Yazoo City: South Toward Home

Yazoo City, Miss.; pop. 11,732; 40 miles northwest of Jackson; site of a Confederate navy yard burned down but never captured by Union troops. Principal industries: cottonseed oil, lumber, fertilizer and clothing.

It was to this fiercely proud, well-mannered community that Jimmy Carter journeyed last week for a sweltering 90 minutes of questions and answers with 1,500 of the local citizenry in the high school gymnasium. Yazoo City had turned out five more votes for Gerald Ford than for Carter last November (2,330 to 2,325), but still folks could hardly have been happier to have him as a guest. Among those on hand was Author-Journalist Willie Morris, who celebrated his Yazoo roots in his autobiographical memoir, North Toward Home. His account of Carter's visit written for TIME:

The thrall of the office is extraordinary. One senses it in unsingular things. For instance, I never saw so many lawns being cut at the same time. The smell of newly mown grass drifted out of the hills onto the flat land and overpowered the senses. There were American flags on the houses of the meanest and most ageless old recluses of my boyhood. The place was taut with pride. There was something touching in the spontaneity.

I am constantly coming back nowadays, but I must admit that the Yazoo of my truest reality is a languid village on a summer's day of 30 years ago, when one big car whipping through with out-of-state plates was diversion enough. I know what Mark Twain meant when he returned to Hannibal: "I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them."

The familiar was familiar all right, because physically the town has not changed all that much in a quarter of a century; the crepe myrtles still grace the houses, which go by the family names of four generations ago. But the strange, in this case, was stranger yet, and came in waves: the Secret Service men with their crackling radios, and the communications technicians and the White House advance people, and then the TV people and newspaper and magazine reporters, and next the curious from other towns, and finally the firemen and troopers and deputies from other towns too. One TV crew got up at 5 a.m. to video-tape a Delta sunrise, and in front of Owen Cooper's house on Grand Avenue, for which Mr. and Mrs. Cooper bought new carpets, drapes and sheets for their overnight visitor, I sighted a TV crew shooting another TV crew at work.

The Yazoo Motel was taken over en bloc by the White House, with the mystically regarded communications equipment quartered there. In Stubb's restaurant next door. Sheriff Homer Hood showed up in a suit and tie for the first time in recent memory, and at lunches there was an amalgam of reporters, cameramen, White House people, Secret Service and old country boys from the seed stores, feed stores and sawmills, who seemed to wish to preserve an integrity of disinterest but shamed themselves with sneaky over-the-shoulder glances at the outlanders. People watched the national TV news every night to see if they had been on yet.

At the Ricks Memorial Library every afternoon. Harriet DeCell and her hospitality group worked hard to disseminate information to the visitors and have them mingle with the townspeople, who act the way good people do who are not accustomed to being juxtaposed with too many celebrities: a little jumpy and voluble. A woman asked privately, "Did Theodore Roosevelt draw in this many in 1902?" [Answer: No.] A young visitor from Long Island saw a crop duster circling the cotton fields near the new school where the meeting would take place, and thought it might be a Government plane looking for Communists.

My friend Tarpley Mott, the 17-year-old son of the editor of the Yazoo Daily Herald, told me he hoped the town does not become a tourist spot now. "That's always been one of the good things about it, not having any tourists at all," he said. "I'm a progressive person. I want change within ourselves, not from other people. Look what happened to Florida." One day in Stubb's as we ate Yazoo River catfish, Tarpley complained: "I can't find any of my friends today. Nobody's where they ought to be. They're all out looking at the strangers and grinning to get attention. It's scary." Tarpley said it seemed like an awful lot of trouble for just a ten-hour visit.

But now that it has happened, you will have to take me on faith that almost everyone in Yazoo believes it all was worth it multifold. One reason for this lies in the subtle electricity which curiously embraced the town and its strangers. It is a good old town, enviable in its sense of place, and I did not encounter many visitors who were not attracted to its irascible charm and spirit. The town itself finally seemed to have developed an affection for those who came to put it under the omniscient eye, for it felt the outsiders had spurned the temptation to make it typical.

The second and more overriding reason quite simply must be attributed to the magnetism of the ranking visitor. He touched the people here profoundly. This was not merely the matter of his being a fellow Southerner, although that was naturally part of it--they were proud when he praised them for supporting their integrated public schools, proud too when he spoke of the mutual heritage with its faults and virtues. What struck them most deeply of all, at such close quarters, was the intelligence, friendliness, graciousness and trust he conveyed to them as Americans.

When suddenly everyone left town and the accouterments of power vanished and the languor set in again, even Tarpley Mott confessed that the trouble had been worthwhile. It was he who managed a seat in the front row and shook hands afterwards with the man who answered the questions. When congratulated on this, he said: "If you know this town the way I do, you can get into anywhere, I don't care who visits." But the remark was not cynical the way it may sound on paper.

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