Mississippi Cotton (29 page)

We drove into Cotton City and went into the old café downtown. I didn’t know the owners now, but whites and colored sat at the counter and tables. Once it was for whites on one side and colored on the other. The pinball machine was gone. We talked for over two hours.

His son had gone into coaching, too. He’d been a good player, mostly through hard work, since he had less natural talent than BB. But he had been a well-respected defensive coach and had been sent feelers as to him taking a head coaching job at a major university.

“You don’t tell me,” I said. “Well, where is it, BB? What school?”

“Well, between you and me and the fence post, Mr. Jake, it’s Ole Miss.”

“Really. Ole Miss? You mean—“

“I mean the first black head coach at Ole Miss,” he said in a whispered voice.

I took a sip of coffee and glanced around to see if others were listening. “Is it certain he’s gonna be offered the job? Will he take it?”

“Well, it’s his decision. But I told him that there were a lot of white folks up at Ole Miss wanted him to have it just because he’s black and because most of the players are black. Those people are about as sorry a lot as you’ll find, black or white.”

“You’re trying to tell me something, BB. I can feel it.”

BB smiled. It was that white-toothed smile contrasted against his black face. The same smile I had seen fifty years before. The only color change in BB was in his hair, now mostly white.

“Well, I told my boy, Jesse, that these people who want him as head coach are the same people who don’t want white people to sing Dixie or carry their flags; the same flags that the Mississippi Grays carried. They don’t care about Ole Miss and they probably won’t care about you or your players. You know, Mister Jake, they tell them boys that the sound of Dixie is a sound of evil and they should shun it. They don’t care that they get themselves tattooed and stick jewelry in their ears and noses, as long as they ain’t Dixie boys. As far as I’m concerned, those people can go to hell. And I told Jesse that he oughta tell ‘em that if you don’t allow Dixie or the Bonnie Blue flags, then you don’t allow me. If you start singing it like us Gray men sing it, if you teach ‘em that this is their land; their land to love and work and maybe even fight for one day, then I’m your man. Because I’m not gonna lie to those young men, black or white, about their heritage. Not even for the million dollars they’re offering you.”

“So, you think he’s gonna be the first black coach there?”

BB held his cup with both hands and took a sip. He put it down in front of him and jiggled it and looked into it like he was a seer studying the future in the small ripples of the black liquid. He looked up and smiled at me. “Nope.”

I updated him on my life. I told him I had moved to Texas some thirty years earlier, had married and reared a son myself. I had served in the Navy. I had thought at the time those white uniforms looked sharp. I hadn’t been sent to Viet Nam, being held in reserve to guard the Panama Canal Zone.

Texas had been a cotton and cow state forever. But there wasn’t a cow college and the cotton wasn’t Mississippi. I told him I had thought about moving back to Mississippi one day, but that was still in the future.

Our meeting in the old café was the last time I saw BB. He finished his new house and went back to work in the cotton fields. He would work until the day he died. I knew him well enough to know that would happen.

On my return trip along the Interstate, I realized that this was not the road of my youth that had taken me to the Delta and back to Jackson. That road winded slowly through the countryside, carrying visitors and farmers and families. It was slow enough to have memories etched, and stopping points where people and towns were local and special. And not only the destination but the journey had chronicles. The Interstate was a monster that sped people back and forth in a hurry because hurrying was essential to modernity. This monster stole land and lives and memories. It was progress. And I could see that it had begun to steal the South’s identity and rob its people of their culture.

I had a long drive back to Fort Worth, plenty of time to think of childhood memories. And some of those memories are so much more vivid because of the permanence they burned into me. That August spent in Cotton City was still afire in me—the summer of mystery, murder, and working in the cotton fields. And the Giants in their remarkable race to the pennant.

They finally did win the Pennant that year, coming back from thirteen and a half games behind to win on a home run by Bobby Thomson in a playoff game. Regrettably, they were spent and had not enough left to win the grand prize. The Yankees overwhelmed them in the World Series. I guess it was like the University Grays at Pickett’s charge. They took the hill but didn’t have enough left to win the grand prize. And the Yankees overwhelmed them.

***

Special thanks for encouragement to:

Julie Cantrell, Oxford, Mississippi

Fred Miller, Columbia, South Carolina

James Ferguson, Oak Ridge, Tennessee