Willie Morris: From Yazoo to New York and Home Again
 by Wade Stevens Ricks

To be white and have roots in Mississippi is a paradoxical thing.

In this post-segregation era, one is wont to point fingers at that state and scoff. Scoff that it has taken so long to join the modern era. Scoff that at last, when it is finally prosecuting its race killers rather than canonizing them, the state wants to be taken seriously.

But it is hard to scoff at the place where one's kin lay buried. There is this desire to dig, to search, to scratch for some residue of value, some evidence of redemption.

Writer Willie Morris, who died August 2 at the age of 64, spent many hours of his life engaged in such endeavors. He leaves behind a body of work that lays bare the Southern white psyche, both the best parts and the worst. His was an odyssey away from the troubled soil of his youth, toward the success and ambition of literary New York, and back again.

As the youngest editor (at 32) of the nation's oldest literary magazine, Harper's, Morris enlivened the previously stodgy pages of that publication with breakthrough writing by David Halberstam, William Styron and Norman Mailer. When the Cowles family, which owned Harper's at the time, threatened to either close the magazine or change its editorial direction, Morris resigned.

The tinge of loss from his Harper's departure stayed with Morris throughout his life. But to focus on that four-year span in the early '70s is to lose the import of his legacy. First and foremost, Willie Morris was a translator of the Southern experience from the first person, a narrator who struggled to understand the thinking behind those who perpetrated so much evil; he was the voice of those who dared to hope for so much better.

He was not an apologist. Far from it. In North Toward Home, his first and most important book, Morris describes how his illusions about his hometown were shattered when he returned home from college in the mid-1950s. He found Yazoo City, Mississippi, in full revolt over its black citizens' tentative attempts to desegregate the schools. He described in horror attending a meeting of pro-segregationist whites, friendly figures from his childhood whose faces were now contorted with hatred, uttering the "n" word and the scarily ubiquitous phrase of the time: "Protect our way of life."

"I felt an urge to get out of there," Morris wrote in the 1967 book. "Who are these people? I asked myself. What was I doing there? Was this the place I had grown up in and never wanted to leave?"

For a young Southern boy, baffled by the incongruities of life during the last days of segregation, Morris' doubts provided a signpost toward sanity, an escape route to civilization. Along with Lanterns on the Levee by Hodding Carter and The South and the Southerner by Ralph McGill, North Toward Home provides a primer on the segregationist mentality and the author's manifest desire to reject it.

After he left Harper's, Morris moved out to Long Island and completed the transformation from magazine editor to author. The same year he left the magazine, he published Yazoo: Integration In a Deep Southern Town, a further examination of his Delta hamlet's desegregation struggles.

In 1973, Morris published his ill-fated novel, The Last of the Southern Girls, a tale about a Southern debutante who goes to Washington, D.C. That event affirmed that his true metier was the memoir and narrative non-fiction. Four years later, however, Morris undertook to finish Whistle, a novel his friend James Jones was writing when he died. Perhaps of greater value than the finished novel was Morris's subsequent memoir about his relationship with Jones, author of The Thin Red Line and From Here To Eternity.

James Jones: A Friendship was essential Willie Morris: graceful, fluid writing in the first person, alive with anecdotal detail. This was Willie with a drink in his hand, Viceroy dangling from his lips, holding court and telling stories laden with insight and sentiment. Even in his book about Jones, Morris managed to convey much about his native Mississippi, from which he was, at that time, a willing expatriate. In the first chapter, he recalls returning to New York from his mother's funeral in Yazoo: "Ever since my boyhood, driving through the South had never failed to suffuse me with a bittersweet sadness, the sadness of love and belonging..."

In 1980, Morris made his inevitable return to the South, signing on as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi. The irony of this posting was not subtle: once a fiery icon of Southern resistance, Ole Miss had become the gentle, methodical custodian of everything Southern, from Faulkner to Elvis.

Once repatriated, Morris set out to assay the changes in his beloved land. He saw reason for optimism and he saw renewed evidence that some things had not changed at all.

In his 1983 book The Courtship of Marcus Dupree, Morris observed wide-eyed the pursuit of blue-chip running back Marcus Dupree by the powers of college football. Poignant was that this "courtship" of a talented young black athlete was occurring in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were mercilessly dispatched in 1964.

In modern-day Neshoba, Morris found Dupree enjoying the praise of a community united by the love of sport. A friend and fellow teammate of Dupree's was the son of a former deputy who had been convicted of complicity in the abduction and death of the civil rights workers. But alas, when it came time for Dupree to choose among his suitors, he scorned Mississippi and signed with Barry Switzer's Oklahoma Sooners. Dupree's desertion of his native state followed a well-worn pattern established by African-Americans over the past half-century.

While some dismissed Courtship as little more than the latest manifestation of the South's preoccupation with football, some of his admirers dared hope that Dupree's anticipated gridiron success would help Morris's book score financial success. Unfortunately, Dupree dropped out of Oklahoma after a dispute with Switzer; his pro career was sharply curtailed by injury. Courtship remains a valuable document for understanding the slow transformation of Mississippi; like A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley, it is far more than a book about a writer's fascination with a football player.

In 1990, Morris married JoAnne Prichard, editor of the University Press of Mississippi, and moved to the city of his birth, Jackson. Some of those who know Morris credit Prichard with prolonging both his literary and physical life, both of which were imperiled by his penchant for hard living.

In 1991, I made the obligatory pilgrimage of many writers, journalists and dilettantes to observe Morris in his native surroundings. I found this man who had once held court at Elaine's in Manhattan, the socio-literary salon of his heyday, charming a houseful of well-lubricated partygoers in suburban Jackson. I'm still not sure whose house it was, since the owner was not present; I don't think Morris knew, either. The next day, over lunch with a mutual friend, I complained that I had neglected to bring along my well-worn, first edition copy of North Toward Home for his autograph.

Without delay, he summoned Dean Faulkner Wells, niece of the Nobel Prize-winning author and his publisher at that time, and suggested she sell me a copy on the spot. While I had been advised by a friend of Morris's tenuous financial status, I meekly explained that my original copy had been long held, an article of passage into adulthood and professional journalism. Morris politely produced his card, scribbled out his mailing address and invited me to send him the volume for signing. I never did get that autograph, assuming incorrectly that I would one day see him again. After that, Morris's literary fortunes rose. Basking in the warmth of his second marriage, he produced New York Days, a fitting sequel to his earlier memoir.

In 1996, he was a consultant for director Rob Reiner in the making of the film Ghosts of Mississippi. Mississippi was, at last, coming to terms with the concept of racial justice. After repeated mistrials, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of slaying Medgar Evers. Two years later, Morris published his own account of the notorious case and the movie it spawned with The Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, Mississippi, and Hollywood.

Although he was back in his native South, viewing his halcyon days through the lens of maturity, Morris sometimes struggled with his identity as a writer.

Last year, during his publicity tour for his novel A Man In Full, I asked Tom Wolfe, a Virginian, if he in any way thought of himself as a Southern writer. Without pause, Wolfe replied that he was "a New York writer," noting that he had lived in Manhattan for years. For Morris, the answer was more complex. In New York Days, Morris wrote: "To this day I am half a Yazoo boy, half a cosmopolitan man, and most of the time, as in New York, I still do not know which."

Despite his flash of brilliance at Harper's in the '60s, Morris found himself on crowded turf as a chronicler of the New York literary scene. Through his books, though, runs a captivating narrative of how a young man rejects the evil and ugliness of his home land, tries to distract himself with the pursuit of success in New York, only to find that the only thing really worth writing about is that wondrous, forsaken homeland.

Morris brought all of Mississippi to life in his writing. While he sadly recounted the toll exacted by the deaths of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, he also revealed another Mississippi, a place where black boys and white boys play ball together in the humid dust, a place where there is love, occasional civility, sometimes even nobility.

Wade Stevens Ricks is a freelance writer in Boston. He grew up in Atlanta and has worked for newspapers in the South and Midwest.

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