Boy's Home Town Makes Good

By R.Z. Sheppard

YAZOO: INTEGRATION IN A DEEP-SOUTHERN TOWN by Willie Morris. 192 pages. Harper's Magazine Press. $5.95.

He seemed to see his whole native land, his home--the dirt, the earth which had bred his bones and those of his fathers for six generations and was still shaping him into not just a man but a specific man, not with just a man's passions and aspirations and beliefs but the specific passions and hopes and convictions and ways of thinking and acting of a specific individual and even race.

--William Faulkner Intruder in the Dust

Like Faulkner, Morris, the 36-year-old former editor of Harper's magazine, is Mississippi grown. Unlike Faulkner, who kept close to the home that he turned into a national myth, Morris has spent most of his adult life outside the state. In Texas as an undergraduate and muckraker for the Texas Observer; in England as a Rhodes scholar; and in New York as a hard-drinking, uncompromising and sometimes brilliant editor. Yet, says Morris, "the longer I live in Manhattan, the more Southern I seem to become."

To be both a Southerner and an American like Willie Morris is to engage in a perpetual war between states of mind, between the received past and the acquired present. That past requires continual reconnaissance. So in January 1970, Morris took the first of six trips back home to Yazoo City on the edge of the Mississippi Delta.

Ostensibly he was there reporting on the effects of the October 1969 U.S. Supreme Court order that 30 Mississippi school districts integrate immediately and completely. Beyond that, Morris was reluctantly bent on re-evaluating his own attachments to the South. Three years before he had published North Toward Home, a fine memoir of his boyhood and youth. Judging from the letters he received from Mississippi, he was not the most popular boy in town.

Morris found that after 16 years of talking themselves into believing total school integration would never happen, the townspeople were too busy to notice him. As had previously occurred elsewhere in the South when integration began, hard-core segregationist parents enrolled their children in hastily organized, expensive all-white private "academies." But they did not really catch on. Yazoo's 11,000 citizens are about evenly divided between blacks and whites, but only 20% of the city's white pupils were pulled out for private schooling. Adult acquiescence was veiled in all sorts of rationalizations. One white mother argued that because her son customarily kept his head buried in books, he would never see a Negro.

Pep Yells. Many of Yazoo's kids, Morris says, objected to being sent to private segregated schools. The public schools had their traditions, not the least of which were athletic, and the influx of black players added measurably to the quality of Yazoo's teams. Black and white athletes even began exchanging soul slaps on the field. White cheerleaders picked up black musical cadences in their pep yells.

Morris notes Yazoo's new awareness of itself, not as a backwater of lost causes but as a place where important things are happening--a place to be. Yet he knows the South too well, and he knows how tenuous and how mortal is enlightened leadership. The mood of the '60s, with its racial violence and political assassinations, mutes Morris' blend of journalism and autobiography. It puts graceful reins on his prose, which sometimes seems about to run wild like Thomas Wolfe's or feed royally on itself like Norman Mailer's.

It is Morris' tone of voice, finally, that gives Yazoo a nuance and emotional impact far more revealing than any amount of facts or figurings. The subtle tension in the book began well before the past decade. As heir to the tradition of such liberal Southern journalists as Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter, Morris remains faithful to the basic truth that the Southern white and Southern Negro are bound together like no other two groups in the country. In North Toward Home, Willie Morris' grandmother touched this haunting idea when she remarked, "Maybe when we all get to heaven, they'll be white and we'll be black." . R. Z. Sheppard

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