CHAPTER 1

“THEY AIN’T STOPPIN’ IN DREW”

The distance between the Manning clan and its roots can be measured in a newspaper headline from the January 26, 2008, New Orleans Times-Picayune. As if an elegy, it read, “The Hometown Archie Once Knew Is No More.” That was more for dramatic effect than literal meaning. Save for football and gospel music, Mississippi has, over the last five decades, only gotten progressively moribund, earning its place as the poorest, least educated and most disenfranchised state.¹ But the town where Archie was born and raised—Drew, Mississippi—is still there, up in the northwest corridor of the Mississippi Delta—sometimes known as “the most Southern place on earth,”² all but swallowed up by miles and miles of cotton fields.

In the article, writer Billy Turner looked for traces Archie might’ve left behind nearly five decades ago. While the house where he lived and the fields where he played his way to fame were frozen in time, his connections to the town were invisible. At Drew High School, where he set records, few of the young black teenagers who make up the majority of the student body—the influx of whose families led white families to pull their kids out of the school and send them to another, whiter one in Sunflower County—had no idea who Archie Manning was, though they of course knew of his sons. There was still a school football team, and the stadium where he played still stood, but as Turner wrote, “It once was filled as Manning was rolling out right and either passing or galloping down the field. This season, the stands were nearly empty on Friday nights, and the team needs new equipment.”³ Drew High, which sits mere yards from the one-story house where Archie grew up (at 181 South Third Street, on the corner of Green Avenue), would itself empty out later that same year, its charter terminated, a victory for selective belt-tightening by the still-white county board of education that, not coincidentally around these parts, wanted to save money by closing a black school. As a result, for the last eight years, the abandoned skeleton of Drew High, its tan exterior and pinkish roof and empty classrooms, has sat forlornly vacant, weeds crawling up the walls.

The old Manning house still sits on the corner, its wood frame pale gray. In the backyard is the husk of a shack used once as a clubhouse, faded letters reading “No Girls Allowed” handwritten on the door, written by Archie before he knew better. Once, agents, managers, coaches, and fans would come calling here—“hundreds and hundreds,” Archie’s mother, Jane “Sis” Manning, once estimated. “People would call saying they wanted to represent him, telling him what subjects to major in. They’d show up at the door from all states of the Union. I had a ring stolen one time. One man walked in and took two pictures off the wall. ‘I’ll send them back,’ he said. He never did.”⁴

Not long after the Times-Picayune story ran, the state legislature suddenly decided to send to the governor House Bill 1480, designating a portion of US Highway 49W that runs through Drew as Manning Boulevard. They did this at the same time that another section of highway in Drew was designated the Van T. Barefoot Medal of Honor Highway, and yet another the George “Happy” Irby Parkway. The state senate also declared an Eli Manning Appreciation Day, 40 years after the town had a day for Archie Manning, as a reward for Eli not fleeing to Tennessee to play his college ball, unlike Peyton.⁵ There was a time when Archie regularly returned to Drew over the summer to visit his mother and sister, but only until Sis Manning died in 2000. To some people around town, Archie turned his back on them. To be sure, Drew is not much on his mind.

“It’s kind of sad up there, isn’t it?” he told Turner. “I get back up there as much as I can but I don’t make a big deal about it. I don’t call ahead. I get up there when I’m nearby and I slip in and go to the cemetery or whatever . . . I just don’t have time. When anyone asks me where I’m from, though, I say Drew. I don’t even say New Orleans.” He added, by rote, “Drew has been good to me and I say thank you each day for my life and being fortunate to spend the happiest part of my life here.” But he also remembered what his father once told him, speaking of the state penitentiary just up the road in Parchman. Sometimes, prisoners would break out, making Archie wonder if they would make their way through town.

“Listen, they’re over in Parchman,” his dad would tell him. “If they come this way, they ain’t stoppin’ in Drew,” just passin’ through on the way to better places.

The Manning ancestors who came to America looking for a better place came across the Atlantic from England and Scotland and settled in Virginia in 1745. One Elisha Manning, born in 1803 in Marion, South Carolina, would relocate his family to Crystal Springs, Mississippi, the heart of antebellum slaveholding society, nestled in the southwest corner of the state, bordered by the Mississippi River, just south of the Mississippi Delta. A year after the Civil War that cost Mississippi over eight thousand men, Elisha’s grandson Elisha Archibald Manning had three sons, whose families had by the turn of the century found their way to Drew, a few hundred miles north up the Mississippi.

Named for the daughter of a slave owner, Drew was known mainly as a stop along the route of the Illinois Central Railroad. There, between the Sunflower and Tallahatchie Rivers, the Mannings lived on a homestead the census called the R. W. Manning Plantation, in the township known as Beat 5, Sunflower, which comprised Drew and Ruleville just to the south. The broiling-hot, tropically humid climate meant that the thousand or so farmers who wound up there could expect reasonably good profits when they took their cotton crops to be sold to the distributors. A new revenue stream opened up when soybeans and rice began to come into demand in the 1920s. In Drew, that was the definition of living the good life, though everything about it was humble. One neighbor of Archie Manning’s granddaddy in the 1910s was a child named Thomas Lanier Williams. While this is not to suggest that Tennessee Williams was inspired by the Mannings of Mississippi, they were the sort of clan he spent a lifetime writing about in plays and novels as people more complicated than they looked, who existed in “an actual menagerie.”

African-Americans in Drew also pulled crops from the soil when not confined to their own neighborhoods. Not only were they neglected by the white town elders, but the Parchman prison was a convenient excuse for cops to believe—or pretend to believe—that black men seen in white neighborhoods were escapees and to exercise as much force as they wanted to subdue them. If they put up a fight, it was cause for putting innocent men in the slam, though any resistance—or sometimes none at all—was deemed strong enough to administer on-the-spot capital punishment. Southern culture author J. Todd Moye notes that Drew and its environs were “considered the most recalcitrant of Sunflower County and perhaps of the entire state,” and “a dangerous place to be black.” Within the walls of the prison, wrote Moye, black life “was worth next to nothing.”⁶

To nobody’s surprise, the Ku Klux Klan had a chapter in Drew. There is no evidence that any of the Mannings put on a white hood and robe, but neither is there any reason to believe they opposed the Klan. Rather, it seems they were simple cotton farmers trying to survive times that never got any easier. They worked, obeyed the law, and then put on their Sunday best and went to Drew’s First Baptist Church.

Elisha Archibald Manning Jr., a short but barrel-chested man, was called Buddy. In 1927, his Drew High junior-year yearbook, the Deltaneer, shows him in a bow tie and sporty sweater, eyes round and staring as if for comic effect, hair cropped short, identifying him as “E. A. Manning, Wittiest Boy.” In the senior yearbook, he is far more, well, mature, in a light suit, a wry but dashing smile. And he was as serious as a young man could be. Searching for more than a career as a planter, he went to Bowling Green Business College in Kentucky, then taught business at Pachula High School and Northwest Mississippi Junior College in Senatobia before moving back to Drew, ready to put his business principles to good use within a profession he knew best. He got a job as manager of Case Farm Supply, which sold sundry farm machinery such as mowers and tractors.

Smart as he was, Buddy could read the economic trends, particularly the slow death of King Cotton, and soon he was making enough to take a wife, marrying in 1938 a girl from Humboldt, Tennessee, Jane Elizabeth Nelson, nine years younger than he, whose own diminutive stature was overcompensated for by a feisty but warm nature that led to her own punchy nickname, Sis. They were inseparable, with Buddy freely admitting, only half in jest, that Sis wore the pants in the family. Their plans for a family were put on hold when Buddy enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor was attacked. He served as a private, and then, in the flush of the postwar burst of individualism and optimism, with the demands of the newly booming economy increasing the value of his farm equipment, he turned his attention toward growing a family.

In 1946, Sis became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Joe, who died of complications in childbirth. A year later, they had a daughter, Pamela Ann. Then, on May 19, 1949, eighty-five years to the day after the end of a Civil War battle in Spotsylvania that Ulysses S. Grant would call the bloodiest he ever saw, they had a son, Elisha Archibald Manning III. He seemed small, but after they brought him home to the house a stone’s throw from the high school, he began to grow. Like Buddy, he had a less stuffy identity—he was to be “Archie,” a name the boy would long into the future claim was the one on his birth certificate, though the city’s records show it as Archibald. He and Pam began school at A. W. James Elementary, then Hunter Middle School—which were kept segregated despite the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954. In Drew, as all over the South, “freedom of choice” laws funneled African-Americans into schools that were no more than shacks without electricity or running water, such as the Drew Colored Consolidated School.

But even white folks could only go so far in a town that called itself “the waterfowl capital of the state” but was frequently hit by crippling droughts. On that arid land, any lighthearted respite from work was welcome, something that united both ends of the racial divide. Yet, if not for Archie Manning, Drew might today be most famous for the achievements of its oppressed black residents, many of whom joined the great black migration from the Deep South. Two of them, Roebuck “Pops” Staples and his wife, Oceola, sang in gospel groups in Drew. After they moved to Chicago in 1935, they formed the Staple Singers. Others stayed put, turning to music as well for solace. In nearby Crystal Springs, Tommy Johnson wrote the classic “Canned Heat Blues.” The white populace had its own musical cravings, many similar, such as their church choirs and the rising hillbilly beat taken from the black bluesmen, and later the rockabilly and nascent rock and roll of a truck-driving singer from Tupelo named Elvis Presley.

Life in Drew was an accretion of sleepy, dusty Delta days. But no one worked harder than Buddy Manning. When the census man came around to the house in 1940 and asked him how many weeks a year he worked, Buddy, calling himself a “sales clerk,” answered “Fifty-two.”⁷ Years later, Archie Manning would have vivid memories of his father at Case Supply, holding court with salesmen and farmers, smoking, drinking nickel Cokes. It was, says Archie, “the place to go to bullshit.”⁸ Buddy was a tightly wound, anal man, almost obsessively focused on taking the family name higher, above the mundane picking and chopping of cotton and soybeans. He demanded the same kind of excellence and obedience from his own three sons. As Archie described him, “He was stubborn. He was tough. . . . He smoked, like everybody. Smoked Chesterfields. He wore to work, every day, a pair of khakis and a shirt. And he had to have two front pockets. . . . One pocket for his pens, and one for his Chesterfields.”

To please Buddy, Archie hit the books hard and stayed out of trouble. Buddy had played some high school football, but his main contribution was as a guy who would stick his head into much bigger guys’ chests and leave a mark during on-field fights. But Archie could not fail to see that Buddy was pushing his luck as he got older. He was, his son said, “never all that healthy. He smoked and didn’t exercise, and was always struggling—with his health, with his job at Case, with life generally.”

Pictures taken of Buddy, even when he was holding his son in his lap, are those of an unsmiling man, seemingly with the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. As Archie grew, he too played sports with an almost frightful competitive zeal and an eye for detail that was nearly obsessive-compulsive. As his sister, Pam, recalled, “Archie always worked very hard at everything he did, whether it was school or sports. I think he was just a good child. He did everything right.” She recalled her brother proudly showing off a pin the Drew First Baptist Church gave him for perfect attendance at Sunday school. “It was like fourteen or fifteen years he didn’t miss a day,” she said, shaking her head still at that kind of dedication. “His friends poked fun at him for it, not that he cared.”⁹

Why should he have? On the ball field or basketball court, he could eat them for lunch. His talent and coordination were obvious, but the clincher was his maniacal zeal to win. That, and his endless thirst for practice. With his leadership qualities, he was the ideal shortstop, barking out encouragement to his team and “No hitter, no hitter!” when the other team’s kids stepped into the batter’s box. Though he threw right-handed, he batted from the left side so as to see pitches from right-handed pitchers better. He recalled that “I was one of these ball-all-day type of kids,” which enamored him to the school and Little League coaches. It may or may not be apocryphal, but Archie tells of building an actual full-sized baseball diamond, in the manner of Field of Dreams, in the backyard.¹⁰

As early as 1959, his name appeared in the papers—though not for sports, but rather something almost as important in these parts. The Delta Democrat Times of Greenville, Mississippi, listing the kids going to the Ki-Y summer camp, identified Archie and Pam. A year later, it told of Archie being in a 4-H Club meet meant for boys and girls who had “excelled in club work the past year and who have demonstrated good leadership.” In ’64, at a countywide talent and public-speaking contest on May 4, it was reported that “Archie Manning of Drew was first place in the junior boys’ public speaking.” At 14, he wrote an essay for school precociously titled “My Autobiography,” in which he recognized that “I have been blessed with a healthy body and mind. I stand five feet six inches tall and weigh one hundred-twenty pounds. . . . I don’t know what I intend to be but plan to enter some college. I hope to be someone my friends, teachers, and parents won’t be ashamed of.”¹¹

Frank Crosthwait Jr., a lawyer and family friend who had gone to Ole Miss and became Sunflower County’s top prosecutor, recalls Archie at First Baptist, wearing “a bright red jacket and white gloves. Listen, he always stood out, not because he wanted to but because he had that look, the red hair over his eyes, the strut, the confidence, not caring if anyone else ribbed him.”¹² As Archie explained about the gloves, he had seen Pam wearing them and “fell in love with them.” At 13, he began to attract notice for what would become a familiar reason. In ’62, playing in the area’s summertime Central Delta Babe Ruth League with older guys, he was chosen for an all-star team in a tournament in Columbus. Three players from each town were chosen, and on July 20 the Delta Democrat Times reported, “Drew’s contributions to the team are Chuck Ford, Mike Brooks, and Archie Manning—the only 13-year-old on the team. Archie will be starting as the second baseman.” Archie has fond memories of 1961, following the box scores and the Game of the Week as Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris got closer to Babe Ruth’s home run record. The Yankees, he said, “were my team and I was a typical obnoxious Yankee fan,”¹³ and he used to openly dream of playing shortstop for them. This too might have earned someone other than him a slap upside the head in Drew.

Drew High was the launching pad. He got there in 1964, a critical year both for him and the civil rights struggle. For Archie, the real world went only as far as his family, his only real refuge. People remember him not as shy so much as unwilling to trust anyone outside of Buddy, Sis, and Pam. When he would travel beyond Drew, people thought he had a touch of arrogance. But as Pam Manning explained it, he was simply a product of the town’s tightly structured family ethos. “In a small town like that,” she said, “all the families did things together. We had two or three churches, one school, and everyone knew everyone else.” That meant pretty much always knowing where he was. It also meant that even the parents of other kids had a collective stake in his rising star. Wherever he went, it was with Drew on his back.

Buddy Manning—even his children called him Buddy, not Daddy—was, like most Southern gents, a big sports buff. His son recalls listening to Ole Miss games on the radio with him, his ear pressed to the radio on Halloween night 1959, when the Rebels played LSU in a battle of undefeated teams, a still-legendary game in those parts, and how he cried all night after Billy Cannon returned a late-game punt 89 yards, breaking seven tackles on the way, to put the Tigers ahead. The Rebels then marched all the way to the one-yard line before being stopped—by the ubiquitous Cannon, the Heisman Trophy winner that year. When the game was replayed on the radio at midnight, he listened again. “And when it was over I cried again.”¹⁴

Buddy, who was built like a fireplug, had played and coached sandlot baseball and football. Besides Ole Miss, he rooted for the gridiron New York Giants in the then-ragtag NFL, mainly because of Charlie Conerly, their grizzled quarterback. In the late 1940s, “Chuckin’ Charlie,” born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, was the first great Ole Miss QB, though officially he was, in the terminology of the times, a tailback, taking the snap directly in the I formation and running the offense as the de facto QB (completing a then-record 133 passes in 1947). An ex-Marine who fought in Guam, the leathery-skinned Conerly was the very essence of postwar manhood—and, centrally, Southern manhood—later to grace billboards as the Marlboro Man. He owned several shoe stores in the Delta and had a glamorous wife, another reward for a prototypical football hero.

Of course, the idea that Archie, who to Chuck would surely have seemed like the choirboy he was, could have followed in his steps would have seemed preposterous. But Archie was intrigued at the élan of such sports heroes, and he and Buddy would be riveted to the gadget that was born just around the same time Archie was, when Giant games came on the tube in the South, again cashing in on Conerly’s presence. However, life intruded on those father-and-son reveries when the cotton crop began to ebb and economic conditions worsened. The big old cotton farm ruled over by Elisha Manning Sr. out in the country was just one of many that lost their value. In town, Buddy had to put more hours into his work and could see fewer and fewer of his son’s games, or even spend much time with him. As much pride as he had, he grew insular, depressed, unwilling to share his burdens with anyone. His son noticed, and in retrospect, subtly rebuked the irresponsible manner in which Buddy governed his life.

“[T]he farming was iffy and a lot of the farmers had a peculiar mentality about paying their bills. [They would] go right out and spend [their money]—buy a Cadillac, take a vacation in New Orleans, go to the Ole Miss games and party . . . never mind making the payments for the tractor they bought. [They] lived for the day.” Buddy, he said, was both a perpetrator and a victim, since “many of his customers just flat-out didn’t pay.” Often, Sis would accompany him when he’d try to find the deadbeats and collect, an experience that for Buddy was “frustrating and embarrassing.”¹⁵ He was a bit of a dreamer; he wanted people to like him more than he wanted them to pay him.

“He wasn’t the kind of person who thought a whole lot about money,” Archie went on. “He was a funny combination, a rugged kind of man, but a scholar, too, a great Bible scholar. He loved poetry.” Doing business conflicted with that. In time, he grew progressively unhappy. Of course, few Southern men let their soft side show, believing that a man shouldn’t betray any real emotion. Archie recalls, “He didn’t hug in those days like we do now.” As for telling his children, even his wife, that he loved them, only the weakest of men went there. Archie’s description of Buddy as a “tough guy” would have pleased him, as would his tribute that Buddy was “a good influence on my work ethic.”

Football wasn’t Archie’s preferred sport, yet he had no choice but to play it. In Southern towns like Drew, the best athletes had to prove themselves in the sacred group rituals of the gridiron. The rub was his size. Back in fifth grade, weighing all of 70 pounds and, as he put it, “scrawny and limby and [so] white-skinned that I was ashamed to take my shirt off, even to go swimming,” he played in a pee wee league for older boys as a running back, given the ball only a couple times a game. But the next year, after filling out more, he was made quarterback despite not having a clue about how to play the position. The prospect was, he said, “as thrilling as it was daunting.”

Because Buddy’s personal travails were mounting, and he was less able or even moved to see Archie perform or throw the ball around with him, it was Buddy’s brothers and sisters out at the old Manning farm who played surrogate. The sisters, Mamie and Lucy, were both unmarried schoolteachers who, said Archie, “were old maids when they died.”¹⁶ (By contrast, Sis’s mother, Olivia Nelson, would marry three times.) His uncles, Peyton and Frank, also never stepped to the altar, but apparently not for lack of expertise—Uncle Peyton was a bit of a rounder. If Archie had an impish side, it was likely observed at close range when he would spend some time on the farm, or earning a little pocket change working on neighboring farms, chopping cotton for three bucks a day or cleaning bricks at half a cent per brick.

Usually, at sundown, Uncle Peyton would go into town in his Studebaker pickup, picking up four or five buddies, including a couple of naughty women, along the way. They’d alight at a redneck bar and drink until cross-eyed. Looking back, Archie would recall that, if he was around, they “might have limited their drinking and cussing some, but I had no qualms about that.” Even for the underage, drinking was a rite of manhood in the Delta, and the barkeep would slip Archie a beer. But for the most part, he was a straight arrow and a late bloomer when it came to the opposite sex. Given a choice between a date or playing Ping-Pong, he said, “I played Ping-Pong.”¹⁷

Even before he was a schoolboy star, Archie had an insatiable need to learn how to play the mental game along with the physical. His neighbor, James Hobson, three years older, had set records in school sports and on the sandlot and had been the starting quarterback wherever he played. Archie hung with him, taking his advice when he played quarterback in middle school. Sometimes, he would go right from a Saturday afternoon school game to a pee wee game on Beef Maxwell Field, the home turf of Drew High, named after a former local football hero who now owned the Western Auto parts store in town. Archie’s frailty was a looming worry, compounded by the fact that the best athletes at Drew had to play both offense and defense, the student body of the school being so small that only around 25 kids came out for the rarely elite team.

During Archie’s first year there, 1964, a rule barring freshmen from the varsity squad was bent so that he could back up Hobson, though he had never played a down. The next season, with Hobson gone to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, Archie eased into the starting job and would win his first citation in the papers—though not as he would have hoped. The November 1 Delta Democrat Times reported that, late in the first half against Leland High, “Leland end Paul Cuicchi . . . intercepted Archie Manning’s pass seconds before the first half ended.” Drew lost 27–6, not an uncommon sort of score, explaining why he had three coaches in four years.

As a sophomore, Archie broke his right arm against Indianola, ending his season early, which may have convinced him he should be a baseball player. That was still his game. He’d also run track as a sprinter and quarter-miler and was the captain and point guard on the basketball team, averaging 25 points a game. Still, as he continued to grow and become acclimated to the chores and demands of being the quarterback of the only high school team in Drew, it was nothing to sniff at. These games were big news in the area. The whole town was expected to show up for them, notwithstanding Buddy Manning’s increasing absences.

Archie’s last coach at Drew, Paul Pounds, was a neighbor of the Mannings and worked hard with him. Pounds saw a skinny, brittle kid who disregarded his safety when he ran like a mad bull. “He was tough. He’d done that bricklayin’ all summer, his hands would be all callused, but he could throw like nobody’s business. He didn’t really know how to drop back and throw, so I just said, ‘Listen, Redhead, get out around the end and go all the way.’ Or he’d lower his head into a linebacker’s chest. He had no fear.”¹⁸ That was not always wise. As a junior, Archie broke his left arm and went on playing with it in a cast. He was growing into his role, slowly. As a senior, he stood six foot two and a solid 170 pounds, still looking, as his school buddy Robert Khayat said, like “skin and bones and freckles,” but bowing to no one, and paying for it. The Delta Democrat Times reported that in a game against Winona, he was “knocked out of the game four times,” but still won. A week later, he sizzled—“Indianola Is Victim of Drew’s Manning” was the headline heralding the 27–21 victory, the game story calling him “the do-it-all kid” who “bomb[ed] a weak Indianola pass defense with everything but a worn-out pair of football shoes.”

A common sight at a Drew game under the Friday night lights, one that would stir the crowd into a frenzy, was Archie breaking around end and threading his way down the field, sideline to sideline, hips swiveling like Elvis, as he eluded tacklers. As he recalled, “I wasn’t fast but I was the fastest in Drew.” He was also sneaky, hedging on a fake until a tackler had committed to an angle and got close to him. And when he broke clear, funny as he looked with those loose limbs, he ate up big chunks of turf.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his senior year was not his combined 16 touchdowns, but that he led the Eagles to a 5–5 record. “Heck,” says Pounds, “we were always overmatched. [Opponents would] have more seniors alone than we had players. Then they had to face Archie, and it would be ‘good night.’ One time, he told me he saw the middle linebacker cheating to the outside to stop him from getting around right end, because right-handed quarterbacks like to go right. We were behind, we needed a score, and Archie took a step right, turned around, and went left, all the way. I think he’s still runnin’.”

For moves like that, he was praised in the Delta Democrat Times as “one of the top quarterbacks in the [Delta Valley] conference.” He was named to the first string of the all-county team. For a time, he even seemed to go Hollywood, bleaching his hair a weird facsimile of blond, saying later that it was a fad going around in school at the time. He had cause to strut. Nearing graduation, he was a 15-time letterman, too many to sew onto his school jacket. As soon as the football season was over, he was on the court with the basketball team, leading Drew to a win over Indianola by “scorch[ing] the sacks for 33 points.” But, every bit as impressive, his academic average was 99.44, first in his class. Of course he was named Mr. Drew High and elected class president, to deliver the valedictory address on graduation day, something he says happened because he was the only one in the class who wanted to do it. His topic in the address was prophetic—as he recalled, “I just talked about how we were going to shape the future.” If he only knew.