months to be distracted for long. Eventually the gravity of the river draws my gaze to the west.
From the midpoint of the Bienville bluff, you can see seventeen miles of river. Thanks to the misguided Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi upstream from Bienville looks like a canal. It’s a nine-mile run to the first meander, and two meanders above that stands the siege city of Vicksburg. Besieged by Yankees during the Civil War and by economic woes today, the city fights hard to survive. It’s a grim reality, but the river towns are dying in Mississippi, by a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease. Most have changed so little over time that if you resurrected a citizen who lived in the 1890s, they would still recognize the streets they once walked. In Natchez and Bienville, you could do that with someone from the 1850s.
Of all the famous Mississippi cotton towns—from Clarksdale in the Delta to Natchez on its bluff—only Bienville is holding its own against the tides of time, race, and terminal nostalgia. The reason is complex, largely illegal, and has occupied much of my thoughts and work since I moved back here five months ago. My gut tells me that Buck Ferris’s death will ultimately be added to the list of smaller crimes committed in the quest for Bienville’s economic survival, but right now my mind refuses to track on that.
Right now I’m thinking how this day feels a lot like the day my feelings about the Mississippi River changed forever. It was May then, too. A glorious May. I loved the river then. As a boy, I’d fished in it, hunted along it, canoed across it, camped above it as a Boy Scout, even skied over its backwaters during flood years. The Mississippi was as much a part of me then as it ever was of Huck Finn or Sam Clemens. The year I left Bienville to attend college at the University of Virginia, I came across a letter by T. S. Eliot, who I had always vaguely assumed was English. To my surprise, I discovered that Eliot had grown up along the same river I had, in St. Louis, and to a friend he wrote this about the Mississippi: I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. I knew exactly what Eliot meant.
All my life, I’ve felt a constant, subterranean pull from the great river that divides America into east and west, this slow juggernaut of water that was the border of my home, a force that tugged at me like spiritual gravity. But after one day in 1987, what it pulled on in me changed. Today smells a lot like that day: Confederate jasmine and honeysuckle, late-blooming azaleas. The sun is hot, but the air is cool. And the river’s running high, just as it was thirty-one years ago.
But unlike today, which began with death, that day began in glory. Glory for my family and my friends. The idea that the angel of death was circling over us would have seemed preposterous.
My brother and I had spent the afternoon in Jackson, the state capital, running in the state track meet for St. Mark’s Episcopal Day School. When I write “Episcopal Day School,” don’t picture an ivy-walled temple of learning. Picture three gray corrugated aluminum buildings without air-conditioning and a bumpy football field in a former cow pasture. Correction: The teacher’s lounge and the library had window AC units. The school board couldn’t have hired anyone to teach us without them. Academic rigor was stressed at St. Mark’s, but—as in the rest of the former Confederacy—football was a religion. Basketball and baseball also rated as manly sports, though second tier, while running track was viewed merely as training duty. Golf, tennis, and swimming were hobbies pursued by dandies. Swimming was the one activity at which I truly excelled, but St. Mark’s didn’t have a team. I had to swim for the City of Bienville.
Thanks to my brother Adam and his senior classmates, St. Mark’s had thus far won both the Class A state championship in football and the Overall State championship in basketball, defeating the preeminent Quad A school in the state, Capital Prep in Jackson. This miracle had been accomplished only twice in the state’s history. It