by Julia Reed
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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For my father, Clarke Reed, the Silver-Haired Daddy of the Delta
Acknowledgments
Sid Evans was my first editor at Garden & Gun. He not only hatched the idea of the columns collected in this book, he also kept the magazine afloat—and on the map—during the toughest of times.
David DiBenedetto, Sid’s successor as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, is the best friend, sounding board, drinking buddy, confidante, and collaborator a girl could hope to have. The magazine—and its writers—have thrived under his leadership.
Rebecca Darwin guides the ship with a steady hand and passionate heart.
This is my fourth outing with my intrepid book editor Michael Flamini. His unfailing enthusiasm, patience, talent, and trust have been true gifts. He is also an unrivaled dining companion and invaluable menu consultant!
Jon Meacham has been both my actual and my shadow editor for almost two decades. I will never be able to thank him enough for his clarity, his advice (though he claims I never take it), and for his steadfast friendship. Keith Meacham is herself an excellent editor and true blue friend—and provider of luxurious safe harbor whenever I am in Nashville.
My agent Binky Urban keeps the trains, and me, on track. It is no small feat but she pulls it off it with her usual grace and good humor.
Too many people to name either appear on these pages or have inspired them. I am lucky indeed to be surrounded by so much love, support, and good humor, and so many stalwart hearts.
Finally, I remain forever grateful that my father landed in the Mississippi Delta, the place I so happily call home, and that he convinced my mother to make a life with him there. They are two of the most extraordinary people I’ll ever know.
Foreword
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight…
Tell me a story of deep delight.
—ROBERT PENN WARREN
The poet, novelist, and critic Robert Penn Warren wrote those lines in 1969, and they were published in a volume of his entitled Audubon. I am, it is true, a sucker for Warren—All the King’s Men, the epic 1946 novel about Willie Stark, a Huey Long-like figure who seeks to do his best, albeit imperfectly, in a fallen world, remains perhaps the seminal book of my life—but I can honestly say that I have never encountered a finer description of the duty of the writer than the verse above: to tell stories of great distances, of starlight, and, finally, of deep delight, however tragic and ultimately incomplete life may be on this side of Paradise.
The book you are reading now is in the Warren tradition of deep delight. With her distinctive voice, her sense of humor and of humanity, and her persistent—if largely unacknowledged, for that would give away the game—good cheer about the world’s great and small joys, Julia Reed has emerged as one of the country’s most astute and insightful chroniclers of the things that matter most. Whether the topic is what we eat, how we live, or why we believe, Julia has, in her books and in her wildly popular column in Garden & Gun, pulled off what her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner set out to do when he said that he wanted to take a “postage stamp of native soil,” of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, as a particular stage on which to dramatize great human themes.
Julia’s postage stamp, though, is even larger than Faulkner’s. To switch metaphors, her canvas is the whole of the South, stretching from the dives of New Orleans up through her beloved Delta and winding up, naturally, in the northern reaches of Virginia, at the Madeira School for girls. Who else but Julia could be a trusted guide through such a sprawling mass of America, never putting a Manolo Blahnik-shod foot wrong in limning the triumphs and absurdities of culture? I can’t think of a single soul.
Whether her subject is Scotch whiskey, the opossum, or the mad politics, mournful music, and out-of-the-way cafés and bars of the South, Julia unerringly finds the universal in the particular. In a way, she’s a foreign correspondent in her own land, filing dispatches about the sacred and the profane—and revealing, often subtly, the porous border between the two. The mark of a great journalist is the capacity to see what should be evident to everyone but somehow isn’t—not until a keener eye and a sharper sensibility casts fresh light on what lies before us in plain sight, suddenly giving readers the fabled flash of recognition.
That’s Julia’s formidable gift—the gift, as Shelby Foote once put it in a letter to Walker Percy describing the writer’s craft, of teaching others how to see. Because of her, our vision is clearer, our senses heightened, our lives charmed and enchanted. And what more, in the end—or even in the beginning or in the middle—could we ask of a writer than that?
Nothing. Nothing more. For decades I have been struck by how many people come up to me to bear unsought witness to Julia’s power—the readers of her work who, on learning that I am fortunate enough to be her friend, want to tell me how important, how wonderful, how indispensable they find her voice. That irreplaceable, unmatched voice is the one you will hear in the following pages. Alternately funny and wise, charming and knowing, transporting and illuminating, Julia has, in this collection, given us yet another great gift. It is a gift, you will soon come to see, of deep delight.
As is, inescapably, Julia herself.
—Jon Meacham
Introduction
In 1967 Willie Morris wrote a memoir, North Toward Home, in which he recalled his childhood in the Mississippi Delta, a place with its share of dark history, but also one of abiding grace and goodness, humor and eccentricity. Like Willie, I grew up in the Delta, in Greenville, about seventy miles up the road from his birthplace in Yazoo City and, like Willie, I went north, first to Washington, D.C., and then to Manhattan, not toward home exactly, but for a career in journalism and what I hoped would be a rich, full life. It was. But a few years after Willie returned home, I came back South too, first to New Orleans, where I have lived off and (mostly) on since the early 1990s and, more recently, to my beloved Delta, where I’m building a house.
Until I came back, I don’t think I realized how much I’d missed the landscape and the sense of community, the humor and the good-heartedness, the agricultural scent of earth and chemicals more powerful to me than any of Proust’s madeleines. Most of all, I’d missed the fact that fun was so damn easy to get up to. I had some fun with Willie a time or two before he left us in 1999, but his prose is what I remember best. I frequently quote his line that “it’s the juxtapositions that get you” down here, because they sure as hell still abound.
A couple of years ago, for example, I found myself slap in the middle of some typically jarring contradictions when my good buddies Roy Blount, Jr. and William Dunlap and I served on a panel together in Jackson, Mississippi, the city Willie ultimately called home. Our assigned topic was fairly loose, but we knew we’d be touching on possums—Roy and I have both written about them (there�
��s an essay about the misunderstood marsupial on these pages) and Dunlap has not only painted one, he is the creator of the tasty opossum cocktail (vodka, a splash of cranberry juice, a dash or two of orange bitters, and an orange slice as garnish). As a prop of sorts (and perhaps a spot of inspiration), we decided to bring the cocktails with us onto the “stage,” which was actually the chancel of a Methodist church that had been commandeered for the occasion.
As it happened, a few months before the event, Mississippi governor Phil Bryant had signed a bill into law that allowed handguns inside churches. For an added flourish, Bryant chose to do so with his own personal handgun, a Glock, atop the large family Bible on his desk, a newspaper image greeted with an alarming amount of equanimity by a large segment of the populace. Roy and Dunlap and I, on the other hand, did not fare so well with the locals. Weeks after our panel, we learned we’d caused something of a scandal for drinking alcohol in the Methodist sanctuary. Too bad we weren’t packing heat instead. No one would have flinched.
This is the kind of stuff that keeps you pretty much constantly on your toes. It also provides ample fodder for people like me who make a living documenting the various goings-on in these environs. The particular goings-on in this volume were all penned for Garden & Gun magazine, where I’ve been writing since its happy inception more than a decade ago. Its very name is a juxtaposition, taken from a fabled, sadly long-shuttered bar in Charleston, South Carolina, where I was lucky enough to be taken as an underage college student visiting the city for a friend’s debutante party. There were ceiling fans and balconies, sailors and socialites, the occasional drag queen and the frequent sockless Gucci wearer. It was an eclectic, high-low mix of folks, one not entirely representative of the South, but close enough that the founders of a magazine about Southern culture chose to take its name.
My column in the magazine is called, appropriately, “The High & The Low” and I have a great time brainstorming its wide-ranging topics with my intrepid editor, David DiBennedetto. I write about our music and our food (two of the region’s best gifts to the rest of the country), our critters (and our penchant for hunting and making a meal of them), our drinking habits (prodigious), our talent for making our own fun (highly necessary), and some of our more embarrassing tendencies (including our seemingly bottomless propensity for committing a whole lot of craziness in the name of the Lord). I still get mighty embarrassed by the behavior of some of the folks in my region, but it also has been my fellow Southerners who have brought me the greatest joy—on the page, over the airwaves, around the dinner table, at the bar or, hell, in the checkout line.
Willie contended he could best write about the land of our birth from the distance Manhattan afforded him. I find it useful—and endlessly entertaining—to be right here in the thick of things. What I love most about where I live is that my fellow residents have always had an enormous capacity for laughing at themselves—for good reason, of course, but it’s a quality we could all do with a lot more of in these fraught times. It’s hot and even more humid, the mosquitoes are murderous, and we might all be half crazy, but I am grateful every day that I ended up returning South toward home.
Part One
Personal Notes
Grace Under Pressure
“Function in disaster, finish in style” is one of the mottoes of the Madeira School, the all-girls boarding school in McLean, Virginia, where I happily spent my junior and senior years. Festina lente (“Make haste slowly”) is the official motto, the one engraved on our class rings, but as anyone who knows me can tell you, that’s not really my thing. I prefer the informal one, the one that was drummed into the student body by Lucy Madeira Wing, who founded the school in 1906, ten years after she graduated from Vassar. When my mother was at Madeira in the 1950s, Miss Madeira was still alive and pretty much kicking and she delivered the line to the assembled girls almost every morning.
I have been thinking about Miss Madeira and her guiding principle a lot lately. Perhaps because so few in our midst seem to be living by it. On a particularly bad summer day this past summer, for example, I was driving from the Hartford, Connecticut, airport to the Vermont graduation of my good friend Ellen’s son, late and speeding (in defiance of the charge of the ring on my little finger), and listening to an especially incessant drumbeat of doom on NPR. My friend and favorite senator from Mississippi, a total class act and by far the best advocate for our poor state, was under siege from a primary challenger whom I’ll refrain from characterizing here in a Herculean effort to be a class act myself. War was escalating in so many places at once I was reminded of my Madeira Modern European History class and the lectures of the good Dr. Brown on the events leading up to World War I. A particular wing of the Republican Party seemed not to have taken even an elementary school civics class, much less modern history of any kind, and the administration was, well, being the administration.
The center does not hold, I thought. Common sense does not prevail. No one is functioning in disaster, much less finishing with a modicum of style. But then I made it to the graduation at the Burr Burton Academy atop a gorgeous green hill. The young women and men were all dressed up beneath their caps and gowns—my friend’s son, the handsome Eli, wore a fetching pale orange button-down shirt, a green tie, and a conservative but well-cut poplin suit. The leadership award was won by two beautiful girls who were best friends. The valedictorian talked about responsibility, integrity, service, and grit (grit!). And the speaker, a case study in Miss Madeira’s mantra, was Kevin Pearce, the snowboarder who suffered a traumatic brain injury and had to learn not just how to walk and talk again, but also how to swallow and brush his teeth. Now, he runs the Kevin Pearce Fund to help people with injuries like his. He told the kids he was “living proof you can overcome what you’ve been dealt,” that they should “focus on this moment and be proud.”
So we all did and we all were. We went to dinner at the nearby Downtown Grocery, owned by my fellow Mississippian Abby Coker and her husband, the brilliant chef Rogan Lechthaler. We had delicious rhubarb margaritas, bought a round of Miller ponies for the kitchen staff (per Abby’s menu instructions if we liked what we ate—and we loved it all), lit sparklers at the table, and generally had a huge warm time.
Pretty much everybody that day had finished in style, and it made me realize once again that the best center to hold is your own. Which brings me back to Miss Madeira. Her simple definition of education was “discipline of the mind,” and I can tell you that in my two years at her school I worked and thought harder than I ever have since. She agreed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s opinion that the world had best hurry up and return to the “word duty and be done with the word reward.” She decreed that there would be no class rankings and grades would not be posted. She taught the public affairs and Bible courses herself (in my day, the latter had morphed into ethics, but a close friend who took that small and intense class ended up with a Ph.D. in theology and ministered to folks at a church near Ground Zero on 9/11).
My mother remembers that Miss Madeira was wild about the young queen Elizabeth and implored the girls to emulate not just her “dignity and quiet poise” but her proper low-heeled English shoes. “She hated the Capezio flats we all wore,” my mother says, adding that she thought them “sloppy.” Miss Madeira, described by Time in 1946 as “one of Washington’s last New Dealers,” told the magazine that she regretted the fact that most of her students came from “economic royalist” families and put them all in the same outfits lest they try to outspend each other. In spring, my mother reports, the girls dressed in green jumpers with white cotton blouses, while in winter it was the same blouse with a gray skirt and a yellow or green sweater. For dinner they changed into white piqué dresses, and in the senior portraits of my mother’s yearbook, every single girl has on a string of pearls.
I arrived well after the era of white piqué, in time to enjoy the hangover of the far more lax rules of the sixties, which would come to an abrupt end almost as soon as I left the
gates. We had no adult supervision in our dorms and elected our own dorm mothers from our peers. We smoked pot in the woods and cigarettes on the outdoor smoking terrace or in the unspeakably grungy senior clubhouse. I kept a fifth of Scotch in my underwear drawer, and one of my dorm mates was in possession of a blender with which we made the occasional birthday daiquiri. The queen, who is now among my own heroines, was not much on our radar screens.
The equitable Miss Madeira would have been appalled at the charge accounts we had with the local taxi service, which we sent on runs for Häagen-Dazs and Chinese takeout (accompanied by six-packs of Tsingtao beer). A great many of us got around the lone dress code requirement of a skirt at dinner by wrapping our plaid gym kilts around whatever we were already wearing, which in my case was usually a pair of Levi’s pulled over the Lanz nightgown in which I awoke—the only outfit that would enable me to make it to chapel (barely) on time.
Looking back, the best I can hope for is that Miss Madeira would have perhaps been gratified that it was still impossible to tell anything about the wealth and class of most of us by our appearance—we all looked equally awful. (In our defense, some of the staff didn’t look a whole lot better—the school nurse was fond of combing mayonnaise through her steel-gray hair.) The only exceptions were the Carolina girls who wore wraparound skirts and the same cotton shirts of my mother’s era with gold clip-on earrings, add-a-bead necklaces, and Pappagallo flats or Weejuns. When I met my roommate, who hailed from Wadesboro, North Carolina, for the first time, I was wearing my favorite Adidas T-shirt, ancient Levi’s, and a pair of Earth shoes. She walked in with neatly coiffed hair and mascara, trailed by her brother, who was carrying, I swear, a crate of African violets for our windowsills. I ended up loving her, and, I think, she me, but I never saw the point of wasting time trying to pull myself together—except, of course, on Wednesdays.
