A Mississippian who moved to Nashville 60 years ago – the time elapsed cannot change his true residency – recently mailed me a kind note and gift. The man is a Winona native who still takes his hometown newspaper (my kind of guy), and he had read a column I had written about reasons to move to Mississippi.
So he sent me a CD of a speech that the late, great writer Willie Morris gave at USM in 1979. He’s shared copies with many through the years, and I’m the latest to enjoy the wisdom from one of our state’s greatest writers.
The gist of Morris’s speech is that Mississippi is the most uniquely American place, and many of the themes in the speech about the struggles with racial change and suburbanization are still the same problems we gnash about today in our state and nation. I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of Willie’s thoughts on these things.
He opened with a story about sitting in a bar in New York with colleagues from Harper’s Magazine and meeting another Mississippian. As they talked, one of Morris’s friends launched into a tirade.
“You fellows are writers, and you have the gall to say you want to change Mississippi. You must be insane. Here you are from a place that has produced the best d***** writers in America, that’s always had the courage of the most noble fools, and the most haunting landscape in all the United States and a spoken word that would make a drunk Irishman envious and a miscegenation that is the envy of Brazil. And a sense of the histrionic that would pale the Old Testament and a past so contorted that it embarrasses the people of Scarsdale. And you say you want to change Mississippi?” Morris recalled .
“He finished with an exultant flourish, ‘Why if I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d put up big green signs at every point of entry into Mississippi which said, ‘Posted. No trespassing.’”
After writing about that, Morris said he received more than two dozens letters from Mississippi people saying he was absolutely right.
Morris also noted the bond that Mississippians have when they meet by chance in a faraway place.
“We always somehow seem to know someone in common in Itta Bena or Iuka or Tchula or Osyka or Collins or Mendenhall. The stories about football or fishing or some long-vanished preacher are signs of an extraordinary mutuality,” he said. “I’ve met black Mississippians in the North who were much more similar to me in background, preferences and temperament than the Yankee WASPs I worked with every day.”
Morris theorized that the common denominator to this distinctiveness was “an awareness of community, a profound feeling for communal origins.” But he warned that was threatened by a “relentless drive for mobility and homogeneity.” How true has that proven?
Morris’s solution was to remember, saying memory is the “sustenance of literature” and that young Mississippians must remember who they are and where they came from,
“The hope for belonging, for belief in a people’s better nature, for steadfastness against all that is hollow or crass or destructive or ruthless, is really as old as mankind itself, and can’t be encompassed in some formula or statement or credo or rationale. Wherever we live, we Americans who call ourselves Mississippians will find a way to remember,” he said before closing to a round of applause. n
Reach C-P Editor and Publisher Charlie Smith at csmith@columbianprogress.com.
