I was instantly thrown back into the years of Sunday school, the countless lessons of the foolishness of pride. Pride cometh before the fall. Be not proud. “Bad way to put it,” I said, retreating. “What do you think of as your greatest achievement?”
He didn’t say anything for a while, then got up and stretched, then sat back down. The sun was hitting the bench and warming up. It was a nice spot.
He put his arm on my shoulder. “You are. And your sister.” I looked at him for a moment, then hugged him awkwardly, the two of us side by side.
“Love you,” I said.
“Love you.”
—
The LSU–Ole Miss game was one of those special gatherings of the clans of the football faithful. I ran into Curtis Wilkie, the former Boston Globe political reporter who was now teaching at the Ole Miss journalism school, as he was hurrying through errands on the Oxford square. “Everybody’s in town,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve eaten a meal at home all week.”
One of my favorite Louisiana cousins, Stuart Oliphant, drove all the way from Texas for the game. He had grown up going to LSU games with his dad, a Methodist minister. We met at the Grove, where the mood of the Ole Miss fans was pleasantly fatalistic. It’s not that we expected to lose but more that everyone seemed determined to enjoy the day despite the likelihood of impending pain.
Stuart had been in the stands when LSU fielded their first African American players in 1972. (Interestingly, that same year LSU elected its first African American student body president.) “I remember sitting in the end zone of Tiger Stadium with all the drunks,” he said as we watched the Ole Miss team come through the Grove in the ritual Walk of Champions. “I was just a kid. Daddy was there and my brother. The first black LSU players, Lora Hinton and Mike Williams, came out on the field. I’d never heard cussing like that. I think it was the first time I heard the n-word.
“People were throwing these little empty bottles of booze out on the field, yelling. Then Hinton intercepted a pass, and everybody is standing up yelling for him. ‘That Puerto Rican can play! Look at that Puerto Rican sum-bitch.’ ”
We laughed and watched the crowd mobbing the Ole Miss players. The crew-cut, all-white team of 1962 was now replaced by big strong kids who looked a lot like modern Mississippi: long hair, short hair, scruffy beards and locks. With Coach Hugh Freeze in an elegant suit and sunglasses, the team glided through the Grove’s dappled sunlight.
“You guys,” I said to Stuart, meaning LSU fans, “are going to leave here so happy. Ole Miss can hardly field eleven guys on defense.”
“Maybe. But you know what worries me?”
“The long drive home tomorrow?”
“For these guys,” he said, pointing to the end of the line of Ole Miss players disappearing through the crowd, “it’s the biggest game of the year. Our guys are looking to Alabama.”
“We already lost to Alabama,” I moaned. “It was a slaughter.”
“We’ll see. I just have a bad feeling.”
—
With the first Ole Miss interception, it started to feel as if something special might just happen. It was late in the first quarter, and LSU had shown why they were ranked number six in the country. They had phenomenal athletes who played with confidence and grace, including a receiver, Odell Beckham, who casually caught passes with one hand in the pregame warm-up. LSU was headed for what seemed like a certain score when a freshman Ole Miss defensive back flashed across the field to steal the ball from a surprised Beckham.
My father leaped to his feet, I next to him, and in that moment it was as if the years had shed away as effortlessly as tossing aside a quilt when getting out of bed in the morning. He was no different from the students below us, screaming in utter joy. This simple game had cut through our differences and our years with a powerful grace.
The interception was only one play, early in a long game, but it was enough to let you believe that tonight had a shot to be one of those magical games when luck and chance had decided to bless our side, if only for a few hours. Of course there was the equal possibility it was all a great tease, that our hopes had been raised, only to be dashed more brutally. But when you are playing one of the best teams in the country, you don’t let a piece of hope drift by, convinced another, larger one will soon follow. And at the half, miraculously, Ole Miss led 10–0.
Everyone seemed more nervous at halftime than before the game. Then there had been a grudging anticipation of pain masked by the dark humor of those who expected to lose but still found a way to have fun. But now the door had been cracked open to the bright and happy land called upset. Everyone spoke quietly, respectfully, as if concerned about angering the gods of football through sins of pride.
We ate hot dogs and talked in subdued tones about how the crippled Ole Miss defense was playing with such heart. “They’re not afraid,” my dad said. “That’s the key. They’re playing like they’re angry, not afraid.”
When the second half began, I slumped down next to my father, preparing myself for the disaster sure to unfold. We’d had our fun, but the house always demands its payment, and in this case the number six team in the nation was surely the house. “I’ve got a bad feeling,” I said to my father as Ole Miss kicked off.
“The Rebels want this more,” my father said. “If it’s close in the end, I think we’ll take it.”
To my amazement, the second half began well. Ole Miss scored on their first possession, making it 17–0. They looked the way we had expected LSU to look, running powerfully behind a dominating offensive line. “Can we leave now?” I said. “I know there’s pain coming. I don’t want the pain. I reject the pain.”
And it came. On the kickoff, LSU’s dazzling Odell Beckham ran through most of the Ole Miss team, until one desperate tackle brought him down on the thirty-nine-yard line. Half a dozen plays later, LSU scored. Ole Miss 17, LSU 7.
When Ole Miss got the ball, they promptly fumbled. “What did I tell you?” I moaned to my father.
He shrugged. “They just need to stop ’em now.”
I’d heard this same reassurance from my dad since we first started going to games whenever it was time for the Rebels to make a stand. I’d found comfort in it, and because more often than not the Rebels did stop them, it inspired a deep faith in my father’s power to will a commanding defensive stand. I wondered if, fifty years from now, fathers and sons would be sitting in the stands watching their favorite team and telling each other, “We just need to stop ’em now.” I found that idea strangely reassuring, as if we were part of some timeless communion of sports.
For two plays, the Ole Miss defense was perfect, almost sacking the LSU quarterback twice, forcing two incomplete passes Then on a third and ten, he was chased by the defense but threw a beautiful pass for thirty-four yards. A huge groan rumbled through the stadium. Two plays later, LSU scored, and it was Ole Miss 17, LSU 14.
Ole Miss came back to score, and my father slapped my knee and sprang to his feet with the crowd. “We can beat these guys,” he said. “We can do it.”
With three minutes left in the game, it was tied, 24–24. Probably every Ole Miss fan was thinking about last week’s game against Texas A&M, when the team fought ferociously only to lose in the last seconds. “Have faith,” my father said. “Have faith.”
The rest of the game wasn’t pretty and hardly looked like destiny, but somehow Ole Miss ended up where Texas A&M had been the previous week. There were six seconds left in the game when the field goal team came out. The kicker had missed one earlier, and at forty-four yards out this kick was at the limit of his range. LSU fielded its biggest, tallest players, tremendous athletes with great vertical jump and pure fury in their hearts. They were desperate to win a national championship. They had worked for years for it. Now this one skinny kid was trying to take that away.
And so he did. In the kick of his life, Andrew Ritter nailed it.
Then my father lifted me up in his arms in a great big bear hug, a
nd this, I knew, was what I had missed most of all.
7
After the LSU game, I drove my parents down to New Orleans for a few days. It was a drive that should take about five hours, so naturally it took us most of the day. We drove south on Interstate 55, the main north-south route that divides Mississippi. In disasters like Katrina, it became a primary escape route for everyone leaving for safer ground. But for generations of Mississippians, I-55 and the older northbound highways of Mississippi had always been escape routes to a different life.
This was the route of the great exodus to the North that so many African Americans took trying to find better jobs and a better life. It was the road that a Mississippi governor, Kirk Fordice, was driving on his way back from seeing his high school girlfriend when he crashed and almost died. It was awkward that his wife was living in the Governor’s Mansion at the time, but this was the way of Mississippi: you went north to Memphis or south to New Orleans to escape, if only for a night or weekend. In high school, my sister and I had come up with a friend to see Jimi Hendrix play in Memphis one January. On the way back, the electric windows of his parents’ fancy car mysteriously lowered and refused to rise. It was about ten degrees, and we drove the entire way with the heater on full, shivering, playing Hendrix on an eight track. It was sublime.
Jackson is about halfway between Oxford and New Orleans. When we got to the outskirts of Jackson, my dad tapped me on the shoulder and gestured to his right. “Doesn’t look like a good day,” he said. I looked over, confused. Then I saw it. We were passing the building that housed his old law firm with the name of the firm on the outside. For an old-school lawyer like my dad, this hinted at advertising, and he loved to tease them that it probably flashed on and off when they won a big case.
“Not flashing,” I said.
He nodded, smiling.
The law offices were in a prosperous business/shopping center development with a gleaming new Apple Store. Just a few miles away was the campus of St. Andrew’s day school. It was the new incarnation of the rattrap mansion on North State Street where I had gone to elementary school. This was the “New Jackson,” and if you had grown up here as I did, you would appreciate that “new” was truly better.
Jackson was more like the rest of the country now, with its chain stores and flurry of rush-hour traffic, but the loss of that individuality that came with the isolationism of earlier years was not to be grieved. For Mississippi, joining the mainstream was mostly progress. Jackson had a world-class bookstore, Lemuria, hosted the USA International Ballet Competition, had a newspaper that wasn’t trying to turn back the clock, had better schools, public and private. A new civil rights museum was being built, helped by a large contribution from my father’s law firm. There were still tremendous problems of poverty and race that seemed to improve with glacial slowness, but the efforts to seal it off from the rest of the country had ended.
I hadn’t planned to, but I found myself turning off the interstate, drawn to our old neighborhood. My parents smiled and didn’t object.
We passed Riverside Park, where I had learned to swim. When you grow up in a place with the long summers of Jackson, the delight of days in a pool is near primal. Riverside had been one of a handful of public pools sprinkled across Jackson, like an oasis in a desert. It was close to our house, and I could still remember the sense of joyful freedom when I first rode my bike from our house on Piedmont Street up the big hill to the pool. I was afraid my parents would say no, so I did the only natural thing and didn’t ask permission. When I started out, I didn’t tell myself I was going to ride all the way to the pool. I went to the end of Piedmont Street, which was the normal bike boundary my parents had established. Then I snuck a right on Riverside and just kept going. All the way there I expected a car to pull up alongside and some adult—my mother or father or a neighbor—to roll down the window, letting a gust of cool air from the clunky car air conditioner blow out, and say, “What in the world do you think you are doing?”
But that never happened. I kept riding until I got to the pool. Years later, I read this description of OPEC’s founding: “They doubled the price of crude and when they didn’t hear jets, they doubled it again.” That was sort of how I felt riding to the pool. If not stopped, I was going to go.
Later that afternoon, I snuck back down the hill, taking the backstreets through our Belhaven neighborhood to avoid being seen on busy Riverside Drive. My swim shorts were dry, or so I thought, and wearing them wasn’t incriminating. I’d wear swim trunks all day, every day in the summer. We all did, looking for hoses to run through or any backyard plastic pool, the ones that seemed to last only a few days before they exploded. I was feeling very proud of myself when I was standing in the kitchen, eating some leftover ham biscuits from a party. Wonderful, salty Virginia ham with soft biscuits was a standard at every party, and when I taste those flavors today, I can hear the clink of glasses, the high laughter of women, piano.
“Stuart Stevens, you’ve been swimming.” I turned around to see an impish grin on Elzoria’s face. I had a mouthful of biscuit. “You rode that little bike of yours up to the pool, and you went s-w-i-m-m-i-n-g.”
“How do you—”
“Don’t you even try,” she said, laughing. “How was the water? That Stuberfield boy go with you?”
“He was there already.” That was Al Stuberfield, who lived down the street and was my best friend. “I love to swim,” I said. “I’m fast too.”
“Don’t brag on yourself. Somebody is always better. Pride cometh before the fall.”
“Yes, ma’am. But I beat everybody.”
“And tomorrow somebody will beat you. Don’t you forget it.”
“Yes, ma’am. Do you like to swim, Elzoria?”
“Me? Me?” She laughed. “You put me in that water and I’ll drop like a rock.”
“You can’t swim?” I asked. I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t swim.
“Not a lick.”
“You should come tomorrow, and I’ll teach you,” I said. “It’s fun.”
She looked at me, cocking her head in a way she had as if wondering how the world got this way.
“Well, we’ll talk about that sometime,” she said.
“You’ll like it,” I promised, grabbing another biscuit. She snatched it from my hand and took a bite.
“Mmmm. These things make my mouth too happy. I’m gonna be fat as you.” She pinched my stomach, and I buckled over, giggling.
“I’m not fat!”
She tickled me harder.
—
Today there isn’t a swimming pool at Riverside Park. There’s now a handsome museum of natural science at the park, but for years the pool I loved sat empty, unused until finally it was filled in. Like all of the public pools across the state—and most of the South—the Jackson swimming pools were segregated. Though it didn’t hit me until years later, that probably explained the odd look Elzoria gave me when I suggested I teach her to swim. When federal courts ordered that the Jackson pools be integrated, the city closed the pools rather than integrate. That prompted a challenge that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1971 the Court ruled 5–4 that Jackson closing its pools was consistent with the doctrine of separate but equal. If there were no open public pools, then blacks were not being singled out for discrimination. Everyone was being equally denied the right to swim through the five months of a Mississippi summer.
Madness? Of course. Once closed, the Jackson pools never reopened. In other towns across the state, they were either converted to private “clubs” for whites only or filled in. In the small town of Stonewall, named for Stonewall Jackson, in eastern Mississippi, near Meridian, a beautiful Olympic-sized pool was filled with hundreds of dump truck loads of the red soil that had never been as productive as the Delta’s more fecund black earth. Years later, a local businessman who had sweet memories of summers spent at the pool paid to have it dug out, rebuilt, and reopened for the public.
The public expla
nation for the closing of the Jackson pools was “closed for maintenance.” Around that time, my parents decided to build a pool in our backyard. When the neighborhood was first being developed, my dad had bought a double lot that ran between Piedmont Street and Howard Street. Our house faced on the dead end Piedmont Street, and the backyard, where they built the pool, faced onto Howard Street. This allowed access to the pool from another street, away from the house. It felt not like a backyard private pool but more like a neighborhood pool, and so it was. Pretty much always, the pool was open to whoever wanted to use it.
We drove from Riverside Park through the old neighborhood, down Howard Street to the back of our old house. I hadn’t been here in years. I parked the Toyota on Howard Street. The lot in back of our house where my parents had built the swimming pool was once again a backyard. The pool had disappeared.
“They filled it in,” I said.
“So they did,” my father said.
“I think I heard about this,” my mother said.
Part of the old fence was still there, redbrick columns and cedar planking. I got out to stretch and look around. It was hot and very green, like a long, lush tunnel. This little corner of the world had meant a lot to me. Next door was the house where my aunt Dorothy had lived her entire adult life, and I had written my first articles and short stories in her basement. She was of the MacLaren clan with a fondness for all things Scottish and would bring down shortbread cookies for me to eat. Her husband, my father’s older brother, had died young of a heart condition from rheumatic fever as a child. One door down was the little house where my grandmother lived. I had wandered in and out of her kitchen in my early years. She was always reading, everything from mysteries to Shakespeare. My father often made the case that the South was something of a hidden matriarchy, that the impact of so many men being lost in the Civil War had created a society dominated by strong women. It was an interesting theory, and women like my aunt Dorothy and my grandmother were good evidence.
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