South and West

by Joan Didion

  An Afternoon in Meridian with Stan Torgerson

  When I called Stan Torgerson for lunch at his radio station, WQIC, and asked him the best place to lunch, he said Weidmann’s, “but it wouldn’t win any Holiday Magazine awards.” In fact it had, and was not a bad restaurant, but everyone in Mississippi begins on the defensive. “I’ll be the biggest man in a green shirt to come through the door,” he advised me. He was, at lunch, wary at first. He said he didn’t think I knew what I was doing. I agreed. He refused a drink, saying he wasn’t in New York City. Stan Torgerson came out of the cold North (Minnesota, I think) and headed to Memphis, where he went into broadcasting. He worked in Miami, and then, for a year, in San Diego, living in La Jolla. He felt ill at ease in La Jolla—his neighbors kept to themselves, had their own interests—and he wanted to get back south. His son had won a football scholarship to Ole Miss. He was worried about his children and drugs in California. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I just haven’t reached the point where I think pot is a way of life.”

  When the black radio station in Meridian came up for sale he bought it. He also broadcasts the Ole Miss games, something he began doing when he was in Memphis. “That’s right,” he said, “I own the ethnic station, WQIC. In its thirteenth year of serving the black community here.” He programs gospel and soul, and reaches 180,000 blacks in several Mississippi and Alabama counties, “the thirty-second-largest black market in the country, sixty miles in all directions and forty-three percent of that area is black. We serve a major black market, program soul music and gospel music, but what does that mean? A month ago in Billboard there was a survey pointing out that the Top 40–format stations are playing basically soul. Jackson 5 with ‘ABC,’ ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time,’ that’s Top 40 but it’s soul. Once in a while we throw in some blue-eyed soul, like Dusty Springfield with ‘Son of a Preacher Man.’ We don’t play rock because our people don’t dig it. We don’t play your underground groups like the Jefferson Airplane…We have goodly reason to believe that ten to fifteen percent of our audience is white; some of the phone calls we get in the afternoon for dedications, they’re definitely white voices. We get thirty-six percent of the audience.”

  He said I was probably wondering why he came back to Mississippi. “I came because I dearly love this state. I had a son—he’ll be a senior this fall—playing football at the University of Mississippi.”

  He pointed out that Meridian was timber country, hill country. Pulpwood is the backbone of the agricultural product. He pointed out how progressive Meridian was: its three new hospitals. “In most southern cities there is a much stronger tendency to old-line money…Southern retailers stayed in business privately, home-owned, until very recently. In most cases the retailer has just begun to feel the competition from the chains. There’s the greatest business opportunity in the country right here in the South…We don’t have a McDonald’s in a city of almost fifty thousand people, don’t have any of these franchises here yet. You give me one corner of one intersection in Jackson, Mississippi, or you give me the whole ball of wax right here in Meridian, I’d take the whole ball of wax and I’d put a McDonald’s on one corner, a Burger Chef on the other, a Shoney’s Po’ Boy ’cross the street…”

  His voice kept on, weaving ever higher flights of economic possibility. “There is and must be,” he said, a “continued turning to the South by industry. The climate is certainly one reason. Another is that the South wants industry, and is willing to give a tax advantage to get it. Another, of course, is that there is a relatively low level of unionism in the South. Lockheed assembles tail sections here and ships them to California for assembly…

  “Atlanta is the magic city for the young around here, across the whole social spectrum…The great migration out in the past ten years has been black, they get these glowing letters, and of course they’ve got relatively liberal welfare programs in some of the northern states…No doubt, too, there appears to be greater opportunity in the North.”

  More on the progressive nature of Meridian: “Our radio station has probably got as fine a list of blue-chip clients as any in town, black or not. We’ve got all four banks, and anyone in retailing who’s interested in doing business with the black—the black’s dollar is very important. The minimum wage was probably the most important thing to happen along these lines, and then food stamps were a good deal, I would say they added millions of dollars to our economy.

  “We are in a transitional phase. There’s a tremendous push to education on the part of young blacks. The schools here are completely integrated. Of course neither you nor I can change the older black, the forty-year-old, his life patterns are settled.

  “Ole Miss has its standards to keep up. As more and more blacks get an educational advantage, you’ll see blacks at Ole Miss. There’s a feeling among some black leaders that because these kids have not had advantages they should get some kind of educational break, but basically what has to happen is the standards have to stay up and the people come up to meet them.”

  We were driving through town at night, and Stan Torgerson interrupted himself to point out the post office. “There’s the post office, the courthouse where the famous Philadelphia trials were held, the trials for the so-called Philadelphia deaths.”

  “If there were elm trees hanging over the street it would be very midwestern,” Stan observed as we drove through the residential district. He pointed out his $29,500 house, a two-story frame, “twenty-eight hundred square feet, with magnolia, dogwood, and pecan trees.” He pointed out Poplar Drive, the “Park Avenue of Meridian, Mississippi, all the houses built by the old-line families.”

  Fervently, he kept reverting to the wholesomeness of life in Meridian. His daughter, who would be a high school senior in the fall, had “her sports, her outdoor activities, her swimming. It’s a quiet, pacific type of living, which is one of the reasons I wanted to come back down here. The kids are taught to say ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ I know it’s very fashionable to poke fun at the South, but I’ll pit our slum area any day against the slum areas where the Cubans and Puerto Ricans live in Miami, Florida, and Miami’ll lose.”

  Meridian is the largest city between Jackson and Birmingham, and there is a naval base there which means a great deal to the community. At apartment buildings largely inhabited by the navy there are cars with plates from all over the country.

  Some random social observations from Stan Torgerson included: most of the local children go to college within the state, at Ole Miss or Mississippi or Southern Mississippi; the other country club, built with federal money, has a membership which includes “assistant managers of stores and some navy people”; most of the subdivisions in Meridian feature “custom houses.” Torgerson paused dramatically, to emphasize the versatility of the new blood in town: “A fabric store.”

  I asked if some children did not leave, and he allowed that some did. “Nothing here for the kid with an engineering degree. And of course the girls go where they marry. Southern girls are notoriously husband hunting, but I guess that’s the same anywhere.” It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

  Torgerson was wound up now, and I could not stop his peroration. “There’s been a great metamorphosis in recent years in the South, the Volkswagen dealership for example comparable in size to anything you’ll find anywhere.

  “The KKK which used to be a major factor in this community isn’t a factor anymore, both the membership and the influence have diminished, and I cannot think of any place where the black is denied entrance, with the possible exception of private clubs. We don’t have any antagonistic-type black leaders working against racial harmony. Since the advent of black pride, black power, there is a little tendency to be self-segregating. On our station, we have a program we call Adventures in Black History, to point out the contributio
ns black people have made—a black minister does it. I have blacks working in the WQIC Soul Shop, and there’s a black druggist here, a man eminently qualified, who is a local boy who went north and came back, received his training at the University of Illinois. We have a certain degree of black business, including this gas station here, which is owned by a black. The key is racial harmony, and education, and we’ll try to provide our people with both, ’cause we’re gonna live together a long time. Every major retailer hires black clerks, Sears has a couple of black department heads, there’s a black business college here, and a black and white Career Training Institute.

  “Of course we have transplants, too, new ideas, like any other hybrid we’re generally stronger. We’re not nearly as inbred as we used to be. We’ve been withdrawn in this part of the South for many, many years, but we’ve become more aggressive, and as people come in they’ve helped us become more aggressive—we don’t wear crinolines anymore, no we don’t.

  “And about our politics, well, George Wallace got a lot of votes in Indiana, let’s face it. I’m not saying I’m going to have a black minister come home to dinner tonight, ’cause I’m not. But things are changing. I had a man the other day, owns an appliance store, he never believed you could send a black repairman into somebody’s house. Now he can’t find a white…He asks me if I know a black man who makes a good appearance. That’s progress…

  “Of course, there’s a tremendous lack of skilled blacks, and the problem is training and education. It’s no longer a matter of lack of opportunity, it’s a matter of lack of skills. We’re still two generations from full equality, but so are they in Chicago, in Detroit, and have you ever been in Harlem?”

  Glazed by the two hours in which this man in the green shirt had laid Meridian out before us as an entrepreneur’s dream, a Shoney’s Po’ Boy on every corner and progress everywhere, even at the country club, I dropped him off and drove through the still-deserted streets of the downtown. A few black women were on the streets, and they carried umbrellas against the sun. It was almost five o’clock. In the middle of 22nd Avenue, the main street of Meridian, there was a man holding a shotgun. He had on a pink shirt and a golfing cap, and in one ear there was a hearing aid. He raised the shotgun and shot toward the roof of a building several times.

  I stopped the car and watched him a while, then approached him. “What are you shooting at?” I asked.

  “Pi-eagins,” he said cheerfully.

  In this one demented afternoon Mississippi lost much of its power to astonish me.

  —

  Because I had fallen and hurt a rib in New Orleans, and the rib pained me in the steaming heat and when I swam or turned in bed, I decided to see a doctor in Meridian. I was unsure how long it would be before I was again in a town big enough to have an emergency clinic, and here there were, Stan Torgerson had told me repeatedly, four hospitals, and I even knew the name of one, the Rush Foundation Hospital, and so I went there. One of the younger Rush doctors looked at my rib and sent me for an X-ray. I do not know if it was Dr. Vaughn Rush or Dr. Lowry Rush, who are brothers, or Dr. Gus Rush, who is a cousin. Before the doctor came in a nurse took my history, and she seemed not to believe a word I said. While I waited in my white smock I began to see it through her eyes: A woman walks into a clinic, a stranger to Meridian. She has long straight hair, which is not seen in the South among respectable women past the age of fourteen, and she complains of an injured rib. She gives her address as Los Angeles, but says the rib was injured in a hotel room in New Orleans. She says she is just “traveling through” Meridian. This is not a story to inspire confidence, and I knew it as I told it, which made meeting her eyes difficult.

  Dr. Rush himself was willing to let this story go at face value, more or less.

  “Just traveling on vacation,” he said.

  “Actually I’m a writer,” I said. “I like going places I’ve never been.”

  “Traveling alone?” He pressed at my rib.

  “With my husband.”

  This did not sound exactly right, either, because I was not wearing my wedding ring. There was a long pause.

  “I went to school up north,” he said. “I liked it a lot up there. I thought once I wouldn’t mind living up there.”

  “But you came back here.”

  “But…” he said, “I came back here.”

  —

  One evening in Meridian we went to the movies: Loving was playing with George Segal and Eva Marie Saint. The audience, what there was of it, gazed at the screen as if the movie were Czech. As it happened I had seen Eva Marie Saint a few weeks before, at dinner at someone’s house in Malibu, and the distance between Malibu and this movie house in Meridian seemed limitless. How had I gotten from there to here: there, as always, was the question.

  NOTE: Thinking about southern girls I had known in New York, the astonishing way their life in the South remained more vivid to them than anything that was happening to them in the city. Esther Nicol, when told I had been a Tri Delt at Berkeley, sniffed and said that at Ole Miss the Tri Delt house was “mostly Mississippi girls.” To Esther, who was from Memphis, this meant something real. Again, remembering having lunch with a girl from Nashville who was working at Condé Nast. She would have to leave in a month, she told me, because home in Nashville the season was beginning and her grandmother was giving a party.

  NOTE: On being asked for identification when I ordered a drink in the rural South. Before I came south I had not been taken for seventeen in considerable years, but several times in that month I had to prove I was eighteen. It is assumed that grown women will have their hair done, is all I could think.

  NOTE: Remembering that in Durham in 1942 there was something, or was said to be something, called Push Day, when blacks would push whites on the streets. People avoided going downtown shopping on Push Day, which was either Tuesday or Wednesday. And there was that time in Durham, when Mother and my brother, Jimmy, and I got on a bus to go out to Duke and the driver would not start because we were sitting in the back of the bus.

  On the Road from Meridian to Tuscaloosa, Alabama

  Signs: WELCOME TO ALABAMA! TAKE A FUN BREAK!

  782,000 ALABAMA BAPTISTS WELCOME YOU!

  Dixie Gas stations, all over, with Confederate flags and grillwork.

  Boys working on the road between Cuba and Demopolis. Making measurements with fishing poles. Sumter County, Alabama, around in here, is 80 percent black. We crossed the Demopolis Rooster Bridge over the Tombigbee River, another still, brown river. I think I never saw water that appeared to be running in any part of the South. A sense of water moccasins.

  In Demopolis around lunchtime the temperature was 96 degrees and all movement seemed liquid. An Alabama state trooper drove slowly around town. I put a penny in a weighing machine on the main street. My weight was ninety-six, and my fortune was “You are inclined to let your heart rule your head.”

  In the drugstore a young girl was talking to the woman at the counter. “I’m gonna run off and get married,” the girl said. “Who to?” the woman asked. The girl crumpled her straw paper. “I’m gonna get married,” she said stubbornly, “I don’t care who.”

  To get out of the sun I sat a while in the Demopolis library and contemplated a newspaper photograph of the Demopolis police force (nine of them) pouring out 214 gallons of confiscated moonshine. The moonshine had been confiscated after a four-hour chase and tracking with a bloodhound. The driver of the moonshine car, Clarence Bunyan Barrett of Cedartown, Georgia, was fined $435 and released.

  At the desk a small birdlike woman about seventy was chatting with the librarian.

  “The Nashville Sound in yet?”

  “Still on order,” the librarian said.

  “How ’bout The World of Fashion?”

  “Still out.”

  “Put me down on the waiting list for The World of Fashion.”

  The French Lieutenant’s Woman was moving briskly that summer in the Demopolis library. The temperatur
e at two was 98 degrees.

  Greene County rolls gently, trees and grass, a light clear green. Pasture. The land looks rich, and many people from Birmingham, etc. (rich people) maintain places here to hunt.

  The southern myth: a small bungalow named Grayfield, lots and lots of small one-story houses with two-by-four pillars.

  Eutaw, Alabama, is a town the train goes through. Children were bicycling in town, barely moving in the leafy still air. There were tiger lilies everywhere, wild or naturalized. We listened to country music on the radio. There was a funeral taking place at the Eutaw Baptist Church at 4 p.m. on June 16, and the mourners made a frieze outside the church with a group of children on a penny hike. The coin spinning on the sidewalk and the children kneeling to see, with the adults in black around them. In Eutaw there was a white swimming pool and a black swimming pool, and an apartment house, the Colonial Apts., where the sign read APPLY JIMMY’S GRILL.

  In the Eutaw City Hall I asked a clerk where the Chamber of Commerce was, but she could not, or would not, tell me. On a corner was a locked-up Teen Center, with posters inside that read GO TIDE and FREAK-OUT. There was one poster of a peace symbol. Children represent a mysterious subculture in small southern towns.

  At 5 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon we drove down a side road into Ralph, Alabama. A sign told us that the ZIP was 35480, the pop. 50, and that the town included:

  Bethel (Baptist)

  Shiloh (Baptist)

  Wesley Chapel

  Post Office

  School.

  Ralph was also a Prize Winner for Cotton Improvement. Tiger lilies and no people, anywhere.