After Vanderbilt, Ole Miss returned to Oxford for their first home game. My parents and I drove down from Asheville. It was a long day, but after the last-minute win against Vandy, we were eager to get to the next game. Sports is funny that way. Had Ole Miss lost, the next game would have been tainted with fear of more pain. But even a last-minute victory against the traditionally weakest team in the SEC was enough to convince us that this was going to be a great season. The Rebels were playing Southeast Missouri State, a college none of us had heard of, which made it tempting to assume Ole Miss would win. But my father reminded me of a previous “certain” victory that had turned into a humiliating defeat.
“Jacksonville State,” Dad said, “2010 and they beat us 49–48 in overtime.”
“I remember,” I said, sighing. “It was horrible. In overtime. How in God’s name did Jacksonville State score forty-nine points?”
“How did Ole Miss score only forty-eight?” he asked.
“Can we talk about something more pleasant?” my mother asked from the backseat, where she had been reading. She was right. Thinking about a disastrous game like that could induce the sports version of post-traumatic stress.
For the weekend, we had rented a little house outside Oxford in a tiny community called Taylor. It was famous for a restaurant called Taylor Grocery, which had developed a cult following for its catfish. The game started at 6:00 p.m., which was an odd, happy-hour sort of kickoff time but perfect for Ole Miss. The partying in the Grove always began at least four hours before game time. For a 2:00 p.m. kickoff, that meant the drinking would begin around 10:00 in the morning, which wasn’t a terrible thing, but it did take some combination of practice and natural ability. The problem with night games was that the pregame partying inevitably went on a little too long and a third-quarter hangover could become a serious problem. But for a 6:00 p.m. kickoff, you could sleep late, get something to eat in town, and still be drinking with family and friends at a perfectly respectable mid-afternoon hour.
On the morning of the game, my mother, who enjoyed football but had no desire to go to the games, announced she would hang out at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house while Dad and I were at the game. This was the sorority that had brought her to Mississippi when she had come from LSU as a sophomore to “colonize” its first chapter at Ole Miss. She still had the combination of charm and iron will that had made the Kappa launch a great success.
I was headed out for a run but stopped in the door and turned around.
“You’re joking, right?” I asked, sounding a little too hopeful.
My mother looked at me in surprise. “I’ll drop you and your dad off and then just go over to the house.”
“It’s a great idea,” my father chimed in.
I had to admit there was something about my eighty-six-year-old mother at the Kappa house during the game that was sort of wonderful. But it was obviously total lunacy.
“You’re going to hang out with a bunch of drunk sorority girls?”
She made a face. “Don’t be mean. They’re Kappas.”
“They probably won’t get too drunk until after the game,” my father said. “It’s an early game.”
“Pacing is important,” I agreed.
My mother sighed. “I think I know more about Kappa girls than you do. When is the last time you were in a Kappa house?”
I wasn’t about to argue. “Why don’t you just stay here during the game? It’ll be crazy on campus.” She looked over at my dad in a way that said clearly, “Please explain this to your son.”
“I don’t think it’s a great idea,” he replied.
“How come?”
“We’re out here in the country. Your mother shouldn’t be here alone at night.”
“Country? There’s art galleries and Taylor Grocery out here. It’s not like we’re in the northwest frontier provinces of Pakistan. It’s far more dangerous at the Kappa house,” I insisted. “The first home game? Do you have any idea how hard they will be partying?”
“I’m sure they will have the best party,” my mother said, adding pointedly, “the nicest party.”
“They always do,” Dad agreed.
I headed out in the hot midday sun for my run. By the time I got back from navigating the dangers of Taylor, past the boutique art galleries and Taylor Grocery, my parents had settled on my mother’s staying at the house.
“It’ll be fine here,” she said and sounded a touch relieved. I realized that she hadn’t wanted to go to campus; it was just Dad worried about her.
My father was already dressed in the red Ole Miss polo shirt we’d picked up the day before on campus. “You ready for football?” he asked. It was a refrain we had shared since I was a kid. This was before “Are you ready for some football?” became a popular riff in promo ads and game-day hype. When I was growing up, it was our own code, like a password to another special Saturday. “You ready for football?”
“Are they going to win?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
It made us both smile. It always did.
“It’s a good day for a game,” Dad said. That was part of the ritual as well. It could be pouring rain or sleeting, and it would still be a good day for a game.
“Great day,” I said, reciting my part.
For this season, the university had started new game-day parking regulations involving a complicated system of off-campus bus shuttles. The only way to get on campus was with a parking pass, which mostly went to season ticket holders and donors to various building and scholarship funds. But I’d been lucky enough to snag a pass through the kindness of the athletic department. My dad was the oldest living member of the Ole Miss Student Hall of Fame, and that he still wanted to come to games seemed to please the university a great deal.
We drove onto campus around 4:00 p.m. for the 6:00 p.m. kickoff. As we parked just off All-American Drive and were getting out of the car, I grabbed from the car a campus map that I’d picked up earlier at the Rebel Shop. That had been a mandatory stop to buy the matching Ole Miss shirts that we were wearing.
“What’s that?” my father asked, sounding like a suspicious TSA agent eyeing a chain saw in your carry-on.
“It’s a map.” Then I added, as if it were necessary, “A campus map.” Good to clear that up, in case he thought I was bringing, say, a map of Quebec.
He shook his head, looking pained. “The day I need a map to get around the Ole Miss campus…” He let it hang there, unfinished.
“Okay, but what about me? You know I haven’t been here in years.”
“Stick with me,” he said gravely, as though we were heading out on a dangerous patrol.
As my dad and I slowly made our way across campus to the Grove, it was like walking into a huge reunion of a very extended family. If you didn’t recognize someone immediately, the odds were still overwhelming that you would enjoy getting to know anyone you met, at least after a couple of drinks and some trash talk about the impending Rebel victory. It was the exact opposite experience of walking through Manhattan at rush hour. Yes, both were crowded, but here no one hesitated to make eye contact, smile, and greet one another with a nod and “Hotty Toddy.” Of course, my initial reaction was to pull back, as though the next level of friendliness would invariably be intrusive and awkward and probably involve a request for money or at least football tickets. But by the time my father and I had reached the Circle by the Lyceum, it was all starting to feel perfectly normal. It was probably what visiting a nudist colony was like: a little odd at first but pleasant after a while, as long as it was warm.
And it was warm, too warm. I looked over at my dad and was startled that he was drenched in sweat and red-faced. My mother had stuck an inhaler and a little bottle of tiny nitroglycerin tablets in my pocket. I wondered if he might need one or both. A couple in their forties saw me looking at my dad with concern and stopped to ask, “Y’all doing okay?”
“Hotty Toddy,” Dad said automatically, managing a smile.
“Hotty Toddy to you, good-looking,” the woman said, taking his arm and looking over at me questioningly. I shrugged.
“It’s hot,” I said stupidly, not really knowing what else to say.
“Real hot,” her husband agreed. “You know, we were just right inside there, and it’s nice and air-conditioned. Might want to cool off in there.” He motioned to a large building behind us: Brevard Hall.
“That sounds real good,” Dad said but didn’t move. He was looking out at the scene in the Circle with a smile. In front of us were hundreds of red party tents inside a half-mile circular drive. To our left was the Lyceum, the oldest building on campus, built in 1848 in imposing Greek Revival style, with half a dozen columns.
“You know,” he said, “when I first came up to Ole Miss as a freshman, those columns weren’t any more big around than this.” He held out his hands about eighteen inches apart. The couple looked at him, then me, then saw the smile on his face, and we all started laughing.
“When was that?” the woman asked.
“Nineteen thirty-six,” he said.
There was a pause as she did some math, then she asked, “How old are you?”
“Ninety-five,” he answered. “Ninety-six in December.”
“Good God almighty,” the woman said, tightening her grip on his arm. “And you’re going to the game?”
“Yes, ma’am. We went to the Vandy game, too,” he said with a trace of pride. “That was a hell of a game.”
The husband looked at his wife. “I told you we should have gone. I mean, he went and he’s ninety-five!”
“When you’re ninety-five, I promise you we’ll go.”
“When I’m ninety-five, you’ll want to bring your boyfriend.”
“I sure hope so.” They were laughing.
I took my dad’s arm, and she let her hand drop. “I think we should go inside and cool off,” I said.
“You do that,” she said, “then come on over to our tent,” pointing across the Circle toward a tall statue at the bottom of the Circle; it was a memorial to Confederate soldiers. “We’re over by the statue. Same place every year. Kind of a boring group, but we try.”
My father waved, and we turned around to go inside Brevard Hall.
“This is the chemistry building,” my father said as we stepped inside the cool brick building. “I think I had some classes in here.”
There was a desk by the entrance with a campus security guard, a middle-aged African American woman who looked at us curiously.
“How you doing?” she asked. She looked hard at my father. “You okay?”
“Fine. This is the chemistry building, isn’t it?” my father asked.
She looked at him in surprise and smiled. “It was. Old Chem, they called it.”
“I’m old,” my father said.
She laughed. “But now it’s Brevard Hall. Chemistry moved.”
“If chemistry moved out,” my father asked, sitting down on a plastic chair near the guard’s desk, “what moved in?”
“The National Center for Computational Hydroscience,” I said, reading from a pamphlet I’d picked up by the entrance. “And the Mississippi Mineral Resources Institute. And a computer lab.”
“I don’t know what any of that is, but it sounds important,” Dad said.
“Got a dean’s office too,” the guard said.
“Been to the dean’s office a few times,” my father said.
The security guard laughed and asked, “So what y’all doing now?” She looked at my father with a sweet concern.
“Cooling off,” Dad answered.
“Ain’t it the truth,” she said, nodding. “You planning on going to the game in that long-sleeved shirt?”
I looked at my father, and it dawned on me that under his Ole Miss polo shirt he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt.
“What are you doing in that thing?” I asked.
“Your mother thought I should wear it.”
For some reason, I hadn’t noticed.
“There’s a bathroom over there. You can take it off. Or do it right here. I don’t mind.” She laughed.
The bathroom was stone and marble with a slight echo. I doused my face in cold water and, when I came up, saw my father struggling to get his Ole Miss polo shirt off. “This damn thing,” he muttered as I turned to help him ease the shirt off. I thought of the countless times he’d helped me dress or undress, how he’d taught me how to knot ties in half a dozen different ways and shown me how to put on football shoulder pads. Now it was my turn to help, wishing I could slip time backward so there was no need. He had run marathons into his seventies, rarely been sick. But now he was ninety-five.
We carefully peeled off the polo shirt and the long-sleeved shirt underneath it. It was a button-down blue oxford dress shirt, soaking wet. I helped him unbutton it and rolled it up. “I’ll carry this.” He nodded, then started to put his Ole Miss shirt back on. Even at ninety-five, he was still strong, which only meant he had once been very strong. He got it back on, dug a comb out of his back pocket, and worked on his hair. For some reason, it was longer than I remembered, mostly a whitish gray but not completely.
“I look terrible,” he said with a smile. His eyes caught mine in the mirror. We both laughed and walked out.
“You come on back if you need to cool off,” the security guard said. “Go, Rebels.”
Since we had been inside, the crowd in the Circle had grown. Various friends had told me where they had tents before the game, and I’d promised to drop by, thinking it would be easy to find them. But this was like a color-coordinated—red—refugee camp for what seemed like half the football fans in America. “Let’s go over to the flagpole,” Dad said, pointing to the center of the Circle.
It was hard to believe this was exactly where a pitched battle had been fought on September 30, 1962, the day James Meredith was brought to Ole Miss by federal marshals for enrollment. In the Civil War, the Lyceum had served as a Confederate hospital, and on the night of the Meredith riot it was once again transformed into a combat aid station. In The Race Beat, their great book on civil-rights-era reporting, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff describe a terrible scene inside the Lyceum that night: “Bloodstains on the floor. Bandaged marshals lying exhausted on the floor…A marshal from Indianapolis had gotten shot in the throat; blood spurted with the rhythm of his beating heart and his condition deteriorated as he lost blood.”
Two men died that night, a Mississippian in his twenties and a French journalist. In accounts, the young Mississippian seems invariably referred to as a “jukebox repairman,” as if the sheer ordinary and casual charm of his profession made his death more absurd. He was struck in the forehead, most likely by a stray shot. The journalist was shot in the back and the head, probably targeted intentionally as many newsmen were that night.
In the 1968 Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention, protesters famously chanted, “The whole world’s watching,” as both a taunt to the police and a validation of the importance of their actions. But that night in Oxford, first in the soft dusk of a hot Mississippi evening and then in the darkness that seemed to last too long, the rioters didn’t want the world to watch; they wanted the world to go away.
It was both the first student riot of the 1960s and the last battle of the Civil War. It was here, in front of the Lyceum, that the University Greys had mustered in 1861 to fight the Federals; all but three students joined up. In Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, every Grey was killed, wounded, or captured. One hundred years later, armed Federals had returned, and there was no desire to lose again.
That Saturday night in 1962, when my father and I got home early from the stadium where Ole Miss was grinding out a win over Kentucky, the game was still in the fourth quarter. My mother was listening on the radio. “That son of a bitch,” she said, meaning Ross Barnett. “That little son of a bitch.” She and my father disappeared back into their bedroom, and I went into the kitchen. Elzoria was there, putting away food after the party. She was listening to the gospel music she loved, but I talked her into changing stations so I could hear the last of the game. I helped her bring in glasses while the game played out to its finish. I cheered every Rebel first down.
Elzoria Kent had worked for my family all my life. It would be that southern cliché of a certain era to say she raised me, but of course that was true. She was short and athletic, with a quick wit and laugh and an ability to find that touch of the absurd that never seemed to lurk far from the surface in the strangely textured world of the South. We could and did laugh about just about anything. I can’t ever remember there being anything I wouldn’t talk to her about; she was more an older best friend than a parent, and I asked her advice on everything.
“I heard Mr. Barnett speak,” she said. She always referred to him as “Mr. Barnett.”
“We left at the half. Daddy wanted to go,” I said. “Ole Miss is going to beat everybody this year. Just you watch. Everybody.”
“Well, wouldn’t that be something,” she said, smiling. She held up a plate of cobbler. “You don’t want some of this by and by, do you?”
I sat and finished the cobbler while listening to the Rebels win, 14–0.
“You know something about your mama?” Elzoria said, bringing in some serving plates that had leftover baked ham and sweet potatoes. “She is a handsome waster,” she said, then chuckled. “I love Mrs. Stevens to death, but she is one handsome waster.”
“The Rebels are the best team in the whole world,” I said to her.
“Isn’t that something,” she said, poking me lightly with a fork. I laughed. She always made me laugh. Then she sat down to eat ham, and we had some of her cobbler together and listened to the postgame show.
The next night, President Kennedy addressed the nation on the integration of Ole Miss. He spoke while the riots were erupting but astoundingly was unaware of the violence. “Mr. James Meredith is now in residence on the campus of the University of Mississippi. This has been accomplished thus far without the use of National Guard or other troops.”
“Thank God,” my mother said.
We were all watching together, my sister and my mother and father. Like the president, we had no idea of what was happening in Oxford. I was wearing pj’s that had cowboys and Indians on them. For some reason, my mother saved the top of these, and I found it years later, stuffed in a box at our house down on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was moldy with salt air, and for a moment I stared at it, thinking it was an old rag that had been used to wrap pictures. But then I saw the cowboys with the big hats and the lassos, and it came rushing back to me.
I stood up to go to my room. My mother motioned for me to sit back down to watch. The whole thing was confusing. I didn’t understand about integration or James Meredith or why the president was mad at us. “Why does everybody hate us anyway? What did we do?”
My father pulled me into his lap. “Nobody hates us. Some people just do bad things. That’s all.”
That night, Dad came and sat on my bed, and we talked about what a great team the Rebels had and how they could win another national championship. “They won’t take that away, will they,” I asked, “just because the president is mad at us?”
He told me the president wasn’t mad and he was a good man. “Some people are full of hate for things they don’t understand. But there are more good people than bad people.” He nodded to the Ole Miss roster I had taped by my bed. “The Rebels are good this year. Real good.”
That made me feel better. If the Rebels were good, everything would work out.
At school the next day after lunch, our teacher, Mrs. Davis, came in red-eyed. We liked her a lot, and it was clear she was upset. She told us the headmaster wanted to talk to us.
In the third grade, I had transferred from the public school in our neighborhood to a tiny Episcopal elementary school, St. Andrew’s. Later, because of the work of my mother and others who followed her, it would grow into probably the state’s best school, with grades one through twelve and a campus like a small college on the outskirts of Jackson. But when I was there, it was just a handful of what seemed to be oddball students in a once grand mansion near collapse that had been donated as some sort of tax write-off. Much of Jackson had been burned when Sherman came through during the Civil War, but this house had been spared, most likely used as housing for Union officers.
The headmaster, the Reverend Marshall James, was a bubbly sort of clergyman, impossible not to like. He was one of those irrepressibly visionary types who could turn the frequently blown fuses of the old house’s ancient wiring into a science lesson. He always smiled and laughed at the worst jokes, but today he came into our classroom looking very somber. While Mrs. Davis stood off to the side, the headmaster faced us, his hands behind his back.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—he always called us this—“this weekend a terrible tragedy occurred at the University of Mississippi.” I can remember thinking that something horrible must have happened to the Rebel team. “Two innocent souls were lost in needless violence.” He stopped, and then I realized that he was trying not to tear up. “A single American Negro named James Meredith was admitted to the University of Mississippi. This was in accordance with the laws of this great nation and state. The president spoke of this last night on national television.”
There was rustling in the classroom now. Meredith and Kennedy were subjects people talked about, and a lot of the kids around me had parents who weren’t happy with either of them.
“There was much violence on the campus. You will hear a lot about this in the days and weeks ahead. We will discuss this here at school. But I always want you to remember that it is our duty, as servants of the Lord, to view the world with love in our hearts, not anger or hate. We must drive out hate with love. God loves each and every one of his creations, and God made us all in his image. We know that, because the Bible tells us so.”
This was a refrain from a song we often sang in school and in Sunday school:
Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong;
They are weak, but He is strong.
Refrain:
Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me!
The Bible tells me so.
A lot of students were crying now. I can’t remember if I was. Probably.
“This is a sad day for Mississippi and America,” he said. “But we will have brighter days. I want you to always remember that, ladies and gentlemen, we will have brighter days, and it is your responsibility to bring more light into this world. And I know each of you will. Now let us pray. Our Father who art in Heaven…”
After the riot on Sunday, September 30, 1962, Ole Miss was scheduled to play Houston in its homecoming game in Oxford the following Saturday. Coach Johnny Vaught describes the scene in his book, Rebel Coach: “It looked to me like 5,000 canisters of tear gas had been used. The campus resembled a trash dump. By midweek, helicopters were landing on our practice fields. Each day when we worked out there were a couple of thousand troops standing around watching us.”
No one knew where Saturday’s game should be played, and some wanted it canceled. This was a matter of discussion at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Coach Vaught to discuss. Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (later AG under President Johnson) met with Coach Vaught several times. On Wednesday, the Memphis Commercial Appeal ran a story confirming that the homecoming would continue as planned in Oxford: “The University reconfirmed its decision to carry on normal Homecoming activities at Ole Miss, including the game with the University of Houston after more conferences with military and Justice Department officials. United States Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach told a news conference: ‘Meredith has plans which will take him off the campus, irrespective of whether the game is played or not.’ ”
As I walked through the Grove on a warm afternoon fifty-one years later, it was hard to imagine an assistant attorney general commenting on the game-day plans of one student at the University of Mississippi. But in retrospect, it seemed like a very smart play to defuse any chance for those hoping to confront Meredith on campus.
On Thursday, news accounts reported the game was being moved to Houston, though that was never confirmed. Finally, on Friday, Ole Miss announced that Jackson was the choice. It was a homecoming that wasn’t at home, but it made sense. This got the game out of Oxford but was still close enough for students to attend, heading off possible anger over the moving of the game to another state. Students and Ole Miss fans could come to the game, wave Confederate flags, yell for their team, and vent any frustrations. The high-level negotiations over the game reflected an appreciation for the power of the sport, at least among white Mississippians. It was an all-white team, and it seems a safe assumption that the fan base was mostly white. It would be fascinating to have some inkling of what black Mississippians thought of the Ole Miss Rebels in those days. Did they take pride that a university from their home state was a football power? Did they listen to Ole Miss defeat every team in that troubled year of 1962 and cheer? Did the team’s being segregated mean support was segregated? None of my friends got excited when Jackson State had a great team, as they often did. We—black and white Mississippians—loved the same game but existed in our separate worlds. It would take years for football to start bringing races together in Mississippi.
But I wasn’t thinking about that when I was nine years old and one of those white Mississippians; all I thought about was the Rebels winning another game and the chance to see my heroes in person. I remember when it was announced that Ole Miss would play in Jackson. It was on Friday morning, and I was in a gym class at St. Andrew’s School. Because it was in an old house, St. Andrew’s didn’t really have a gym. We played basketball on cracked asphalt in back of the house under rims without nets and threw a football around on a stony dirt patch. My friend Stuart Irby told me about the game location. Later his life would come to a tragic end, but in our school-yard days, Stuart appeared sophisticated and worldly beyond his years. It seemed natural that he would know everything.
I went straight to the headmaster’s office and asked to use the phone. His secretary, a kind woman who sang in the choir at St. Andrew’s Church, came around from her desk and sat next to me in the cheap chairs that were for visitors. She asked me whom I wanted to call.
“I need to call my dad,” I said. “It’s important.”
She nodded sweetly. “Is everything okay? Do you feel okay?”
“Didn’t you hear?” I pleaded. “The Rebels are going to play tomorrow!”
It was a sign of St. Andrew’s School’s general benevolence that they actually let me call my dad. I reached him through his secretary. He had an office not too far away in Jackson’s ugliest office building, called the Petroleum Building. It was a failed attempt at modern, covered with bright multicolored panels. My father always said the best thing about having an office in it was that you didn’t have to look at it. I loved to visit him at his office and would play with spools of Dictaphone tape, a magical device that somehow captured his voice. He came on the phone, concerned. But I blurted out, “The Rebels are playing in Jackson on Saturday. Can we go?”
“I’d heard rumors about that,” he said in a teasing voice. He was probably relieved that was all I was calling about. “Let’s talk about it tonight,” he said. “Everything okay at school?”
When I got in the car after school, I told my mother about the game and how I had called Dad. “It could be dangerous,” she said. “Who knows what people might get up to after what just happened?” She said the same thing that night when we talked about it over dinner. My parents never argued at the dinner table, but this came close.
“It’s a football game,” my father said.
“It’s the Rebels,” I said. Who didn’t want to go see the Rebels?
“You don’t know what will happen,” my mother insisted.
“They’ll win,” I said. “The Rebels always win.”
“I want to go horseback riding,” my sister, Susan, said. She had discovered horses and loved to go to Stockett Stables and ride. It was a place run by our cousin Robert Stockett, where you could rent horses. Robert was a kind, gruff man who told great stories and loved hanging out on the falling-down porch of his stable. Later Robert’s granddaughter Kathryn would write about Jackson in The Help. My sister and I both enjoyed horses, like most kids, but Susan had started to develop a deep lifelong love of horses and riding. I just liked the trail rides and a chance to feel like a cowboy.
“We have to go see the Rebels,” I pleaded.
But we didn’t. The next morning, my dad told me we weren’t going but that we’d go to other games. We were in the kitchen, and Elzoria was there. My dad made waffles. That was his thing on weekends. He loved to make them on a big hunk of waffle iron. I still have that thing, and it still works, though it looks like a part to a Russian tank that had gone through a long war. Every Saturday, he mixed up the batter and carefully poured it out, like casting gold ingots. When he closed the top, some of the batter always leaked. That was the best part. That batter on the outside would burn crisp, and I’d break it off while the waffle was still cooking, always managing to burn my fingers and my tongue.
“Mr. Stevens,” Elzoria said, and my father nodded, carefully watching the waffle iron. “What’s wrong with this world when you have to worry about going to a football game?”
My father turned and shook his head and looked as sad as I could remember. “Some people are just crazy.”
She nodded. “Ain’t that the truth?”
The waffle iron started to smoke. I yelled, and my dad turned back to lift the lid. This was always a big moment: to see what color the waffles had turned out.
“Crazy, crazy,” my father said, carefully starting to lift the waffle. “And crazy mean.”
Elzoria brought over a plate, and Dad placed the perfect waffle on it and started to pour another.
“Mr. Stevens,” she asked, “why you reckon they don’t want that boy to go to school?”
My father watched the batter spread out on the spikes of the iron. “I think they’re scared, Elzoria,” he said.
“Scared of one boy?” Elzoria scoffed.
“Scared he’s smarter than they are and a whole lot of others are too.”
“Can I tell you one thing, Mr. Stevens?”
“You can tell me anything in the world, and I wish you would.”
Elzoria laughed. She opened up a metal tin of sugarcane molasses that we’d buy when we went out to the country. I scooped it out and watched it drip down on the waffle, like amber lava.
“I think if that’s why they’re scared, they probably right.” And she laughed, covering her mouth. She was so tiny that when she laughed, she seemed to move up and down. “Once these boys and girls start going to college, there’s not any stopping ’em. Least that’s how I see it.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” my father said, using one of Elzoria’s favorite sayings.
Ole Miss crushed Houston 40–7 that afternoon. Houston had been undefeated, but it was as if the entire frustration and anger and humiliation and shame of the riots were unleashed on them. I walked down our street, Piedmont Street, to the end and could hear the crowd in the distance. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I kept walking toward the stadium. By Bailey Junior High School, I could see the stadium and hear the announcer, though I couldn’t understand a word he said. I stayed there as long as I dared and then started to walk back home. On the way home, a car passed me with Rebel flags and I waved and they waved and a crew-cut driver yelled, “Go, Rebels!” and I yelled right back. That’s what we Rebels did.
Ole Miss won the eight remaining games that season, outscoring opponents by 247 to 53 for the season. It was that magical season of every fan’s dreams. Eventually, everybody quit talking about James Meredith and started talking about Fidel Castro and the Cuban missile crisis. I put extra batteries for my transistor radio in the crude fallout shelter my dad outfitted under the basement steps so that I would be sure not to miss any Rebel games if we moved in. It never occurred to me that if we were living under the stairs after a nuclear strike, the Rebels probably wouldn’t be playing.
Almost fifty-one years later, the Grove was again filled but with tents and fans, not troops and rioters. My father and I took a while to work our way through the game-day crowd to the flagpole at the center of the Circle. “Let’s sit awhile,” he said, edging down on the concrete base of the flagpole. It was crowded, and I’m certain that we were the only adults not drinking something strong.
The Lyceum was directly in front of us and the statue commemorating the Confederate war dead directly behind us at the base of the Circle. In the late afternoon and dusk of September 30, 1962, it had been mostly students here in the Circle. But as it grew dark, outsiders from across the state and beyond had joined them. In his wonderful memoir, Dixie, Curtis Wilkie, who was an Ole Miss student at the scene, writes, “Within a half hour of the outbreak of fighting, the state troopers—who had maintained roadblocks at the gates of the school to keep troublemakers away—withdrew, leaving the campus open to posses of night riders.”
As the riot escalated, one of my childhood heroes, the legendarily tough linebacker and fullback Buck Randall, saw the bloodied bodies inside the Lyceum and went out on the steps and appealed for calm. But the riot had passed the point of being calmed by words, the madness of the moment bigger than even the toughest guy on the toughest team.
We walked down the center of the Circle toward the Confederate monument, surrounded by party tents with long tables overflowing with everything from ribs to casseroles. My dad spotted a particularly tasty collection of barbeque and moved toward it.
“We don’t know these people,” I whispered frantically. “We can’t just walk up and take their food.”
“Sure we can. Everybody does that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Phineas? Good God!” We looked up to see a smiling man elegantly dressed in a blazer and slacks. He had a bright white handkerchief artfully folded in his breast pocket. He was younger than my dad but not by much. They shook hands, and my dad took him by the forearm, the way he did when he was truly glad to see someone. The man turned to me and held out his hand, “Bill Threadgill. Your dad and I were in law school together.”
“I was ahead of him in law school,” Dad said. “I’m much, much older. What are you, Bill?”
He sighed. “Ninety. I know, you’re older. Don’t be showing off. You know what I did, Phinny? I bought a condo up here last year. Yes, sir, bought me a place here to come up for games and concerts. Just great.”
His son, Tim, pulled us over to his tent. He was in his late forties, thin and athletic. He was a lawyer in my father’s old firm, and I’d met him before at an event the law firm had for my dad’s ninety-fifth birthday and we’d talked bicycles. He and a few friends had ridden the length of the Blue Ridge Parkway a couple of years before, passing through Asheville. My folks had come out on the parkway and met them for cheerleading and provisions. It was a trip I’d always wanted to make.
“We’re all from Columbus,” Tim gestured to his tent crowd, introducing us around. “Half these guys I went to high school with. We’ve been doing this for about ten years now.” They had a long table filled with all sorts of food, folding chairs, and a huge television.
My father and I dug in to jambalaya. “How do you do all this?” Dad asked, nodding to the food spread, the tent, the chairs, the television. “It must be a lot of work.”
Tim looked a bit sheepish. “Actually, we used to do it more ourselves, but now there are these outfits that will just handle everything.”
His wife laughed. “Except the food and the drinks. We still do that. But some folks, they go the whole catering route.” She gestured over to a nearby tent. It was laid out with china and silver utensils and had a candelabra hanging down. Under it was a little sign that read DON’T WORRY, THIS IS NICER THAN OUR HOUSE. It was easy to see why many fans just stayed in the Grove and watched the games on television. The food was better than any at the stadium and the chairs as comfortable as you provided.
But Dad was eager to get to the game. “It’s been years since we’ve been in the stadium,” he said, putting his arm around me, and I realized I was excited in a way I hadn’t been at the first game in Nashville. That had been a football game and a good one, but this was more: the first home game of the season and a stadium full of Rebel fans.
“I’m really glad we did this,” I said to him.
“Me too,” he said. “You know, I feel pretty good. I wasn’t sure I was up for this but I feel pretty good.” We thanked our impromptu hosts and started walking toward the stadium. As we passed the statue of the Confederate soldier, Dad said, “It was said in my day that the good soldier tips his hat to every virgin coed.”
I laughed. We’d walk a little, then stop and rest, then walk a little more. From inside the stadium, we could hear the pregame videos that have become a staple of college football played on the scoreboard screen. Every couple of minutes, a raucous “Hotty Toddy” broke out.
“Do you remember when we would walk to Memorial Stadium from Bailey Junior High?” I asked as we rested on a stone wall near the stadium gate.
“Of course,” he said. “Those were great games.” He wiped off sweat with a handkerchief; he always carried a handkerchief. I don’t think I’d had one since debutante dances. In front of us, a long line of fans streamed into the game. Several people recognized my father and called out. He’d wave and smile. “I remember how excited you would get at the games,” he said. “You talked about them all week.”
“I think I did all summer.” We both laughed.
“It was when I really fell in love with football, walking to those games with you. I can remember almost running to keep up with you.”
“Not a problem now,” he said. “I’m moving slow. But we’re almost there.”
We could hear the stadium announcer introducing the Rebels’ starting offense. It was time to go find our seats, but we both seemed content to wait.
“I wish we had gone to more games,” I said.
“When?”
I shrugged. “The last twenty or thirty years.”
He nodded. “That would have been nice, but you were busy, and we did other things.”
“I shouldn’t have been so busy. I don’t know why I didn’t make more time.”
“It’s what happens,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t worked as much as I did when you and your sister were growing up.”
“Really?” I turned to him. We’d never talked about this sort of thing. “I know there are kids who think their dads weren’t around enough, but I never felt that with you. Never.”
“Good.” He smiled, and I could see his eyes drift back to a different time. “But I missed too much. I spent a lot of nights in hotels when you were growing up. We had to go where the work was. We were still trying to get really established.”
His law firm had grown from five members to the largest in Mississippi and one of the largest in the South. “It was an incredible achievement to turn it into what it is today,” I said.
“It wasn’t just me,” he said, and that was always how he handled any praise about the firm.
“You know how you used to say, ‘There is no limit to what can be achieved as long as no one cares who gets the credit’?” I asked.
“I still say that. Don’t have to put it in past tense.”
“Right.” I felt scolded, as if I’d considered his expiration date had passed. “Do you remember where you heard that first?”
“You don’t think I made it up?” he teased. “It was here at Ole Miss. A law school professor. Always stuck with me. Thought about it a lot when I was in the Navy.”
The stadium behind us roared with the opening kickoff. We both got to our feet. “We have to get inside,” he said. “They may need us.”
We started moving toward the ticket gate. The crowd was almost gone, everyone inside cheering the Rebels.
“You know,” I said, putting my arm around him and squeezing his shoulder, the way he used to do to me on our way to games, “I thought you were the best dad in the world. I still do.”
He reached around and put his arm over my shoulders, so we were walking like two drunks.
“You’re a great son. We’ve been lucky.”
And when he said that, walking into the game, I felt like the luckiest man alive.
Our seats were in the first row, behind the Ole Miss bench. I’d bought them online, more for their ease of access than game-side appeal. The idea of hiking up many flights of stadium steps with my dad had seemed crazy, and that was even before I realized just how slowly he moved.
Like almost every major college football stadium, Ole Miss’s had undergone a series of renovations, expanding its seating to just over 63,000. The latest work had been completed the past August, and although I had good memories of the old stadium, I had to say the changes had been done well. It didn’t have the beautiful retro quality of the new baseball stadiums like Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., but it seemed as though it belonged. You could still close your eyes and imagine Archie Manning running from LSU’s future Hall of Famer Ronnie Estay, fake pumping to freeze the secondary, and then throwing across his body in his strange but deadly style.
“Hey, these are great seats,” the man next to me said. He was wearing an Ole Miss shirt, and next to him was his young son, about ten, and college-aged daughter. She had her arm around her younger brother.
“Great seats,” I agreed. We introduced ourselves, the sort of open camaraderie that came so naturally at a game with the assumption of shared interests. I nodded to his game program. “They say in there where Southeast Missouri State is?” I asked the man. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.”
“Cape Girardeau, Missouri,” he said without hesitation. “We live there, actually. It’s my school.”
I smiled the way you might if you walked into the wrong-sex bathroom by mistake. Smile. See, just a mistake, I’m not a bad guy. Honest.
“Really?” I asked. There was a chance he was just kidding me. There had to be. “But what are you…”
“My daughter’s a freshman at Ole Miss. We came down for the game.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said, overcompensating with way too much good cheer. “She liking it?”
“Loves it. You saw the scene today at the Grove. And she’s a big lit major. We came down here and went to Faulkner’s house.”
“Rowan Oak,” I said.
“Nothing like that at home.” Then he nodded toward the Southeast Missouri players taking the field. “Don’t worry. I know we’re going to get killed.”
He was right. By the end of the first quarter, Ole Miss was ahead 17–0. By the end of the second half, it was 31–0. The Rebels scored on five consecutive series, with two long passes of sixty-plus yards.
It was great fun. With games like this, at least for a while, it’s easy to forget that the other team was way overmatched and start believing such easy success could be had against an SEC team. The sun dipped below the stadium, bringing a hint of coolness and a tease of the season changing. We ate a couple of hot dogs and listened to the Ole Miss coaches yell at their players. A team could be up by one hundred points, and coaches would still yell. Not angry, but excited, bringing order, keeping the players’ minds in the game.
At the half, as the Ole Miss band started to move out on the field, we stood and stretched, feeling good about the world. “You know,” my dad said, “I bet they could win this second half without us.”
“Do we risk it?” I asked. This was another ritual of ours if considering leaving a game when the Rebels were ahead. Do we think they could win it without us? Do we risk it? We once left a game when Ole Miss had what seemed an insurmountable lead, only to have them lose by the time we got back home. It was agony. There was no way not to believe that if we had stayed, it would have made the difference. I once explained this to my mother, and she countered, “That’s why I don’t sleep on planes. Who’s going to fly the thing?”
We made our way out of the stadium into the falling light. I stood there, thinking. “I have no idea where we parked,” I finally confessed.
My father looked at me and smiled. “That’s what happens when you get to your age,” he said, then led us directly to the car.