It was mid-morning, and I was staring at the computer, trying to craft an article about a city council meeting I’d attended in a nearby small town the night before that I was not sure how to write about because I’d never written a news story before, and I didn’t know what had happened at the meeting, not really, since the council had shut me out by going into executive session for most of the evening to talk about what they called a “personnel issue” because, according to state law, a board that was supposed to meet and deliberate in public could go behind closed doors for “personnel issues” or to discuss potential litigation, and I guess every action they considered could be construed as potential litigation, so I didn’t get much to write about.
I was a junior at Ole Miss, or I was supposed to be—still catching up on classes lost my sophomore year when I drank too much, like in the tenth grade, and fell behind. I’d stopped drinking by my so-called junior year, mostly, because I’d gotten a girlfriend, Kent, who was far more interesting than laughs with friends and a hangover. I had a new major, journalism, which felt like weather forecasting of a sort, and I thought perhaps I’d found myself a path, a future—and so far, it was so good, landing a part-time job to go with my girlfriend and renewed enthusiasm for school.
My idea of majoring in journalism was to follow my dream and become a weatherman, in actuality, as in, “Here’s David Magee with the updated evening forecast.”
Wrong. The dean of the program had suggested I should hear myself, with a Southern accent that sounded like East Texas meets South Mississippi near the Louisiana border. I’d taken a listen to myself, and the Doubter had chimed in before I could answer. You’d sound like a clown, honking that accent, he said, so I’d gone back to the dean for further guidance. “You have talent,” he said, “but you’ll have to write in journalism,” and I remembered how Mrs. Trotter had said I had promise putting words on paper, so I signed right up.
David Magee, journalism major.
Within weeks I’d scored a byline in the student newspaper, which published five days a week like the Eagle. More than a few in the community considered the student paper the better of the two, but the pay was skimpy there, at $8 a story, and when the Eagle’s sports editor saw my byline in the student paper, he said, “Come on by if you’d like to write for us,” and there I was within twenty-four hours, earning $4.75 an hour writing news for an honest-to-goodness daily newspaper, even if it was no match for the student-run competition. All that remained was learning how to report and write a story, but I couldn’t focus and figure it out because I was being hailed by one of the owners.
Not by name. She knew my name, or should have, since we’d gone to the same church, First Baptist, for all of my life, and she was in a women’s club with Mom, which hosted luncheons and speakers on topics like how to grow effervescent roses or how to remake your kitchen on a budget. Still, she was wandering around the newsroom shouting toward bodies she saw, “Where is he? Have you seen him?”
I was sitting there in plain enough sight, as the building was only four rooms in total, not counting where the printing presses ran, distributing the smell of ink and the cleaning solution that cleaned the ink up from the presses throughout the building and onto the clothing and skin of all who dared walk in. But I had my head crouched into the screen because I didn’t think she saw too well.
Miss Nina was her name, the one looking for he, or in other words, me. Age: sixty something. Title: editor of the Oxford Eagle, the small five-day-a-week daily newspaper in my town. She was half-blind, though she denied it, to keep her driver’s license, and half-owner of the paper with Mr. Phillips, and they didn’t agree on much, I was told, except for when to make the profit distribution. We had a small staff, with Miss Nina’s daughter Rita as office manager and Mr. Phillips’s son Tim running circulation. Miss Nina and Rita sat on one side of the building, and Mr. Phillips and Tim sat on the other. The staff members, including Don, the sports editor, and David, the news editor, sat at desks in the middle of the building, among surrounding desks for the one full-time staff writer, and two part-time staffers, students, one of which was me. Oh, and there was one bathroom, with no air-conditioning or heating, in the back, in the storage room, and I’d been told before I filled out my W-2 that you wanted to get there before Miss Nina, because she had explosive bowels, and a belief that once within the doorway of the bathroom she could cock her mouth like a slingshot and fire a loogie into the space with force and no regard for direction or placement, leaving her splattered phlegm and spit marking up the bathroom wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, and all over the toilet. She was short and chunky, like a junior college football guard, with dyed, cream-color hair, and she wore black-frame glasses and a rotation of several sack-like dresses that landed between her feet and knees.
Miss Nina was arguably our most famous citizen in town, in close running with the mayor, who owned a drugstore on the Square; the university’s chancellor, who kept a low profile, but there was no denying his esteem, since we were a college town and education was our most prominent industry; and the university’s football coach, nicknamed the “Dog” from his playing days. The chancellor and Dog were more beloved, easily, but Miss Nina got a nod in popularity because she wrote her daily Nina’s Notebook column in the Eagle, though it may have been a pitiful excuse for journalism, as she’d butter up those she wanted something from, like mentioning her longtime Black maid and cook in the column when she wanted Miss Annie to work an extra shift helping out at the women’s club, for instance. “Miss Annie,” Miss Nina wrote in her newspaper column, “is such a special lady, nobody is good like her. She’s raised eight children, and none of those eight has ever spent a day in prison. Can you believe that? Not one day in prison.”
As if, if you were Black and had eight children, one of them should end up in prison, by Miss Nina’s calculation—but that was her compliment, aiming to get a little bit more from Miss Annie, telling that to the Eagle’s 3,500 daily subscribers, unaware, apparently, that the year was 1986, some twenty-four years after Ole Miss was integrated by James Meredith, the first Black student, and sixteen years after the town’s public schools integrated. It wasn’t just Miss Annie she buttered up like a Saturday morning biscuit, either. If she wanted free tickets to the game, often to give to family or friends because she had season tickets herself, Dog Brewer was the best coach in all the land that week, according to her column. If she wanted the mayor to speak at women’s club, well, he was the best in all the land that week. If she wanted the mayor’s drugstore to buy an ad, well, the drugstore had everything you could want that week—simply everything.
Our only full-time staff reporter, Warren, in his mid-twenties, was on assignment the previous week at Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, to cover an execution, a big departure for the Eagle from its typical high school basketball games and city council meetings. But Mississippi hadn’t killed anyone in three or four years, which made the killing of twenty-six-year-old Edward Earl Johnson a statewide story, and I guess you could say it was a slow news day in Oxford, which was most every day, especially since the newspaper didn’t make a habit of covering stories out of its county-and-a-half circulation area, since paying travel reimbursement at thirty cents a mile plus time on the clock for a reporter over and back adds up. But David the news editor, short and bespectacled and with a beard featuring gray flecks that reached his collarbone, had come from the Delta after years of working as a reporter and editor at the kind of paper that would never have published Miss Nina’s column, one that swept the awards for journalism statewide and won a few nationally despite publishing only three days a week. He’d covered many executions at Parchman through the years, and asked Warren the reporter if he wanted to cover Mr. Johnson’s, and he’d said sure, figuring it wouldn’t amount to much since there’d be dozens of reporters from Mississippi to New York at the Mississippi Delta prison covering the story, and there was only one pool reporter who’d get in, anyway.
Darnedest thing about odds, though. Sometimes, you win, or you lose. But sometimes, you win. Warren got his straw drawn and accepted the challenge as the one pool reporter to witness the state’s killing, joining the small handful of Mississippi Department of Corrections officials and Mr. Johnson’s lawyer in the viewing room, because, as luck would also have it—bad luck, that is—the last-minute appeals for a stay were denied, meaning murder in Mississippi. Mr. Johnson didn’t have any family present, Warren told me afterward, adamant that they not watch him die, and Warren said he wished he’d gotten the same advice, since he had a seat on the front row, peering into the gas chamber at Parchman, Mississippi’s only maximum-security lockup, located on eighteen thousand acres in the flatlands of the Delta region. Editor David said Warren would win a statewide journalism award for the story he filed the next day, in which he wrote about the “lurid smoke” that filled the chamber around Mr. Johnson, beginning at 12:06 AM, and how fifteen minutes and a good bit of thrashing later, the convicted killer was dead.
Warren figured he might win a prize for that story, on the state level at least, but he told me he’d rather win on something else, since he couldn’t get the image out of his head of watching a man roughly his age die by the state’s hand, mere feet away from his face, separated by glass and circumstances that seemed unclear up to Mr. Johnson’s last breath.
It was nearly eight years before, in the small Mississippi community of Walnut Grove, when a marshal responding to a burglary call was shot five times, killed with his own handgun, and Mr. Johnson was charged with murder in the tragedy, landing him on death row, even though the prime witness whose testimony put him there, a woman at the crime scene who was assaulted, reportedly said at an initial lineup of suspects that Mr. Johnson had nothing to do with it, she was sure. I tried talking to Warren about the execution he witnessed, but he was too bothered and said dead is dead, can’t bring back what he witnessed—Mississippi was wrong, trying to make another wrong right—and that he was so shaken by watching the death up close, he’d prefer not talking about it further, and I wondered if Warren would ever be the same after that journalism assignment.
I was new at the Eagle, but I was learning already that truth isn’t always black and white, and neither is the storytelling of reporting, since Warren filed a story about how the state of Mississippi executed a killer, and that was an act worth writing about, but the bigger story was the one that didn’t get told, about what really happened when the marshal was killed eight years before, with no DNA testing and no eyewitness beyond the one who initially said he didn’t do it. But as it happened, those getting the news the day after Mr. Johnson’s execution read a story about how the state killed a man, then moved on to the next headlines of the day, like how Dog Brewer’s team was taking shape, or not, while the truth needing examination ran much deeper but we didn’t get that, because the Eagle couldn’t afford the time, the mileage, for that story, and it wasn’t Oxford’s story, anyway. But it got me thinking how we too often take things as they are and move on because it’s too hard, too complicated to get down to where we really need to go. For the life deserved. I’d guessed that’s why Warren was bothered by what he witnessed, shaken after watching the man die, wondering if the state had killed an innocent man. Meanwhile, I was focused on getting my city council story written but was having difficulty because.
Miss Nina wanted me.
Not with questions from the editor related to the story I was tinkering on. She was the editor, but not that kind of editor. She was hunting me, I think, because she was hungry, the 11 AM hour nearing, and her daughter, the office manager, had apparently hidden her car keys so Miss Nina would stop driving all around town, running into people and things like Mr. Magoo.
“Hey!” she said, spotting me. “Is that you?”
“Well, hey, Miss Nina,” I said. “Yep, it’s me.”
“I need you,” she said. “Come, come this way.”
I followed as she led the way, past her desk to the front door, out on the sidewalk, and to her car.
“Can you drive?” she asked.
She wanted me to take her to lunch, she said. I looked around, didn’t see any other options. And I was on the clock for the company she owned 50 percent of.
“I’m supposed to write this story for the city council meeting I attended in Water Valley last night,” I said.
“Water what?”
“Water Valley.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “Well, look, let’s get lunch first.”
She got in the passenger side. I took the driver’s seat, started the engine, and we were off, but where? To Batesville, she said. That’s twenty-five miles away, I said. I know, she said, that’s okay.
We arrived at a former house, newly converted to a restaurant, fresh gray paint on the exterior, a sign out front that said “Mama’s Kitchen.” It was a few minutes before 11 AM. We walked inside, and a lady was putting buckets of food onto the buffet. “Be ready in a minute,” she said.
We sat down.
Miss Nina stared at the buffet, waiting for the opening.
“What do you do?” she asked me.
“Besides driving you?”
She didn’t laugh.
“I’m a reporter,” I said, “or hoping to become one. I want to tell stories to inform and help others.”
The opportunity was ripe, I figured, to become a reporter. Oxford was small, with less than ten thousand residents, but home to a major university, giving us an SEC football team, world-class researchers, and a current Miss America, recently crowned.
How about that for a story?
“Miss who?”
“Miss America, Susan Akin. She won in September. She’s from Meridian, but she’s a student at Ole Miss. She lives here, she’s a star, all over the world. Seems like a great story, asking her what’s it like going from small pageant wins in Mississippi to the biggest win of all.”
“Oh, yeah,” Miss Nina said. “We had something about that.”
She was referring to the Associated Press wire story the Eagle ran when Susan had captivated America, winning the 1986 crown with seventy million or more watching on TV.
“I’ve got other story ideas, too,” I said. “Drugs are a problem on campus, and in the community.”
“Drugs? What do you mean, drugs? Like Leslie’s drugstore? We write about that all the time.”
“Drugs, as in cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy. They’re everywhere. My friends say cocaine is easier to get in town if you are under the age of twenty-one than a fifth of vodka.”
Miss Nina stared back blankly.
“Lunch is ready,” she said, getting up from the table.
For the next twenty minutes, as long as it took for her to down two plates of yams, rolls, ham, and other dishes from the buffet, I got a lesson in small-town newspaper economics, and eating with fingers. We don’t want to cause a stir, she explained, a sticky yam between her index finger and thumb. We want to tell good stories, she said, sucking the browned flour crust from a chicken leg, the kind that make people feel good.
Like our local Miss America?
Yes, but also, she said, Leslie’s drugstore, and Neilson’s, the local department store, which promoted itself as the South’s oldest. Mom wouldn’t buy clothes there during the fall or spring, but she’d line up with other mothers every summer when the half-off sale began, rushing to the racks with me and Eunice in tow for bargain nice clothes we could wear to church. Miss Nina said Neilsens was a story waiting to get told. Have you seen the clothes they have this season? Simply the best, she said. And sports—Dog has the team moving in the right direction, though Don the sports editor has that covered. But wait. An idea bigger than the chicken leg she was gnawing on.
“Listen, sugar,” she said. “Why don’t you write about this place? It’s wonderful. Simply wonderful. Have you tried these yams?”
I stared back blankly.
We left with only a goodbye, since I figured out the free lunch was part of the story. Miss Nina wrote about the new restaurant in her column a couple of days later, with no mention of me, her chauffeur, or the gratis meal, and I didn’t judge her for selling out because I didn’t quite yet understand the journalism thing anyway, and besides, I figured she, as 50 percent owner of the paper, had the right to make her own rules. Besides, in a small community, information about Leslie’s drugstore and a new meat-and-three restaurant in Batesville had value. It’s just not what I was looking for.
Me, I’d signed up for journalism with visions of writing something that warned about the storm, and perhaps revealed the path out, and maybe I’d win a prize that I’d heard about, a Pulitzer, or at the very least write stories that would make subscribers run out to get that day’s edition, because they’d get a call from a neighbor who’d ask, “Have you seen today’s paper? And you’ll never believe who wrote it—David Magee, of all people. Who knew that boy who struggled so in English in the tenth grade due to weathering his own storm had it in him?”
Back at the office, two hours from when I’d started on my story, I made my way to the computer, and Mr. Phillips walked by, on a rescue mission I suppose, because there were no secrets in that building, encouraging me to write my story from the meeting I’d covered last night for the next day’s paper, and he’d talk to Miss Nina, he said, making sure she knew that I wasn’t her lunch escort. David the news editor suggested I write a twelve-inch story, and I thought that sounded like a lot when I wasn’t exactly sure what happened, but what I suspected was that the council talked about things like setting the date of the annual watermelon festival in front of me, so I’d make a story out of that, and then said they had a personnel issue that needed discussion in executive session behind closed doors, where they did all sorts of business matters that impacted citizens out of my earshot. I felt tension growing, wondering what I’d missed, wondering what they hid from me, but I realized the best I could do on that day was write a story telling readers, “Good news, the watermelon festival is coming back for another year.”
I hoped there’d come a time in the future to tell stories that mattered more, that impacted more, like the one Warren wrote witnessing the execution. But I knew I had things to learn first, like figuring out how to escape driving the editor to a buffet lunch and getting doors closed in my face.