I keep ending up in Oxford, Mississippi, sometimes for business but always for pleasure.
The first time I visited, in 1987, I was a reporter covering the debut of the William Faulkner commemorative stamp (the Postal Service likes to hold these ceremonies in the subjects’ hometowns). It was a big deal, especially since the Postal Service was gobbling up a considerable number of people: surely Faulkner is the only memorial subject who was also once fired from the Postal Service, as he was in 1924 (prompting his declaration that he never the more I would return to “be at the mercy of any sob who had two cents for a stamp”).
There were many Faulkner scholars under his feet and Eudora Welty gave a reading. And all of Faulkner’s surviving relatives showed up. Even Faulkner’s only daughter, Jill Summers, made an appearance. She was snooping around Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, and chatting with the curator when she came in alone, went upstairs for about an hour and then left. The curator told me that it was the first time she had returned since her father’s funeral in 1962.
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Oxford city center at dusk.
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It’s tempting to ask rhetorically how she can stay away from such a charming city, because Oxford has been drawing me back again and again since that first visit, sometimes for work, sometimes just for fun. But then, Jill Faulkner’s experience growing up there was quite different: for one thing, her father, when he wasn’t writing award-winning novels, was a lonely drinker with no time for niceties like his daughter’s birthday party (“Nobody Remembers The Daughter of Shakespeare,” he told her on one of those occasions). More humbly, but much more important to everyday life, her father detested modern appliances and refused to allow even a radio or air conditioner in the house (in Mississippi!). And never mind a television. To watch her favorite television show, Car 54, Where Are You?, she walked to a neighbor’s house.
In Oxford, it’s hard to escape the long shadow of the Nobel Prize-winning creator of fictional Yoknapatawpha County (for a time there was a food truck in town called YoknapaTaco, and there’s an apartment complex, one of dozens surrounding the old town). which a not-quite-Snopes-like developer dubbed Faulkner Flats). If there were a literary equivalent of Zillow, Concord, Massachusetts could be considered America’s number one city for authors per square foot, and would have bragging rights for Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts. But anyone who has fallen under Faulkner’s spell, even a little, cannot visit Oxford without immediately trying to relate the incidents in his books to real locations. For anyone who needs help, the local tourist office has created a walking tour brochure (that’s where Gavin Stevens’ law office was once located, or at least where the Intruder in the Dust movie was set; that’s the house that served as the model for the Compson mansion; and of course, at the center of it all, is the town square where Benjy was driven the wrong way in The Sound and the Fury). There is even a small life-size bronze statue of the author sitting on a bench facing the square.
So it’s hard to ignore Faulkner. But not impossible. Not like football in the fall.
Ole Miss Football could very well be another religious denomination, given the fervor with which it is worshiped by the faithful, that is, the alumnae. On the day in December that next fall’s schedule is announced, hotels are booked up almost immediately (and prices skyrocket). If you don’t like football, you’ll want to avoid Oxford in the fall.
The Lyceum, oldest building on the University of Mississippi campus.
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But if you find yourself trapped as, say, the partner of a rabid, rebellious football fan, what are your options? Since this is a college town, and college towns, especially in red states, have more in common with other college towns than with neighboring towns and cities, your options are much better than you might expect.
Oxford has changed a lot in the last few decades. The Oxford I first saw in the 1980s was a quiet little southern college town built around a courthouse square with its requisite statue of a Civil War soldier, no memorable restaurants or hotels, and one very good bookstore. It had more in common with Faulkner’s Oxford than with what’s there today.
Oxford is still a small city, but you wouldn’t call it quiet. The extraordinary bookstore, Square Books, is still there and has three satellite shops dotted around the town square. There is also a fantastic new and used record store, End of All Music, located above a women’s clothing store in the square. (I told you it was a university town). If you’re thirsty and want to have a little fun, there are a couple of speakeasies in town – that is, bars with slightly secret entrances. Nightbird is hiding inside the Oliver Hotel and Bar Muse is in the Lyric Theatre.
Or go straight to the source, because now Oxford can boast North Mississippi’s first distillery: Wonderbird, located just outside the city, produces a subtle-flavored product that might have you redefining your idea of gin, in the good sense. They’re not open for tours and don’t sell their products on-site, but they do schedule tastings and special events from time to time, so you might get lucky.
And today there are enough good restaurants to qualify the place as a dining destination.
City Grocery has been feeding happy diners at its town square location since 1992. And it has spawned several offshoots, including Big Bad Breakfast (where, given my taste, I ate three times a day) and, most recently, Snackbar. The only bad thing about that place is its name: it is not at all like a snack bar, but in every way like a first-class restaurant that prepares simple dishes (fresh oysters) and complex ones (Royal Red Shrimp Cakes, corn cakes grilled). that make you dream of heaven) with ease. Let’s put it this way: I hate most slaws (what kind of word is that? Cabbage? Sounds like half a Tolkien villain), but I’d eat Snackbar’s slaw any day. And you don’t have to dine well to eat well in Oxford: Handy Andy will sell you a fantastic barbecue sandwich and give you change for ten dollars.
What attracts us to a place? Surely there is no fixed recipe or checklist, no one-size-fits-all solution. Big city lovers can embrace Chicago or Paris, but not both? Is your idea of a cool coastal city Newport, Galway or Myrtle Beach? And sometimes places surprise us, like Oxford did for me. I had backtracked three or four times before I realized how fond I had become of this small town trapped in the mountainous region of northern Mississippi.
I know a handful of people at Oxford, which always helps. It’s neither too big to get lost nor too small to be boring (although it’s getting scarier: the city’s population, currently around 25,000, has nearly tripled since 1990). The summers can be brutal, but the rest of the year is mild. And I’m a Southerner, perhaps more importantly. In Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson, Faulkner’s model for sensitive young Southerners, stubbornly insists: “I don’t hate him! I don’t hate it!”, when his Canadian roommate at Harvard asked him to “talk about the South.” Upon first reading Quentin’s statement when he was about his age, I thought: You and me both, buddy.
If hate were all there was, it would be easy not only to talk about the South but also to ignore it. But that’s only half the story. As Oxford’s most famous resident once observed, the past is not dead; It hasn’t even happened. This is the South in a nutshell. Good and evil, past and present, all compete for primacy.
In the heart of the Ole Miss campus, the Lyceum, a stately old Greek Revival building, still bears the bullet holes from the 1962 riots protesting the enrollment of James Meredith, the first black student to enroll in the university. Two people died in that riot between 3,000 armed citizens opposed to segregation and federal forces that included U.S. Marshals and the National Guard. But a literally scarred campus isn’t the only reminder of that dark time: On the plus side, there’s also a statue of Meredith on campus to commemorate that defining moment when segregation lost a crucial battle (a Mississippi politician called her plausibly “the last battle”). of the Civil War”). And here again, the history over time is complicated: the school abandoned its noxious Colonel Reb mascot years ago, and Confederate flags are no longer ubiquitous at sporting events, but the football team is still called the Rebels. What the hell?
LQC Lamar personifies both the good and the bad of life in Mississippi.
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No one personifies the good and bad of Southern life better than LQC Lamar (1825-1893), an Oxford resident who served the Union, then the Confederacy, and then the Union again as a U.S. Representative. US Senator and Secretary of the Interior. and as a Supreme Court judge. He somehow also found time to practice law, farm and teach mathematics at the university. He was also a slave owner, advocate for secession, and Jefferson Davis’s emissary to Russia during the Civil War (he never got as far as Russia and spent most of the war trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade the European powers to ally themselves. with the Confederation). . But after the war, he also lived long enough to recant his opposition to Reconstruction and embrace the idea of black suffrage and the cause of black education.
You don’t have to agree with John F. Kennedy that Lamar deserved a place in Profiles in Courage to admit that he was a complicated man, capable of enslaving other humans but also capable of facing his sin. I’m not sure Faulkner ever thought much about Lamar, but maybe he did, because Lamar’s story and those of so many other Southerners fit Faulkner’s definition of the crux of all art: the human heart in conflict with itself.
Of course, it’s a difficult formulation to apply to a small Southern town, but it’s that madness, the knowledge that meaning and meaninglessness coexist inextricably, that I long for in places, particularly the South, the place where I feel least , not at home. Oxford and its mountainous surroundings of northern Mississippi don’t have a patent for that kind of madness, but the madness certainly has a home there. You hear it in literature and you hear it in music: North Mississippi blues (think Fred McDowell, Otha Turner or RL Burnside) doesn’t sound like any other blues; It sounds like someone cast a spell, and a strong spell at that, a spell I’ve been under for quite some time.
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