Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

  My stomach was shaking. I was sorry because I had always enjoyed old ladies and I wanted to enjoy these, but I had to escape the echo chamber. As soon as I could politely do so, I excused myself and went for a walk around the campus. It was nearly deserted without the students but I had an imaginary companion. As we strolled through the grove in front of the white-columned Lyceum, Somerset Maugham whispered in my ear: “It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with equal zest.”

  Maybe. Probably. But there was something a little too sweeping about Willie’s theory. The most feminine temperament I had ever encountered belonged to Evelyn Cunningham, but though she was a chatterbox, she was not a repeating rifle. No matter how much she talked she always moved forward, usually too fast; her needle never got stuck. Compared to Miz Arvella and Miz Zaviola, Evelyn was taciturn.

  I stayed out as long as I could, but with the campus closed and no car to take me into town I was thrown back on the dorm. That meant having my meals with Miz Arvella because—I want to emphasize this—she was what the South calls “a good soul.” She would give you half of anything she had to eat and three of everything she had to say.

  As long as I had to endure her echolalia, I decided to analyze it. Perhaps she had been the youngest in a large family and had trouble getting people to listen to her. When she told me she was the oldest of seven and had raised her siblings after their mother’s untimely death, I decided that her thrice-told tales sprang from saying “No, no, no” to children while she herself was still a child. When both housemothers told me their late husbands had been farmers, I blamed isolation in the country with laconic men. This did not explain the absence of echolalia in farmwives in other parts of America, especially New England, but by then I was in no condition to pick a fight with myself.

  All of my theories collapsed on the first day of school when the dorm was invaded by girls and mothers from every part of Mississippi, representing every social background and sibling rank, who all said everything at least three times.

  “Well, lemme tell you, Ah’ve been on the horns of a dilemma evva since we got up this mornin’ to drive Tulaplee up heah from Jaspah City. Ah’ve newa seen a fuhst day like this one. Ah tole Jimmy Lee while we wuh drivin’ up heah, Ah said Jimmy Lee Ah said, Ah’m on the horns of a dilemma, that’s what Ah tole him. When we got to Clarksdale, Tulaplee remembuhed that she forgot huh opal necklace and we had to tuhn right around and go back home and get it. By the time we got stahted again, Ah was on the horns of a dilemma the likes of which you have nevva seen.”

  “Mary Lou’s upstairs just cryin’ huh eyes out ’cause it’s the fuhst time she’s evva been away from home. But Ah tole huh, Ah said Mary Lou Ah said, there’s no point cryin’ your eyes out ’cause there comes a time when the Mama bird pushes the babies out of the nest. You know what Ah mean, Ah said Mary Lou Ah said, Nature tells the Mama bird to push the babies out of the nest, so you hadn’t ought to cry your eyes out like that, ‘cause the time has come for you to leave the nest, that’s what Ah tole huh. But she kept cryin’ huh eyes out, so I went and got huh Daddy and Ah tole him Ah said T.J. Ah said, you make that chile unnerstand that she’s just got to leave the nest. So T.J. talked to huh a long time, a right good while, and finally she dried huh eyes and she said to me, Mama, she said, you’re right. Ah’ve just got to fly.”

  The front door burst open, crashed against the wall, and shuddered on its hinges as an embattled mother and daughter surged through the foyer and stormed upstairs. This time it was the daughter doing the talking.

  “Ah got sick and tard of listenin’ to all that ole hoorah so Ah tole him Ah said Purvis Lee Thornton Ah said, Ah don’t want to heah another word out of you, so you just hush your mouth right this minute, that’s what Ah tole him. And he said to me he said Jackie Sue he said, Ah know good ’n’ well you been datin’ Lamar Creighton on the sly, and Ah said now listen heah Ah said, that’s the biggest bunch of hoorah Ah evva heard! Ah said you just take that up the road and dump it, Ah said, ’cause you’re just as full of hoorah as you can be, that’s what Ah tole him.”

  Thus vanished my slim hope of blaming it on the menopause. I took four aspirin, helped Miz Arvella get everybody squared away, and then escaped to the all-male world of the History Department to sign up for my classes. I took Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Age of Reason, Historiography and Historical Research, and Thesis I. After I registered, I had an interview with my thesis advisor.

  “I see from your transcripts that you’ve had six years of French,” he said. “I assume you’re planning a topic from French history, since you can do the research in the original. How about Syndicalism?”

  Ralph had warned me about professor-generated topics. (“You can bet he’s writing a book on it and wants a free research assistant.”)

  “Labor movements don’t interest me,” I replied, “and besides, it’s too recent. I like the distant past.”

  Having blurted these sentiments to the only liberal at Ole Miss, I was smoothly but quickly transferred to another advisor, but he too pounced on the French, albeit with much more chronological empathy.

  “How about Pippin the Short?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I lied.

  I wanted to write on the historical Bérénice, but I hesitated to say so for two reasons. First, very little was known about her and I was afraid there would not be enough to make a whole thesis. Second, I did not want to suggest a female topic after two men had suggested meaty male topics. I knew what History Departments thought of “hen scholars poring over Godey’s Lady’s Book.” I decided to see if I could solve both of these problems by fleshing out Bérénice with Titus and her father and grandfather, Herod Agrippa and Herod the Great. The latter’s policy on watery moles was bound to be an inspiration.

  Next I went to the library to get my carrel assignment. The study nooks for graduate students, smaller versions of Herb’s first alcove at Park Road, were on the top floor of the library. The room was blessedly quiet and deserted. My carrel was next to a half-moon partitioned window that faced east and got the cool morning light. The desk was a Formica slab bolted to the wall, which made me think of the stationary desks bolted to the floor in high school. I gazed around the partitioned little space and smiled. It seemed more like my first private room than the one I had in the dorm. I ran my hand along the bookshelf above the desk. I was going to like studying here.

  I heard a chair scrape and turned around. A woman stood in one of the cubicles in the back of the room with her arm draped over the top of her partition. The sleeve of her white shirtwaist was rolled up to the elbow in a businesslike way but the arm was languidly, almost bonelessly Southern. Just then she moved, seeming to push herself off the partition with a conscious effort, and started up the aisle toward me. She looked slender even though she wore a gathered skirt, so the body under it must have been thin. Her hair was dark and wavy and twisted carelessly up on the crown of her head in a chignon from which a few strands escaped and straggled down. She was taller than I, and as she came closer I saw that she was older. She looked about twenty-seven.

  It seemed to take her forever to get from her carrel to mine. Southerner she undoubtedly was but a repeating rifle, never. Her smile was slow and lazy, too, but her undernourished air did not extend to her teeth. They were strong, perfectly aligned, and as white as her cotton blouse.

  “Hey,” she said.

  It meant “Hi.” Her eyes were dark grayish-green with golden flecks. I wondered what she put down when she filled out an application. She wore no makeup at all.

  “Saw you get in a cab last night. I was going to carry you up to campus but you got away.”

  I was still not used to “carry” for “drive” but her voice was as soft as velvet. I introduced myself and she responded with something that sounded like “breast.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  She gave a resigned smile as though she had been through this many times before.

 
“B-R-E-S. Rhymes with dress. My mother’s maiden name was Le Brès. Huguenot. We’re from the Gulf.”

  “Are you a graduate student?” I asked.

  “Graduate assistant. Classics. I got my master’s last year. I’m doing independent reading this year.”

  “You mean Latin and Greek?”

  She nodded. “But Latin’s my specialty.”

  It explained her oddly un-Southern, elliptical way of speaking. The military precision of Latin would necessarily eliminate the Mississippi daisy chain. I was terrifically impressed. As I tried to think of something ungulpy to say, she looked at her watch.

  “Want to go get some coffee?”

  The jukebox was playing “Tom Dooley” when we entered the snack bar. It would continue to play all that year and become the song I afterwards associated with her, incongruous as it and she were. Several people gave her a quick glance and then looked speculatively at me. She continued on through the main part of the shop and led me to a smaller annex around a corner. I put my books down beside hers on the table she chose and we went to get our coffee.

  “That’s our section,” she said, jerking her head back toward the annex. “It’s known as the Poet’s Corner. The campus cuties and the meatheads always sit in the main section. It’s called segregation,” she added with light irony.

  I decided to test her. “I call campus cuties malkins.”

  She knew what it meant. “Yes, they are that, but campus cutie is a proper noun around here. Capitalized. An official title. An award.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. The student newspaper picks a Campus Cutie of the Week. Black.”

  “What?”

  “No, I mean the coffee.”

  We returned to the table and I told her about my idea for a thesis on Bérénice. Once again she picked up the intellectual ball and ran with it—much farther than I could.

  “Hmm. Not much to go on. Tacitus mainly. ‘Titus reginam Berenicem, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab Urbe dimisit invitus invitam,’” she quoted rapidly. Something that was pure joy went through me. “There’s a little more in Deo Cassius,” she continued. “And the New Testament. Saint Paul met her. Bet that was an interesting occasion.”

  Two co-eds at a table at the end of the main section were peering around the bend and staring at us. When I looked at them, one smirked and jabbed the other with her elbow. They whispered together and giggled. That’s when I caught on.

  “Do you live in a dorm, too?” I asked.

  “No. Faculty Shacks. Apartments. Full-fledged faculty have houses. Oh, here comes the Grope.”

  She gave a slow-motion, flat-handed Jackie Gleason wave to an assortment of people coming in the side door of the shop. They were the other denizens of the Poets’ Corner—Ole Miss’s handful of bohemians who had baptized themselves the Grope for “the Group.” Though I was to like all of them, at that moment I would have gladly zapped them into dust. I wanted Bres to myself.

  Southern bohemians never quite make it. An embroidery hoop containing a half-finished sampler fell out of the Army B-4 that Sorella used for a book bag. Augustus carried in his chinos an heirloom pocketwatch with an inscribed lid. Lucius kept his place in Tropic of Capricorn with a strip of leather containing the tenet, “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.” The most startling evidence of conservative raffishness was provided by a girl my age named Vanny who launched into a complicated story about an experimental theater performance that was interrupted by a loud fart, which she archly called “a fanfaronade of flatulence.” The surliness that marks artistic types striving for existentialism was totally absent as they acknowledged Bres’s introduction; I was drowned in a sea of “How do’s.”

  All of the Grope members were connected somehow to the English or Fine Arts departments; an instructor, a graduate assistant, and two fellows like me. There were three or four others who kept a foot in both worlds and sometimes sat in the mainstream section of the coffeeshop, but the hardcore Grope was before me now.

  Bres was obviously their leader, and a few minutes’ conversation revealed her as the only bona fide intellectual among them. They readily acknowledged it, deferring to her in almost obsequious ways that betrayed the depths of their cultural roots. The Old South had revered the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean; it was why Southern mansions had Doric columns, why Ole Miss and several other Southern schools still offered a classics major, and why two young men in 1957 bore names like Augustus and Lucius. As a classical scholar, Bres was more truly Southern than the girls who called themselves belles, and the Grope knew it even if the campus cuties and meatheads did not.

  Poet’s Corner or not, the talk quickly turned to the subject that dominated Mississippi conversations at this time. The state was completely dry, so alcohol and where to get it obsessed everyone. For my benefit, several legendary “hooch run” stories were retold. The time Sorella hit a cow on her way back from the bootlegger’s. The time Lucius made gin in the chemistry lab and “evvrabody got dyreer.” The time a professor returned from Memphis “with so much hooch in the trunk that the back bumper started draggin’ and struck sparks and the gas tank blew up.” The time a federal employee at a Labor Department regional office used a government car to drive to the bootlegger’s. “Being a Yankee, he didn’t know what seeing a government anything does to bootleggers, so ’fore he knew what happened, they shot out all four tires and had his pants down and were threatening to castrate him, and he was so scared he shit all over evvrabody.”

  “Bres, tell about the time you found a jug of shine in Sardis Lake,” Vanny urged.

  “Saw a rope, pulled it in, and there it was.” It sounded like veni, vidi, vici.

  I learned about the unabashed “Blackmarket Tax” that was actually on the Mississippi statute books so the state could make money off of the bootleggers it had officially outlawed. I was told that behind the WELCOME TO Mississippi signs one could expect to find lurking state troopers looking for cars with low trunks. I heard about the bootlegger who ran “Johnny’s Grocery” who became so undone by hypocrisy that he eventually came to believe he really was a grocer and started attending meetings of the Retail Food Merchants Association.

  The strangest story they told me was about the local option situation over in the next county. Anyone with a powerful thirst could drive thirty miles to Batesville where there was a tavern that sold perfectly legal malt liquor. Not beer, malt liquor.

  “Why malt liquor?” I asked.

  Nobody knew. “That’s just the way it is,” Lucius said with a shrug.

  It was an example of those recumbent QED’s that so infuriate Northern liberals. Another is: “It’s always been that way.”

  Suddenly I found myself dying for a drink. I was not much of a drinker at this time, and it was only mid-afternoon, but going to live in Mississippi was like being transported back to the 1920s: I wanted it because it was against the law to have it. The others evidently felt the same way; all had a parched, panting look. I was about to suggest a drive to Batesville when Augustus spoke up.

  “Hey, I’ve got a jug of Thunderbird wine in my room. How about if we take it down to Bres’s apartment and drink it?”

  I had never drunk Thunderbird but like all city people, I was familiar with the vintage, having seen empty bottles bearing the label scattered in alleys. Bres agreed to the suggestion and we left the coffeeshop.

  First, we had to stop by Augustus’s dorm and stand watch while he brought out the jug in his laundrybag, surrounded, for authenticity’s sake, by a bundle of his underwear. I expected to hear sirens closing in on us. It was a heartrending example of the sanctity of states’ rights.

  The six of us walked down to the well-named Faculty Shacks, tiny frame houses like beach cottages whose peeling exteriors evoked the old saying, “Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.” Each little house was a separate apartment with its own driveway; Bres’s contained a 1954 Ford with Pearl River County tags. She opened the doo
r of the house and we trooped in.

  The uncarpeted living room was like an oven. While she was in the kitchen getting ice, I looked around. The furniture Consisted of two mattress-on-a-door couches facing each other and separated by a cable spool coffee table; the lamps had been made out of green wine jugs weighted with pebbles, and the bookcases from planks of lumber and cinder blocks. All in all, bohemian done to a turn.

  She was fairly neat but not shockingly so; her slut’s wool was coming along nicely and her window ledges contained that undisturbed layer of aristocracy to which I was accustomed. There were books everywhere, in and out of the bookcases, and an enormous collection of grant literature: prospecti and brochures on Fulbright-this and Guggenheim-that. Lucius noted my interest in them.

  “If you want to know how to live on grants forever, ask ole Bres. Freighters to Europe, too. She’s got the schedules memorized.”

  It was exactly what I did want to know. I imagined the two of us living in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and sharing a Left Bank garret. It was an easy dream to realize in the fifties; grant money fell like rain and Arthur Frommer was the Vagabond King.

  Bres brought in the ice and we started drinking the awful wine. I could barely swallow it but everyone else lapped it up. Still thinking about the Southernness of classical studies, I ventured my opinion and asked the others what they thought.

  Bres shook her head. “That was true once but today’s Mississippians wouldn’t buy it. One way or another, Latin makes them mad.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Three reasons.” She shot a long index finger out of the relaxed curve of her fist. “Primo, it’s Catholic, so the Baptists hate it. Secundo, it’s the symbol of scholarship, so the anti-intellectuals hate it. Tertio, the campus cuties hate it because it has a reputation for being hard to learn, and that makes it unfeminine.”