A month later, I skipped my afternoon political science class and headed to Rowan Oak, my favorite getaway on the edge of the campus. Rowan Oak, the ancestral antebellum home of William Faulkner, was built in 1844. The white, two-story house stood on over twenty-nine acres not too far from the square in Oxford. Rowan Oak was open from dawn to dusk. Five dollars covered the cost to tour the home, but walking the grounds was free.
I liked to explore the grounds and had only been in the house once. A couple of times, I met the old groundskeeper who remembered Faulkner and shared a few stories about the odd little man who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.
The University of Mississippi owned the property and preserved his papers in the Faulkner Room on the third floor of the J. D. Williams Library. Every day when I walked from the Pike House on Fraternity Row to my classes, I read the Faulkner quote memorialized on the back exterior wall of the library: “I decline to accept the end of man . . . I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail.”
When I sat on a bench at Rowan Oak, I channeled the man who wrote about a decaying South coping in the aftermath of its Civil War defeat, integration, and the Civil Rights Movement, a man whose works were rarely taught in Mississippi classrooms because he made the state come to grips with its past.
In the dream, I did what I did once or twice every month during the four years I was enrolled at Ole Miss. I parked my 1969 blue Camaro at the gate and walked up the narrow driveway between two rows of trees. As I approached the brick walk to the house, I veered to the right and down a slope to a bench overlooking a creek. It was my private spot not visible from the house.
Mari was sitting on the bench, just as she had twenty-two years ago, staring away, sobbing. She was upset because she had failed to prevent a suicide. I had helped her cope with the loss at the time. It had been the pivotal moment of our love, the one time I did something right in a relationship.
I rushed to her, wanting to hold her in my arms, longing to touch her skin again, smell her hair, and kiss her lips one more time. The harder I ran the further she was from me. I shouted her name repeatedly, but she wouldn’t look my way. Then, as if an invisible tether had snapped, I fell forward flat on my face, got up, and rushed toward Mari. But I kept stumbling. I yelled, but she still didn’t hear me as I approached. As I reached out to her, Mari faded away. I stumbled over the bench and over a cliff.
I awoke, covered in sweat, crying her name.
15
It was 5:00 a.m. I dressed, put Big Boy on his leash, and started running north on Palafox. I didn’t wear my headphones or bring my cell phone. The dog knew this outing would be different, but he willingly came along.
I had to run Mari out of my system.
We ran past the San Carlos Hotel, “The Gray Lady of Palafox.” Built in 1910, lumber magnate and shipbuilder Frasier Bingham envisioned it would rival the upscale hotels in New Orleans, Mobile, and Atlanta when it opened on the first day of Mardi Gras celebrations. Over the years, a series of owners would expand on the north and west sides of the hotel, adding a ballroom and office and retail spaces.
For decades, Pinckney Hall ran his business and political empire from the penthouse suite of the San Carlos. He controlled railroads, banks, and lumber mills across the state. He hated unions, liberals, and Yankee carpetbaggers, and he kept his businesses racially segregated until Attorney General Bobby Kennedy threatened to shut them down.
An infamous miser, Hall fired a manager for using two paper towels to dry his hands in the restroom. His First Gulf Beach Bank had marble floors and oriental rugs but not a single hot water tap in the entire eight-story building.
Hall had a five o’clock weekday ritual. He and his business associates and buddies would gather for cocktails. They toasted “Confusion to the Enemy!” with Jack Daniel’s whiskey. When the CBS News began at 5:30 p.m., all conversation and movement ceased. Hall took his news and Walter Cronkite very seriously. After the news concluded, the group moved to the Executive Club for dinner.
Hall died in 1991 at the age of ninety-four. The San Carlos Hotel ceased operations the following year and had been vacant for almost two decades. A proposal to convert it into retirement apartments failed to materialize. The current rumor said the federal government might buy it, demolish the hotel, and erect a new federal courthouse.
As we ran past the hotel, I almost stumbled on a shattered piece of mortar that had fallen off the building.
At the Wright Street intersection, we moved past the Perry House. Charles A. Boysen, Swedish consul to Pensacola, began construction of the two-story house with porches that wrapped both floors in 1867. Governor Edward A. Perry completed the house in 1882 shortly before he became Florida’s fourteenth governor, serving from 1885–89.
A Massachusetts native and a graduate of Yale, Perry moved to Pensacola in 1856 to practice law. During the Civil War, he joined the Pensacola Rifle Rangers, which elected him captain. He later commanded the Florida Brigade in General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Twice wounded, he was discharged as a brigadier general.
While he was governor, Florida adopted a
