South and West

by Joan Didion

  At Gulfport, the county seat of Harrison County, a tanker, broken clean in half during the hurricane, lay rusting offshore. The heat was relentless, the streets downtown broad and devoid of trees. The Losers was playing at the Sand Theatre in Gulfport, and would be playing at The Avenue in Biloxi. We went into a café downtown to get something to eat. CAFÉ is all the sign said. The menu had red beans and rice, and the only sounds in the place in the afternoon stillness were the whirring of the air conditioner and the click of a pinball machine. Everyone in the place seemed to have been there a long time, and to know everyone else. After a while a man got up from his beer and walked to the door. “Off to the infirmary,” he said over his shoulder.

  Between Gulfport and Biloxi, the shingles were ripped from the houses facing the Gulf. Live oak trees were twisted and broken. A long way in the distance one could see the Biloxi Lighthouse, a white tower glowing peculiarly in the strange afternoon light.

  I had never expected to come to the Gulf Coast married.

  Biloxi

  Everything seems to go to seed along the Gulf: walls stain, windows rust. Curtains mildew. Wood warps. Air conditioners cease to function. In our room at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel, where the Mississippi Broadcasters’ Convention was taking place, the air conditioner in the window violently shook and rattled every time it was turned on. The Edgewater Gulf is an enormous white hotel which looks like a giant laundry, and has the appearance of being on the verge of condemnation. The swimming pool is large and unkempt, and the water smells of fish. Behind the hotel is a new shopping center built around an air-conditioned mall, and I kept escaping there, back into midstream America.

  In the elevator at the Edgewater Gulf:

  “Walter, I believe you’ve grown the most of any town in the state of Mississippi.”

  “Well, the figures are in question.”

  “Didn’t quite total as high as the chamber of commerce thought they would?”

  “No, well—”

  “Same in Tupelo. In Tupelo they demanded a recount.”

  “Well, frankly, I don’t think we’ve got all those people…they see the cars, they think they live here, but they come in from around, spend a dollar a day—”

  “Dollar, top.”

  The two men faced the front of the elevator as they spoke, not each other. The dialogue was grave. The possibility of “growth” in small Mississippi towns is ever yearned for, and ever denied. The Mississippi Broadcasters’ was, everyone assured me, “the best damn convention in the state of Mississippi.”

  One evening after dinner we drove around Biloxi, and stopped to watch a Pony League game being played under bright lights. A handful of men in short-sleeved shirts and women in faded cotton blouses and Capri pants sat in the bleachers, watching the children play, Holiday Inn versus Burger Chef. Below the bleachers some children played barefoot in the dust, and a police car was parked, its motor idling, its doors open. There was no one in the car. The game broke up finally, to no one’s satisfaction.

  There are railroad tracks running through all the towns in Mississippi, or so it seems, and at every crossing is a sign that reads MISSISSIPPI LAW/STOP. The tracks are raised and the wild carrot grows around them.

  After the Pony League game broke up we went to get a beer in a bar a few blocks away, and there were some of the other people from the bleachers, and no children in evidence. It was apparently just a way to pass a few hours on a summer evening. They had already seen The Losers, say, and it was hot in the house, and supper was finished at sundown.

  Another way to pass the time that evening (but I believe it was an almost imperceptibly more middle-class pastime) was at the Kiwanis Fishing Rodeo, where the biggest fish caught that day were displayed in trays of ice. In the sawdust under the awning a small girl sat, stringing the pop tops from beer cans into a necklace.

  One morning at 10:30 a.m. during the Mississippi Broadcasters’ Convention there was, in the ballroom of the Edgewater Gulf, an event designated on the program as the Ladies’ Brunch. The Billy Fane Trio played, and Bob McRaney, Sr., of WROB West Point, presided. “The Billy Fane Trio is becoming something of an institution as regards our convention,” he said, and then he introduced another act: “We have an act this morning that…I think…unless you’ve been an Indian on a reservation and not many of us have…you’ll find rather novel and unusual to say the least. Out in Colorado…or out somewhere in the West there…there’s a very quaint little village named Taos. And we have a young man this morning who has perfected a Taos Hoop Dance…It’s Allen Thomas, from Franklinton, Louisiana,…with Martin Belcher on the Indian drums.”

  “You’ll love this act,” someone at my table said. “We saw it at the high school up on 49.”

  “I wish I could play organ like that,” someone else said when the Billy Fane Trio was playing.

  “Don’t you, though?”

  “You-all ought to come visit with us,” a third woman said. They were all young women, the oldest among them perhaps thirty. “I’d play organ for you.”

  “We’ll never get up there,” the first woman said. “I never been anyplace I wanted to go.”

  A drawing was held for door prizes, the first prize being a room paneled in Masonite. The women genuinely wanted the Masonite room, and they also wanted the carving set, the playing cards, the pair of Miss America shoes, the lighted cosmetic mirror, and the woodcut of Christ. They recalled among them who had won door prizes in years past, and their wistful envy of each winner suffused the room. Little girls in sandals and sundresses played at the edge of the ballroom, waiting for their mothers, who were now, during the drawing, as children themselves.

  The isolation of these people from the currents of American life in 1970 was startling and bewildering to behold. All their information was fifth-hand, and mythicized in the handing down. Does it matter where Taos is, after all, if Taos is not in Mississippi?

  At the Mississippi Broadcasters’ awards banquet, there were many jokes and parables. Here is a joke: “Can you tell me what you’d get if you crossed a violin with a rooster? The answer is, if you looked out in your chicken yard you might see someone fiddling around with your rooster.” This seemed to me an interesting joke, in that no element of it was amusing, yet everyone roared, and at tables all around me it was repeated for those who had missed the punch line.

  And here is a parable I heard that night: “There was a bee buzzing in a clover field, and a cow came along and swallowed the bee, and the bee buzzed around and it was warm and sleepy and the bee went to sleep, and when the bee woke up, the cow was gone.” As I recall, this parable illustrated some point about broadcasting good tidings rather than bad, and it seemed to make the point very clearly to the audience, but it continued to elude me.

  Someone at the rostrum mentioned repeatedly that we were “entering the space age in the new decade,” but we seemed very far from that, and in any case had we not already entered the space age? I had the feeling that I had been too long on the Gulf Coast, that my own sources of information were distant and removed, that like the women at the Ladies’ Brunch I might never get anywhere I wanted to go. One of the awards that night was for the Best Program Series by a Female.

  The luncheon was honoring Congressman William Colmer (D-Miss.), who had been thirty-eight years in the House and was chairman of the House Rules Committee. He was receiving the Broadcasters’ Man of the Year award, and had come with his AA, his mother, and his secretary. In accepting his award Rep. Colmer murmured something about “bad apples in every lot,” and, about the interest of the rest of the nation in the state of Mississippi, “like havin’ an obstetrician in New Jersey when the baby’s bein’ born in Mississippi.”

  “We get a lot of bad publicity down here,” said someone accepting a Distinguished Public Service award. The solidarity engendered by outside disapproval, a note struck constantly. It seemed to have reached a point where all Mississippians were bonded together in a way simply not true of the residents of any
other state. They could be comfortable only with each other. Any differences they might have, class or economic or even in a real way racial, seemed outweighed by what they shared.

  Charles L. Sullivan, introduced as “lieutenant governor of the state of Mississippi and a member of the Clarksdale Baptist Church,” rose to speak. “I have come to think we are living in the era of the demonstrators—unruly, unwashed, uninformed, and sometimes un-American people—disrupting private and public life in this country.” He complained of the press, “for whom two loud ‘Ah Hate Mississippis’ would be sufficient. This adult generation accomplished more than any generation in the history of civilization—it started the exploration of God’s limitless space. I simply will not hear them cry Pig for a situation they themselves began. Ah don’t believe the right to disagree is the right to destroy the University at Jackson or Kent State or [the “even” was implicit] Berkeley. If it is true, as they say, that they have despaired of the democratic process, then I and my fellow demonstrators shall absolutely insist that if our system is to be changed it shall be changed in the ballot box and not in the streets.” He finally ended on the rote ending to southern speeches: “We can live together in the dignity and freedom which their Creator surely intended.”

  With many of the Highway Patrol as honored guests there was an undertone to this lunch and throughout his speech, since it was the Highway Patrol who had done the shooting at Jackson.

  Random notes from the weekend: The black station manager from Gulfport standing in line talking to Stan Torgerson from Meridian about black programming, Torgerson saying he programs Top 40, no deep blues or soul, and he owns a record store too “so I know goddamn well what they buy.” Bob Evans from WNAG Grenada, trying to explain the class structure of Mississippi towns in terms of five families, with the banker always number one because he makes the loans. A black girl, a student at Jackson State, presented a list of demands at an afternoon meeting and everyone explained to me that she did it “very courteously.” A tribute to coverage during Hurricane Camille, “Broadcasting working in symphonic harmony with the weather bureau and the civil defense authorities.” After that crisis “celebrities from all over the U.S. came down, Bob Hope, the Golddiggers, Bobby Goldsboro. Bob Hope coming down, that really made people see that the country cared.” Mrs. McGrath from Jackson leaning close to tell me Jackson State was a setup.

  The Gulf Coast resorts live to a certain extent on illegal gambling, places back up in the pinewoods known to all visitors. The Mafia is strong on the Coast.

  The Ladies at the Brunch, on the subject of TV:

  “I keep it on for my stories.”

  “Need to have it for the stories.”

  “I hear the radio only in the kitchen.”

  How about driving, I asked. The pretty young woman looked at me as if truly bewildered.

  “Drive where?” she asked.

  I did not know why we were going to Meridian instead of Mobile as planned, but it seemed, after a few days, imperative to leave the Gulf and the steaming air.

  On the Road from Biloxi to Meridian

  There was occasional rain and an overcast sky and the raw piney woods. On an AM station out of Biloxi, 1400 on the dial, I listened to Richard Brannan tell a parable about “a sailing trip to the Bahama Islands.” The radio was out, but finally they got a fix and headed for port. “Everybody gets happy when the right direction is found,” he said. “I mention this because there is another ship in danger of losing its way…the old ship of state.” Then they played “America the Beautiful” with an angel choir. It was a Sunday. Here and all over were the trailer-sales lots with the signs that said REPOSSESSIONS, the trailers bearing plates from all over the South.

  In McHenry, Mississippi, a gas station and a few shacks and a dirt road leading back into the pines, three barefoot children played in the dust by the gas station. A little girl with long unkempt blond hair and a dirty periwinkle-blue dress that hung below her knees carried around an empty Sprite bottle. The older of the two boys got the Coke machine open and they all squabbled gently over their choices. A pickup pulled in with the back piled high with broken furniture and dirty mattresses: it sometimes seemed to me that mattresses were on the move all over the South. A middle-aged blond woman was pumping gas. “One of the boys is off today, so they got me working,” she said. We drove on, past cattle, a Church of God, a Jax (Fabacher) beer sign, and the Wiggin Lumber Co. Mfrs. Southern Yellow Pine Lumber.

  A somnolence so dense it seemed to inhibit breathing hung over Hattiesburg, Mississippi, at two or three o’clock of that Sunday afternoon. There was no place to get lunch, no place to get gas. On the wide leafy streets the white houses were set back. Sometimes I would see a face at a window. I saw no one on the streets.

  Outside Hattiesburg we stopped at a CAFÉ–GAS–TRUCK STOP to get a sandwich. A blond girl with a pellagra face stood sullenly behind the cash register, and a couple of men sat in a booth. Behind the counter was a woman in a pink Dacron housedress. No flicker of expression crossed her classic mountain face, and her movements were so slow as to be hypnotic. She made a kind of ballet of scooping ice into a glass. Behind her a soft-ice-cream machine oozed and plopped, and every now and then ice cubes would fall in the ice machine. Neither she nor the girl nor the two men spoke during the time we were there. The jukebox played “Sweet Caroline.” They all watched me eat a grilled-cheese sandwich. When we went back out into the blazing heat one of the men followed us and watched as we drove away.

  In Laurel, pop. 29,000: FREE FLAG DECALS, as everywhere. PUMP YOUR OWN GAS SAVE 5¢. It’s Fun. Shacks on the backstreets. A black woman sitting on her front porch on the backseat from a car.

  Cannibalized rusting automobiles everywhere, in ditches, the kudzu taking over. White wild flowers, red dirt. The pines here are getting lower, bushier. Polled Herefords. In a time when we have come to associate untouched land with parkland, a luxury, Mississippi seemed rich in appearance. One forgets that this is pre-industrial, not parkland purchased at great cost in an industrial society. There is very little of this hill land under the least cultivation. A patch of corn here, but nothing else.

  A few signs in Enterprise, Mississippi: SEVEN HAMBURGERS FOR $1. FOOTLONG BARBECUE 30¢. People sitting on the porches.

  Basic City, Mississippi, a town not on the map. You go in on a road and there, at the confluence of two railroad tracks, is a quite beautiful white frame house with a green lawn and gazebo. Lacy white flowers. The eccentricity of its location renders the viewer speechless. Across one set of tracks is a sign: PRIVATE DOGWOOD SPRINGS M.E. SKELTON’S FAMILY, OWNER. BASIC CITY MISS. Back on the road, the road into Meridian, 11, is the BASIC COURT CAFÉ AIR COND. When I left Basic City a train was moaning, the Meridian & Bigbee line. One is conscious of trains in the South. It is a true earlier time.

  Swimming at the Howard Johnson’s in Meridian

  The Howard Johnson’s in Meridian is just off Interstate 20, the intersection of Interstate 20—running east and west—and Interstate 59—running north and south from New Orleans to New York. Population 58,000, and beyond the grass and the cyclone fence the big rigs hurtle between Birmingham and Jackson and New Orleans. Sitting by the pool at six o’clock I felt the euphoria of Interstate America: I could be in San Bernardino, or Phoenix, or outside Indianapolis. Children splash in the pool. A three-year-old veers perilously toward the deep end, and her mother calls her back. The mother and her three children are from Georgia, and are staying at the Howard Johnson’s while they try to find a new house in Meridian.

  “I don’t never want to go back to Georgia,” the little boy says. “I want this to be my home.” “This will be your home,” the mother says. “Soon as Daddy and I find a house.” “I mean this,” the little boy says. “This motel.”

  Another woman appeared and called an older child, a boy twelve or thirteen, in for supper. “We’re going to get supper now,” she said. “Hell,” the boy muttered, and stalked after her wrapped in a Confederate
-flag beach towel. The sky darkened, thunder clapped, the three-year-old cried, and we all went inside to the air-conditioned chill. In a half hour or so the rain stopped, and at midnight I could hear the older children splashing in the lighted pool.

  Meridian Notes

  On the far side of the parking lot at the Howard Johnson’s in Meridian is a raw field with a mudhole and a tiny duck house, with ducks. The ducks shake the muddy water from their white feathers.

  In Weidmann’s Restaurant, paintings are hung for sale: we sat beneath one with a calling card taped beneath it. “Mrs. Walter Albert Green,” the card was engraved, and then, in a neat hand, “Dalewood Lake ‘Oil’ York, Ala. Price $35.00.” There was also a painting appalling in its apprehension of human silences, called “In Between,” by James A. Harris, $150. During the few days that I was in Meridian the painting and James A. Harris and his life in Meridian began to haunt me, and I tried to call him, but never reached him. He was at the air force base.

  Gibson’s Discount, ubiquitous. Mercedes-Benz Agency and “Citroën Service,” certainly not so. Coca-Cola signs and the Mid-South Business College and Townsend’s College of Cosmetology and the Hotel Lamar shut down. I tried to make an appointment with the director of Townsend’s Academy of Cosmetology but he said he wasn’t interested in any magazines at the present time. We had misunderstood each other, or we had not. I had an appointment with the director, Mrs. Lewis, of the Mid-South Business College, but when I arrived the doors were locked. I stood a while in the cool corridors of the Lamar Building and went downstairs and drank a Coca-Cola and came back, but the doors were still locked. We had misunderstood one another, or we had not.