advanced twirling techniques: 1-, 2-, 3-finger rolls, wrist roll, waist roll, neck roll, etc. A pretty girl of about twelve was tossing a baton sixty feet straight up, a silver whir in the Mississippi sunlight, and she beneath it spinning like an ice skater, and catching it behind her back, not having moved an inch. She said she had practiced it an hour a day for six years. Her hope was to become “the best there is at the high toss and spin”—and she was now up to seven complete turns before making the catch. Was there a limit to the height and number of spins one could attain? No, she guessed not.
After lunch I packed, bid adieu to the Dixie National and boarded the bus for Memphis. As we crossed the Oxford square and passed the courthouse, I saw the fountain was still shaded, although it was now a couple of hours later than the time I had passed it before. Perhaps it is always shaded—cool and inviting, it could make a person thirsty just to see it.
Recruiting for the Big Parade
ONE NIGHT NOT LONG ago I was sitting around the White Horse Tavern, in New York City’s colorful Greenwich Village, having a quick game of chess with a self-styled internationally famous blitz-chess champ. Six snappy ones and I pretty well had the game sewed up, when the champ suddenly said: “Say, see that guy at the bar—he was in the Cuban fiasco.”
“Cut the diversionary crap, Champ,” I countered, not bothering to look around, tapping the board of play instead, “and face up to the power.” I had slapped the old de Sade double cul-de-sac on his Lady—and, as Bill Seward says, that’s a rumble nobody can cool.
“No, man,” insisted the champ in petulance, “I’m not kidding—just ask him and see.”
Well, to make a short preface even terse (the champ, by the way interfered with the pieces when I did look around, and so eked out another shoddy win), I investigated further to find that it was, in fact, true: this man had participated in the Cuban fiasco, of April 17, 1961, right up to the eleventh-hour moment of the fiasco proper, “Bad Day at the Pig Bay.” His story was so interesting that my immediate hope was to share it with whatever sort of sensitive readership I could muster, and to that end I invited him over to my place for some drinks and a couple of hours tape-recording of his curious tale. Here then is the story of Boris Grgurevich, thirty-three, born and raised in New York City; it is a verbatim transcript of the recorded interview; and what is even more weird, it’s true:
Well, now let me ask you this, how did you get involved in this Cuban fiasco?
It was cold, man . . . you know, like January. You remember that big snowstorm? When they pulled all the cars off the street? Yeah, well that was it. . . . Cold. And this friend of mine, Ramón, comes by. I know him ten, fifteen years, but you know, haven’t seen him for a while, so there’s a big bla-bla hello scene . . . and he was running from something, I mean that was pretty obvious, but he was always very high-strung, moving around a lot—Miami, L.A., Mexico—and right away he says, “Man, let’s go to Miami, where it’s WARM.” And he had this car, and well, I mean it wasn’t difficult him talking me into going, because of the weather and all. So that was the first thing—we went down to Miami.
Had he mentioned anything about Cuba before you left for Miami?
No, man, he didn’t say anything about Cuba—or maybe he did mention it, you know, fleetingly . . . like “bla-bla-bla the Cuban situation,” or some crap like that, but we were just going to Miami. I mean he probably did mention it, because he was born in Cuba, you dig, and speaks Spanish and so on—but Castro was all right with me . . . I mean he had that beard, you know, and he seemed pretty interesting. No, we didn’t talk about that, we get down to Miami, and we have three great days at the track, and then we have four terrible ones—we were reduced to moving in with Jimmy Drew, a guy I know there. And so Ramón’s taking me around—I mean, he knows Miami, see, and there’s a liquor store in the neighborhood and he introduces me to this guy owns the liquor store—nice guy to know, owns a liquor store, and we get very friendly, you know, and he’s giving us bottles of rum. Well, he’s Cuban, dig, and he and Ramón start yakking it up about Cuba and “bla-bla Castro” and so on, and now he’s talking about the “invasion” and how he’s going to get back what they took from him and all that jive. And naturally I’m agreeing with him—well I mean he keeps laying this rum on us, about three bottles a day . . . but he’s, well he was obviously full of crap, a kind of middle-aged hustler businessman . . . and all these cats hanging around the liquor store all looked like hoods, but sort of failing, you know? Anyway, we were meeting all these hood-faces hanging around this liquor store, mostly Cubans, or born in Cuba, and one of them took us to this . . . well, they had this recruiting station, you know, where they’re all signing up for the invasion, and Ramón, well he’s getting more and more excited about this—he’s a salesman actually, I mean that’s what he does, you know, in real life, sell things, and so he’s selling himself on this idea, invading Cuba . . . and of course he was selling me on it too.
Well, now this recruiting—this station—was this being done quite openly?
Openly? Well, man, it was open twenty-four hours a day. You know, like in the middle of town.
This was about the time Cuba raised this question in the V.N. and the U.S. delegation so emphatically denied it. If recruitment was being done as openly as you suggest, how could they deny it?
Well, use your bean, man—what are they supposed to do, admit it?
All right, now let me ask you this, what was Ramón’s idea exactly—I mean, if the invasion was successful, did he think he would get something out of it?
Well, Ramón’s what you might call an essentialist—and he just more or less figures that the man with the gun is, you know, the man with the gun.
And how did you feel about it?
The money was the thing that interested me—I mean we’d had these four very bad days at the track, and I had no money. Well, they were offering two-fifty a month and, you know, room and board, and . . . let’s see, what else . . . yeah, a trip to Guatemala. But I guess the main thing was these cats at the recruiting station, giving this big spiel about “bla-bla-bla the American Government, the C.I.A., the U.S. Army,” and so on. I mean the picture they were painting had battleships in it, Dad—you know, rockets against pitchforks. Well man, I mean how could we lose? Cuba versus America—are you kidding?
So it was pretty obvious even then that it was an American project?
Well of course, man—that was the whole pitch. You don’t think they could have got these guys in there any other way, do you? I mean most of these guys were just sort of tired, middle-aged businessmen, or young hustlers . . . they weren’t going to do anything, anybody could see that. It was like they were recruiting for the parade, you know, to march through Havana—and these guys were joining up to be in the parade, that’s all. I mean there was a slight pretense at a front—the Juan Paula Company, that’s the wa
y the checks were paid, from the Juan Paula Company—and then there were some of these C.I.A. faces running around, trying to make a cloak-and-dagger scene out of it, but that was just sort of a game with them. I mean everybody in Miami knew about the recruiting.
Did you meet other Americans who wanted to go?
Well, they didn’t want Americans, you see, they wanted Cubans—for the big parade, dig? So you had to be Cuban, or if you were American, like Ramón, you had to be born in Cuba. But yeah, there were some other Americans down there, trying to get in—guys from the South mostly, these real . . . you know, anything-is-better-than-home types. Most of them had been in the Army or something like that. But they didn’t want them—they wanted Cubans.
So how did you get in?
Well, man, I mean they didn’t make an issue of it or anything like that, not as far as I was concerned, because we had gotten sort of friendly with them, these C.I.A. cats . . . and they weren’t bad guys really—I mean they thought they were doing the right thing and they thought we were doing the right thing, so we had a pretty good relationship with them. They were nice guys actually—just sort of goofy.
Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes Page 16