wonderful country, I thought, as I sank gratefully into Tupelo's welcoming bosom.
CHAPTER 7
IN THE MORNING I went to the Elvis Presley birthplace. It was early, and I expected it to be closed, but it was open and there were already people there, taking photographs beside the house or waiting to file in at the front door. The house, tidy and white, stood in a patch of shade in a city park. It was amazingly compact, shaped like a shoebox, with just two rooms: a front room with a bed and dresser and a plain kitchen behind. But it looked comfortable and had a nice homey feel. It was certainly superior to most of the shacks I had seen along the highway. A pleasant lady with meaty arms sat in a chair and answered questions. She must get asked the same questions about a thousand times a day, but she didn't seem to mind. Of the dozen or so people there, I was the only one under the age of sixty. I'm not sure if this was because Elvis was so burned out by the end of his career that his fans were all old people or whether it is just that old people are the only ones with the time and inclination to visit the homes of dead celebrities.
A path behind the house led to a gift shop where you could buy Elvis memorabilia-albums, badges, plates, posters. Everywhere you looked his handsome, boyish face was beaming down at you. I bought two postcards and six books of matches, which I later discovered, with a strange sense of relief, I had lost somewhere. There was a visitors' book by the door. All the visitors carne from towns with nowhere names like Coleslaw, Indiana; Dead Squaw, Oklahoma; Frigid, Minnesota; Dry Heaves, New Mexico; Colostomy, Montana. The book had a column for remarks. Reading down the list I saw, 'Nice,' 'Real nice,' 'Very nice,' 'Nice.' Such eloquence. I turned back to an earlier page.
One visitor had misunderstood the intention of the remarks column and had written, 'Visit.' Every other visitor on that page and the facing page had written, 'Visit,' 'Visit,' 'Re-visit,' 'Visit' until someone had turned the page and they got back on the right track.
The Elvis Presley house is in Elvis Presley Park on Elvis Presley Drive, just off the Elvis Presley Memorial Highway. You may gather from this that Tupelo is proud of its most famous native son.
But it hadn't done anything tacky to exploit his fame, and you had to admire it for that. There weren't scores of gift shops and wax museums and souvenir emporia all trying to make a quick killing from Presley's fading fame, just a nice little house in a shady park. I was glad I had stopped.
From Tupelo I drove due south towards Columbus, into a hot and rising sun. I saw my first cotton fields, dark and scrubby but with fluffs of real cotton poking out from every plant. The fields were surprisingly small. In the Midwest you get used to seeing farms that sweep away to the horizon; here they were the size of a couple of vegetable patches. There were more shacks as well, a more or less continuous line of them along the highway. It was like driving through the world's roomiest slum.
And these were real shacks. Some of them looked dangerously uninhabitable, with sagging roofs and walls that looked as if they had been cannonballed. Yet as you passed you would see someone lurking in the doorway, watching you. There were many roadside stores as well, more than you would have thought such a poor and scattered populace could support, and they all had big signs announcing a motley of commodities: GAS, FIREWORKS, FRIED CHICKEN, LIVE BAIT. I wondered just how hungry I would have to be to eat fried chicken prepared by a man who also dealt in live bait. All the stores had Coke machines and gas pumps out front, and almost all of them had rusting cars and assorted scrap scattered around the yard. It was impossible to tell if they were still solvent or not by their state of dereliction.
Every once in a while I would come to a town, small and dusty, with loads of black people hanging around outside the stores and gas stations, doing nothing. That was the most arrest ing difference about the South-the number of black people everywhere. I shouldn't really have been surprised by it. Blacks make up 35 percent of the population in Mississippi and not much less in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. In some counties in the South, blacks outnumber whites by four to one. Yet until as recently as twenty-five years ago, in many of those counties not a single black person was registered to vote.
With so much poverty everywhere, Columbus came as a welcome surprise. It was a splendid little city, hometown of Tennessee Williams, with a population of 30,000. During the Civil War it was briefly the state capital, and it still had some large antebellum homes lining the well-shaded road in from the highway. But the real jewel was its downtown, which seemed hardly to have changed since about 1955. Crenshaw's Barber Shop had a rotating pole out front and across the street was a genuine five-and-dime called McCrory's and on the corner was the Bank of Mississippi in an imposing building with a big clock hanging over the sidewalk. The county courthouse, city hall and post office were all handsome and imposing edifices but built to a small-town scale. The people looked prosperous. The first person I saw was an obviously well-educated black man in a three-piece suit carrying a Wall Street Journal. It was all deeply pleasing and encouraging. This was a first-rate town. Combine it with Pella's handsome square and you would almost have my long-sought Amalgam. I was beginning to realize that I was never going to find it in one place. I would have to collect it piecemeal-a courthouse here, a fire station there-and here I had found several pieces.
I went for a cup of coffee in a hotel on Main Street and bought a copy of the local daily paper, the Commercial Dispatch ('Mississippi's Most Progressive Newspaper'). It was an old fashioned paper with a banner headline across eight columns on page one that said TAIWANESE BUSINESS
GROUP TO VISIT GOLDEN TRIANGLE AREA, and beneath that a crop of related single-column subheadings all in different sizes, typefaces and degrees of coherence: Visitors Are Looking At Opportunities For Investment
AS PART OF TRADE MISSION
Group to Arrive in Golden Triangle Thursday
STATE OFFICIALS COORDINATE VISIT
All the stories inside suggested a city ruled by calmness and compassion: 'Trinity Place Homemakers Give Elderly a Helping Hand,' 'Lamar Landfill Is Discussed,' 'Pickens School Budget Adopted.' I read the police blotter. 'During the past 24 hours,' it said, 'the Columbus Police Department had a total Of 34 activities.' What a wonderful place-the police here didn't deal with crimes, they had activities. According to the blotter the most exciting of these activities had been arresting a man for driving on a suspended license. Elsewhere in the paper I discovered that in the past twenty-four hours six people had died-or had death activities, as the police blotter might have put it-and three births had been recorded. I developed an instant affection for the Commercial Dispatch (which I rechristened in my mind the Amalgam Commercial Dispatch) and for the town it served.
I could live here, I thought. But then the waitress came over and said, 'Yew honestly a breast menu, honey?' and I realized that it was out of the question. I couldn't understand a word these people said to me. She might as well have addressed me in Dutch. It took many moments and much gesturing with a knife and fork to establish that what she had said to me was 'Do you want to see a breakfast menu, honey?' In fact I had been hoping to see a lunch menu, but rather than spend the afternoon trying to convey this notion, I asked for a Coca-Cola, and was enormously relieved to find that this did not elicit any subsidiary questions.
It isn't just the indistinctness with which Southerners speak that makes it so difficult to follow, it's also the
