“So, you think he’s gonna be the first black coach there?”
BB held his cup with both hands and took a sip. He put it down in front of him and jiggled it and looked into it like he was a seer studying the future in the small ripples of the black liquid. He looked up and smiled at me. “Nope.”
I updated him on my life. I told him I had moved to Texas some thirty years earlier, had married and reared a son myself. I had served in the Navy. I had thought at the time those white uniforms looked sharp. I hadn’t been sent to Viet Nam, being held in reserve to guard the Panama Canal Zone.
Texas had been a cotton and cow state forever. But there wasn’t a cow college and the cotton wasn’t Mississippi. I told him I had thought about moving back to Mississippi one day, but that was still in the future.
Our meeting in the old café was the last time I saw BB. He finished his new house and went back to work in the cotton fields. He would work until the day he died. I knew him well enough to know that would happen.
On my return trip along the Interstate, I realized that this was not the road of my youth that had taken me to the Delta and back to Jackson. That road winded slowly through the countryside, carrying visitors and farmers and families. It was slow enough to have memories etched, and stopping points where people and towns were local and special. And not only the destination but the journey had chronicles. The Interstate was a monster that sped people back and forth in a hurry because hurrying was essential to modernity. This monster stole land and lives and memories. It was progress. And I could see that it had begun to steal the South’s identity and rob its people of their culture.
I had a long drive back to Fort Worth, plenty of time to think of childhood memories. And some of those memories are so much more vivid because of the permanence they burned into me. That August spent in Cotton City was still afire in me—the summer of mystery, murder, and working in the cotton fields. And the Giants in their remarkable race to the pennant.
They finally did win the Pennant that year, coming back from thirteen and a half games behind to win on a home run by Bobby Thomson in a playoff game. Regrettably, they were spent and had not enough left to win the grand prize. The Yankees overwhelmed them in the World Series. I guess it was like the University Grays at Pickett’s charge. They took the hill but didn’t have enough left to win the grand prize. And the Yankees overwhelmed them.
***
Special thanks for encouragement to:
Julie Cantrell, Oxford, Mississippi
Fred Miller, Columbia, South Carolina
James Ferguson, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Paul H. Yarbrough was born and reared in Jackson, Mississippi. He attended Mississippi State University and the University of Louisiana where he graduated with a degree in mathematics and physics. He graduated from the University of Houston in applied mathematics and geophysics.
Mississippi Cotton Page 22
