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By Root 1337 0

James Chaney and two white guys from New York, Andrew Goodman, twenty, and Michael Schwerner, twenty. I give their names because they deserve to be remembered. They were arrested for speeding, taken to the Neshoba County Jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and never seen again – at least not until weeks later when their bodies were hauled out of a swamp. These were kids, remember. The police had released them to a waiting mob, which had taken them away and done things to them that a child wouldn’t do to an insect. The sheriff in the case, a smirking, tobacco-chewing fat boy named Lawrence Rainey, was acquitted of negligent behaviour. No-one was ever charged with murder. To me this was and always would be the South.

I followed Highway 7 south towards Oxford. It took me along the western edge of the Holly Springs National Forest, which seemed to be mostly swamp and scrubland. I was disappointed. I had half expected that as soon as I crossed into Mississippi there would be Spanish mosses hanging from the trees and women in billowy dresses twirling parasols and white-haired colonels with handle-bar moustaches drinking mint juleps on the lawn while darkies gathered the cotton and sang sweet hymns. But this landscape was just scrubby and hot and nondescript. Occasionally there would be a shack set up on bricks, with an old black man in a rocking-chair on the porch, but precious little sign of life or movement elsewhere.

At the town of Holly Springs stood a sign for Senatobia, and I got briefly excited. Senatobia! What a great name for a Mississippi town! All the stupidity and pomposity of the Old South seemed to be encapsulated in those five golden syllables. Maybe things were picking up. Maybe now I would see chain-gangs toiling in the sun and a prisoner in heavy irons legging it across fields and sloshing through creeks while pursued by bloodhounds, and lynch mobs roaming the streets and crosses burning on lawns. The prospect enlivened me, but I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking me over with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car. He was sweaty and overweight and sat low in his seat. I assume he was descended from the apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope. I stared straight ahead with a look that I hoped conveyed seriousness of purpose mingled with a warm heart and innocent demeanour. I could feel him looking at me. At the very least I expected him to gob a wad of tobacco juice down the side of my head. Instead, he said, ‘How yew doin’?’

This so surprised me that I answered, in a cracking voice, ‘Pardon?’

‘I said how yew doin’?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. And then added, having lived some years in Britain, ‘Thank you.’

‘Y’on vacation?’

‘Yup.’

‘Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I say, Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?’

I was quietly distressed. The man was armed and Southern and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m kind of slow, and I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I say’ – and he repeated it more carefully – ‘how doo yew lack Mississippi?’

It dawned on me. ‘Oh! I like it fine! I like it heaps! I think it’s wonderful. The people are so friendly and helpful.’ I wanted to add that I had been there for an hour and hadn’t been shot at once, but the light changed and he was gone, and I sighed and thought, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’

I drove on to Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, or ‘Ole Miss’, as it’s known. The people named the town after Oxford in England in the hope that this would persuade the state to build the university there, and the state did. This tells you most of what you need to know about the workings of the Southern mind. Oxford appeared to be an agreeable town. It was built around a square, in the middle of which stood the Lafayette County Courthouse, with a tall clock-tower and Doric columns, basking grandly in the Indian summer sunshine. Around the perimeter of the square were attractive