Maggie tells me, as a reason why the kid was moving away, “She met a man named Raoul (he is in a band, if you can believe that), and that is why they are moving down to Florida, although God knows why one would move down there.”
I nod my head, because I can’t quite imagine why anyone would want to live there, either, although I had at least two good friends from there, one an ex-girlfriend who listened to R.E.M. too much and who wanted to have sex in cars and doorways.
I never understood that part myself, because I suppose I’m a little more shy about it, and so she found her way back to Florida, where perhaps the boys are more accomodating, and I stayed right here. A few miles to the south, anyway. Maggie and me are complaining that no one in Jackson has a sense of place—that all these folks from Oxford and Birmingham and New Orleans all know where they came from, and what they are, and what their city is. Here we try to pave over what we have and then shudder with delight when a new Italian chain restaurant gets put up. “We have forgotten who we are, I think,” I tell her, “and since I’ve been in Mississippi the whole damn state acts like that.”
There’s a lot that needs to be changed here. But there’s a difference between forgiving and forgetting—of changing and hiding. The way to heal a real bad cut on your arm is not to set your jaw and ignore it. You have to daub Polysporin on it, after you wipe the blood off, and wrap it up tight. You don’t want to scar.
We’re still bleeding. But I don’t care because it’s not too hot, because it’s just now April, and I’m drinking lemonade and telling Maggie that I’m in love with Ellen Gilchrist, which would be a lot easier to deal with if she were here. “I mean, I want to date her,” I tell Maggie, who handles all the Southern parts of Lemuria, the best new-books bookstore in Jackson (the best old-books bookstore in Jackson is, of course, Choctaw). Of course the heart of the store is the Southern part, just like it is with the whole of America. “So when she comes by to sign that new book, you call me. I still think I missed my chance with Donna Tartt.”
She laughs her big laugh and the sun catches the scotch tape on the left leg of her little glasses (“I keep meaning to get them fixed, but I taped them up so well, I keep forgetting to”). We are outside and the clouds keep the sun mostly off us and she laughes at me joking that I want to make out with Donna Tartt. Our prodigal daughter, once of Greenwood but permanently lost to New York, seems very cold, especially with that Dorothy Parker haircut, but I bet she would be just fine if you got to know her, and maybe she got a few drinks in herself, and you reminded her where she was from, I bet she’d be great. (Does she drink beer? One hopes so. As a writer born in Mississippi, she must at least drink whiskey.)
Maggie reminds me that “she brought that goddamned Yankee publicist with her—I know that she doesn’t have any choice, but that poor dumb boy, he didn’t know nothing about nowhere. And her being his client! You’d think that he’d made some sort of an effort. I thought Kyle was going to choke him, the way he acted, but instead he just sneered a bit at one more of the Yankee put-downs and said, ‘Oh, are you talking about literature? We may have heard of that. Oh wait! Right, we all work in a bookstore, and we all have degrees in English, and oh wait! We have William motherfucking Faulkner and Eudora motherfucking Welty!??’”
That is perhaps the pinnacle of Kyle’s life, in my opinion. I’ve never quite understood, or tolerated, his love for the Civil War (which he calls “the War between the States,” which I then belittle by calling it “the Failed Southern Rebellion”), but he put that Yankee in his place. And he does something I do, too: he claims the lives of others as his accomplishment, and his redemption.
Make no mistake, Mississippi is made better because of Mr. Faulker, and Miss Welty, and The King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Aron Presley (Memphis may have his grave, but we have his birth, which is so much more important—opening the curtains on the true soul daylight of the 20th century, as opposed to closing them, dirty-handed and drunk), Mr. Robert Johnson, Mr. McKinley Morganfield (who transformed himself into Muddy Waters), Mr. Chester Burnett (who was transformed into The Howlin’ Wolf), and scores of other men and women who have chipped the most beautiful art ever seen out of the hard but mercurial Yazoo Clay of Jackson and the soft dark earth of the Delta and the salt-burned grass of the Coast.
What the Tigris and the Euphrates were in times past—the cradle of life—we have become. If they were born today, Moses would not have been floated down the currents of the Nile, but the Mississippi. I swear to you that Jesus the Christ would have walked in Mississippi instead of Palestine—for what else are we, but a modern-day version of that broken-down conflux of cultures and slavery, confusion and hunger? No longer in chains, not yet free, hoping for something better, desperate for salvation.
There are those that worshipped John the Baptist. Not as a saint, mind you, but as the Christ himself—the sect persisted for decades, apparently, until Jesus-centered Christianity finally shook some sense into them, or they all died out. They were just determined that John was the new saviour—the trick being, he was the one that baptized Jesus, so he was obviously more important. I wonder if any of those people ever woke up one morning and just thought they had gotten it all wrong, and what it did to them. It had to have broken them into many pieces.
So when people, myself included, insist on claiming the names and lives of others—mostly dead—and setting their jaw, determined that it means something, I’m fine with it. I live down the street from where Eudora Welty lived her whole life, and I buy my Budweiser where she bought her Old Milwaukee (although it’s a Winn-Dixie now, not a Jitney, but we still all call it the Jitney Fourteen). I saw her house referred to in a community newsletter as “the Crown Jewel of Belhaven,” and I was at once amazed and a little put-off. How arrogant! But if we are not to have pride in those few of us who transcend the dirt and the hate, what shall we have pride in?
What if there is a new Elvis? I don’t mean one of those fake pop idols that they also compare to Elvis—like comparing water to burgundy wine—but a real for-sure new artform jammed tight into bones and muscles and blood and skin, stuttering into our new century. What if some other God-blasted place steals our thunder? Nebraska, say, or Wyoming? What will we do then?
Was John ever envious of Jesus?
I hope that we have picked Jesus over John.