David Michael Burrow
University of Southern Mississippi (Part 5)
In addition to New Orleans, the university sponsored a group excursion to Vicksburg and Jackson. We had a delightful tour of the battlefield at Vicksburg. Our tour escort was a charming little old belle in a pink parasol who at age 86 set a pace that most of the group had trouble keeping up with. Her grandfather and some uncles had fought at Vicksburg, and both of her parents lived in the town while it was under siege. She knew every detail of the place, and her stories were fascinating. I had enjoyed the park when I visited it last year, but her tour was definitely more fun than just driving around and reading the signs.
Later in the day we visited a junky little museum in Vicksburg that was housed in the former county courthouse. What interested me most were the four outhouses that surrounded the building. The guide said they were constructed for symmetry, but it didn't take long to figure out that in front of the building were "White Men" and "White Women", while "Colored Men" and "Colored Women" were in back. I should add that the old colored toilets have been boarded up; these days everyone uses the ones in front. It's sad to think, though, that it is only within my lifetime that the change has happened.
Later on we saw the state agriculture and forestry museum in Jackson. The place is a lot like Living History Farms, but it's all set to be around the year 1930. It gave me a feeling for what things must have been like when Daddy was growing up. Also there was a museum of agricultural aviation (crop dusting and the like) which was surprisingly interesting.
In the evening we went to Jackson's planetarium. We actually didn't see much of a star show (about ten minutes worth), but they showed three short movies on the round planetarium ceiling that were interesting. It was also goof to sit back in the soft chairs after a long day on my feet.
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I went to Jackson several times on my own. Its major attraction for me turned out to be shopping. Jackson is a wonderful place to shoptoo good, actually. I spent far more than I should have, justifying everything by what bargains I was getting. I was shocked at how cheap things were. Clothes, especially, were extremely inexpensive. There were things that would cost over a hundred dollars in Algona that I could pick up in Jackson for thirty dollars. I asked around and came up with two reasons for this. First, garment mills are the single largest industry in Mississippi. Even such things as the snooty Z. Cavaricci pants, which most of the kids think are imported from Europe, are actually sewn by poor Black people in Mississippi. ... The other reason for the low prices is that fashionable clothing seems to be priced at what the market will bear. The actual cost of garments is almost nothing, so virtually everything you pay is profit. That means that merchants can be extremely flexible in pricing. The boys at Garrigan are perfectly willing to pay eighty or a hundred dollars for pants, so The Buckle is more than happy to let them pay it. Almost no one in Mississippi can afford to spend that kind of money on clothes, so prices are accordingly lower. Even so, it was hard to believe that they could charge such radically different prices.
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While I'm on the topic of shopping, I should mention a chain of stores unique to Mississippi called Hudson's. This isn't in any way related to the chain of ritzy department stores of the same name, the eastern companion to Dayton's. Rather, it's the antithesis of a ritzy department store. Hudson's takes bargain hunting to its extreme. The chain salvages the stock that is left over after disasters and liquidates it in barn-like stores at rock-bottom prices (from half to 80% off the ticketed price). Every Hudson's has a different stock; it depends on what sort of place had a fire or flood recently--one store had almost all shoes, another was mostly hardware, and yet another was filled with the entire contents of a Mexican supermarket. Perhaps most amusing was a store with two full aisles with nothing but condoms. (I had to wonder who would trust contraceptives that had been through a disaster.) Locals consider Hudson's a Mississippi institution, and shopping there was certainly an experience. I had never even imagined such a place existed.
There can be pitfalls to shopping there, though. Sandra found a bargain on a dress at Hudson's, and she brought it back to her dorm with her. When she modeled it for the other women in the dorm, they complimented her on it, but one asked, "What's that thing hanging there?" Only then did she realize that the dress had one of those security pegs that beeps if you shoplift. Hudson's doesn't use those pegs; this one had been placed there by the original store where it was for sale, before whatever disaster struck. The thing was designed so she couldn't remove it herself without ripping the dress. In the end she managed to exchange it for another dress, but she certainly got more than she bargained for.
Finally, on the topic of shopping, there's the grocery stores. Southern supermarkets are always enormous, and they seem to have the stupidest names. The biggest chain in Mississippi is called "Jitney Jungle", with "Piggly Wiggly" close behind. Even "Winn-Dixie" (which always carries the subtitle "The Beef People") and "Delchamps" (French for "countryside" and always given the slaughtered pronunciation "dale-CHAMPS") seemed like amusing names to me. ...
Amid all this shopping, I also became quite familiar with the automatic tellers of the South. Last summer I had trouble getting money on most of my vacation. In Mississippi and Louisiana, though, the Gulf Net system is connected to the same network as Shazam in Iowa. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it made it easy to get cash; the problem was having the cash to be able to get.
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Over the summer it seemed as if I drove every road in southern Mississippi and eastern Louisiana. That would be an exaggeration, of course, but I did see a lot. All in all I found rural Mississippi very dull. Almost every road in the state is a tunnel through the forest. I found it disconcerting to drive for miles and miles without seeing farms or farm houses. The concept of urban and rural are very different in Iowa and Mississippi. Here the entire countryside is sparsely, but generally, settled. Because of that there is a rural population to support business in the towns. In Mississippi the rural areas are mostly unsettled, and it was weird to drive through them.
Overall I liked Louisiana a lot better than Mississippi. It's somewhat (though not much) more prosperous, and (despite all the business with David Duke weve heard about since I got back), the people come across as a lot friendlier. Also Louisiana is dominated by Catholics, rather than Baptists, so the attitudes and morals are different. Most Louisianans lead quite conservative lives themselves, but they will tolerate almost anything. Since that's pretty much where I come from in my own attitudes, I found this pretty easy to relate to. Most Mississippians are scandalized by their next-door neighbor. Many times I heard the state referred to as "Sleeze-iana", and "Gomorrah" is a fairly common Mississippi nickname for New Orleans.
In addition to the people I liked Louisiana because the countryside is more varied and interesting. Most of the state is natively swamp, and to me swamp is a lot more fun to drive through than a pine forest. Not everything is swamp, though. A large part of the state has been drained and is used for farming. I saw almost every imaginable cropfrom the same corn and soybeans I was used to at home to such Southern staples as cotton and tobacco. Also, for the first time in my life, I saw sugarcane (which looks like the yucca you see in the desert) and rice (which is grown on little levees in vast fields that are flooded with irrigated water). The farms make the countryside look more prosperous, and I frankly felt safer driving when there were houses along the road.
One of the most interesting things in Louisiana is what they call the Old River Project, northwest of Baton Rouge. The Mississippi River is the lifeblood of Louisiana, and today most of the water of the Mississippi is walled between enormous levees designed to preserve the current channel (so the major ports at New Orleans and Baton Rouge dont become obsolete) and to keep it from flooding. West of the main channel, though, is the Old River, a former path of the Mississippi that now dumps into the Atchafalaya Swamp. The Old River is now used for flood control. In years when the Mississippi is running high (1991 was such a year) as much as a third of its water is diverted to the Old River. Here a series of dams and levees contain it until it can be slowly absorbed into the swamp. Louisiana highway 15 runs beside the old river. Often it goes on top of the levees or over the dams, offering a spectacular view of the countryside. It's slow going, as the road follows every little meander of the river, but it made a delightful little drive.
Church
This summer, for just about the first time in my life, I went to church while away from home. Actually I went to mass. There's almost no such thing as a Congregational Church in the South. New Orleans, for example, has one U.C.C. Other "mainline" Protestants here seem to be split two ways. Either they are Bible Belt conservative (most Methodists) or they are ultra-liberal (most Presbyterians). There aren't very many of either of those, either. The only real choices were Southern Baptist and Catholic. My own religion is highly eclectic, but Southern Baptist I'm not. I was at least familiar with mass from my years at Garrigan, and the Catholic liturgy is essentially the same anywhere.
I went to three different churches. St. Thomas, next to the USM campus, looked like a poor college church. They had straight chairs instead of pews, and the dicor was minimal to say the least. ... What intrigued me most was that almost all of the congregation was people in the community, rather than college students. ...
St. Thomas used the same Oregon Catholic Press missalettes that the churches around Algona use. They also sang the same hymns ... that we sing at Garrigan, and like Catholics everywhere they seemed to instinctively know how many verses to sing without being told. The priest was lively and interesting. He had been born in Ireland, and his brogue certainly stood out in Dixie. It intrigued me that the altar boy rang the bells at the consecration. The only time I've ever seen that was on TV when the Pope said mass on Christmas. ... Another little quirk was having the entire congregation join hands for the Lord's Prayer. Oddest of all, though, was how many people did not take communion. Probably a third of the congregation (including whole families) participated in mass, but did not go up for communion. I don't know what everybody's reasons were (perhaps they, too, were mainline Protestants lost in the churches of Dixie), but I certainly didn't feel alone.
One Saturday I went to mass at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. St. Louis bills itself as the oldest continually active parish in North America--although I find it hard to believe that there was no place in Florida or California or Canada ... that beat it. It's a lovely old church, though, and I enjoyed the service. The cathedral parish consists of a hunk of the French Quarter and a bunch of public housing projects, and today most of the potential parishioners are either rich gay people or destitute Blacks. Very few of either attend the Catholic church, and virtually everyone in the congregation when I was there was a tourist.
St. Louis Cathedral used a very different missalette, one published by some company in Ohio. It was obviously much more conservative than the O.C.P. materials. ... The overall liturgy was very similar, but at a few crucial points the language tended to be more traditional. ...
I also went to mass at the Church of the Holy Name on the campus of Loyola University in New Orleans. The congregation here was a mixture of students and community people, and the church was by far the most liberal I attended--which was no surprise at a Jesuit college. Everything in the mass was non-sexist ..., and the homily had a social justice message that had very little to do with the readings. This was also the only Catholic church I have ever been to that used a hymnal rather than misalettes. I was especially intrigued (though I'm sure it was an oversight) to find that the hymnal did not begin with a polite, but stern message saying that Protestants were not welcome to share in communion. ...
Holy Name is one of the most gorgeous churches I have ever seen. It is much more beautiful than St. Louis Cathedral, and I personally think it would rival some of the great churches of Europe. Vertical lines dominate the architecture, and inside you really get a feeling of ascending to the heavens. The statues, windows, and woodwork are spectacular, and the whole place exudes reverence. I like almost all old churches, but this one was especially lovely.
Other Events & Notes
Lots of other things, both important and irrelevant, happened over the course of this ten-week summer session. I've mentioned most of the important stuff, but there are a few things left to be said. I've been thumbing through an appointment calendar I kept over the summer and a scrapbook where I shoved little reminders of various things. ...
We had a group picnic for everyone in the SPGE in the middle of June. We all went to Lake Sehoy, a wilderness area north of Hattiesburg that is owned and maintained by the university. I dreaded going to the picnic (I hate big group events), but I didn't have too bad of a time. The food (barbecued ribs) wasn't bad, and they didn't force us to play volleyball or any of those other dumb things I was dreading. This was my first real chance to get acquainted with a large number of the students who weren't in the same classes I was, and I met people from all over everywhere.
* * * * *
Another item I notice in my datebook is a library project I did for my Research class. This was the project where I got to know Sandra and Roy. It is also one of the most useful assignments I have ever done for any class. We had to locate and photocopy thirty different reference materials in the university library. The assignment included some materials on microfilm, at the reserve desk, in bound periodicals, in university documents, in computer databases, and almost every other reference source we would ever be likely to need. Having been a math major as an undergraduate, I was probably inside the UNI library less than a dozen times--and most of those visits had nothing to do with research. I no more knew how to request an item on microfilm or how to do a computer search than I knew how to do brain surgery. This assignment gave me experience and confidence, and I used a lot of what I learned in doing research for the papers I wrote.
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Looking through the scrapbook, I came across a bunch of fast food trash. I kept the stuff mostly as a reminder of the strange and different fast food that exists in Mississippi. My meal ticket only worked on weekdays--which was fine with me, since I skipped town almost every Saturday and Sunday anyhow. In my journeys I encountered all kinds of interesting eateries that are unknown up north.
Two such places are hamburger chains called Indy's and Rally's. ... Their names suggest cars, so it's no surprise that both are exclusively drive-through restaurants (although I once walked up to the drive through window ...). Their only sandwiches are hamburgers, and they are some of the greasiest, most disgusting hamburgers I ever saw. Indy's did have two items I liked, though. They served banana shakes--which tasted nothing like bananas, but had a very rich almost French vanilla flavor. They also had an item called "apple tots" made of deep-fried, batter-dipped apple pie filling, heavily sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. It's the ultimate junk food, but it was definitely delicious.
Another regional chain is Krystal ... . Their lunch and dinner menu features tiny bite-sized cheeseburgers that seem to have more mustard than cheese. They're good, and each one is cheap; but it takes three or four to make a meal. I mostly went to Krystal for breakfast, though. Their egg and meat items made me nauseous, but they served blueberry muffins that were out of this world. They had a crumbly topping and were dripping with butter and honey. Like the apple tots, they had absolutely no nutritional value, but they were a wonderful way to start the day.
Ward's and Sonic are the South's answer to A&W. Sonic claims to be "America's Drive-In", although Ive never seen one north of Cairo, Illinois. They are horribly expensive, and I never knew what I was supposed to do with that tray they attached to my window when I was done eating. Ward's wasn't a drive-in, but they did feature old-fashioned root beer in chilled mugs. The one thing I liked at Ward's was their breakfasts, ... with ham and cheese biscuits and hash browns that were almost crispy--a definite rarity in Dixie.
The last fast food place I'll comment on is Popeye, which advertises "the taste of New Orleans". Their dinner menu is exclusively "Cajun fried chicken", which I avoided entirely. I did have breakfast there once, though--which was more than enough. First, I had the unique experience of being the only white person in the place, even though the restaurant was in the almost all-white neighborhood next to USM. Most of the menu items were things I had never heard of, and everything was served with complimentary grits on the side. I ended up settling for a ham and egg platter. When I got it (after a long wait) it seemed as if they hadn't even cooked the eggs. Not only were the yolks runny; even the whites were not fully set. They had managed to smother them in grease and almost totally blacken them with pepper, though. I thought about returning them, but there was a long line at the counter. The rest of the meal--a salty hunk of lard, greasy hash browns covered with Tabasco sauce, soggy danish, pulpy orange juice, watered down coffee with grounds floating in it, and (of course) slimy grits--tempted my tastebuds almost as much as the eggs. I had to wonder if black people actually liked this stuff, or if they somehow felt they weren't welcome at places that served "real" food. (I don't think I ever did see a black person at Ward's.)
This fatty Southern cuisine seems to have an effect on the local residents. Iowans are certainly not the thinnest people on earth, but we are truly anorexic compared to most people in Mississippi. It intrigued me, though, that weight seems to have a lot to do with income level in the South. Rich people (both young and old, both black and white) are, on the average much thinner than poor people. I saw an example of this when USM hosted cheerleading camps this summer. One evening Roy and I spent dinner gawking at the people who were, presumably, the cutest girls in their respective high schools. After a while we could tell almost instantly where a girl was from, just by how heavy she was and how she cared for her hair. Rich schools (with names like Petal or Oak Grove or Northeast Metro--the rich part of Jackson) had cute cheerleaders with fashionable blonde curls, while poor schools (like Purvis or Belzoni or Bogalusa) had enormous cheerleaders with dark hair cropped close to their face. They looked all the larger in their skimpy costumes. We wondered, half jokingly and half with concern, what would happen if those girls did pyramids as a part of their routine. (By the way, the only black cheerleaders we saw were from Medger Evers High--the wrong side of the tracks in Jackson--and from Christ the King in New Orleans.)
CONTINUED IN PART SIX
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