CHAPTER NINETEEN: 1995, FROM BILOXI TO NATCHEZ, AMERICA'S UNENDING CIVIL WAR(S)

Part IV: 1990s America, Road Trips in Flyover Country

In the autumn of 1995, precisely ten years after leaving New York for London, I traveled around Mississippi on assignment for the BBC World Service. This chapter is based on two of the five essays I wrote for World Service immediately following that trip. They are edited only for tense where appropriate. These words are the contemporaneous record of what I saw and heard on that mid-90s trip with no retrospective judgment from the present.

I was tired. I’d been driving around Mississippi for 10 days talking about race, politics and religion, often all three at the same time. Salvation was a din that hovered in the air, it even came through the ether onto my car radio:

Preacher:

“What we call today ‘death’, would be a welcome relief and release in the tribulation period. It is a time when God is going to pour out his wrath upon this world. It is a time when the world will be infested with demon spirits who will inflict torment upon man. It is a time when men are going to go to the rocks and the mountains, and say ‘fall on us and hide us from the face of him that sits upon the throne…”

And if it wasn’t my salvation that was in question it was America’s, with song’s summoning His wrath on the country:

Revive America again/

Even if you have to bring her to her knees/

Then Lord, please/

Revive America again.”

I needed a break. So I started going as far south as I could in Mississippi, heading for Biloxi on the Gulf of Mexico. I figured I’d lie out on the beach, eat shrimp til they came out of my ears, maybe pay a visit to the town’s new casinos, and just generally relax and heal myself.

Biloxi Beach, Mississippi

I slid into Biloxi just slightly ahead of a storm, the sky darkening, a strong breeze rousing the languid branches of the trees. Everything about Biloxi felt different. Physically, the expanse of the Gulf of Mexico, a benign stretch of ocean gently lapping at Biloxi’s shores, gave the landscape a more open feeling than the rest of Mississippi, with its alternating views of featureless farmland and forests.

Another reason Biloxi felt different had to do with the people who founded the town. Mississippi is shaped like a giant meat clever. The thick blade, the northern part of the state, was settled by dour Scots-Irish protestants. The stubby handle in the south, where Biloxi is located, was settled by the French. Unlike New Orleans, just an hour’s drive west along the Gulf, there’s not much physical evidence of the French colonial presence in Biloxi, just a few place names, but theres some kind of invisible, ineradicable, cultural microbe hovering in the air, because the place possessed a sense of French joi de vivre, a Latin Catholic view of illicit pleasure. Enjoy life by all means, just confess your sins before you die.

One person told me “If you want to see the real Biloxi, you should go to the Project Lounge - if you can find it.” I did. A left off Highway 90, a right through a public housing project, another right when you could go no further, then a quick hitch left, and there it was. A little breeze block building with an incongruous number of Cadillacs in the parking lot.

On this Friday night, there were three couples in the bar; the men, all men of means in their 50s, the women all several decades younger. Clearly not their wives. Very French, I thought, a quiet little place to take your mistress.

There was something else that gave Biloxi a different feel to the rest of Mississippi. The town has a more cosmopolitan mix of people. This dates back to World War 2. Biloxi was essentially colonised by the US military during that conflict and the military was still the largest employer in the town. Many people who come to Biloxi from elsewhere stay on after their service, attracted by the semi-tropical climate and the town’s pleasure instincts.

The storm I drove in just ahead of lingered. Saturday morning was grim and blustery. The pursuit of my pleasure instinct was put on hold. It was November 11th, Veteran’s Day, so I decided to hang out with the military. I hooked up with the Charles L Bowdry post of the American Legion for their memorial service. I was politely welcomed, but it was a little odd being there. Old soldiers have a special fraternity, and I was not a member. The war my generation was called on to fight was in Vietnam and I did not go. I actively worked to stop that conflict.

It was a simple service: a prayer, the singing of the national anthem, and then a speech extolling those who do their patriotic duty. The speaker recounted the proud history of Americans answering the call to arms. It was a homely, unexceptional talk. Then the speaker’s voice darkened. He had come to that unforgotten moment in American history when the sense of duty disappeared: the Vietnam War.

I wondered if there would ever be a day when it would be possible to talk about those who fought in Vietnam without linking them to those who didn’t. But I can’t imagine that day will come. It was 1995, the war had been over for 20 years and there were still plenty of people who thought that if they could just turn back the clock to the minute before the first anti-war demonstration , then America would, in the words of the song, be revived again.

This isn’t an abstract desire. Most of the political ideas of grassroots conservatism dominating life in Mississippi, from anti abortion legislation to constitutional amendments making it illegal to burn the American flag, are simply continuations of the social battles first fought during the Vietnam era.

Vietnam echoes in today’s presidential politics, as I found out when I joined the vets and their wives at a pot luck lunch after the memorial service. Most of the group were adamant that they could not vote for someone who had not been in the armed forces. That left President Clinton out of the equation—he hadn’t served in Vietnam—but it also left many of the leading young, conservative Republicans like Newt Gingrich, out as well. Most of them hadn’t served either. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, a bronze-star winner, grievously wounded in the good war, was the candidate of choice for this gathering. When the subject of politics was exhausted, I started asking the group questions about Biloxi, and found myself handed over to Norbert and Harriet Navarro, life-long Biloxians. Mr Navarro was somewhere in his 80s, and it would be impolite for a gentleman to speculate on Ms Navarro’s age. Let’s just say she had the coquettish charm of a woman from a bygone Southern era.

“We’re really honoured you’re here,” she cooed as we were introduced.

I explained what I was doing in town, traveling and writing.

“Oh, it’s a shame you couldn’t see the old Biloxi.” Miz Navarro said. “It was a wonderful place back then”.

And she reminisced about a clean town of white picket fences with a strong sense of community. I didn’t find out much about Miz Navarro’s background, but she told me all about her husband’s. Mr. Navarro’s father was a Mexican immigrant, drawn to Biloxi by work in the shrimping industry. Even before the US military brought outsiders to the region, shrimping lured people from elsewhere to the Gulf Coast, mostly Mexicans. They worked on the boats or in the canneries along the Gulf of Mexico. “It was a wonderful place back then,” Miz Navarro repeated.

But in this decade the shrimping industry has changed dramatically. The reason? Mississippi’s casino boom. Since the first gambling palace opened in Biloxi four years ago, every single shrimp boat and cannery on the waterfront facing the Gulf of Mexico has gone out of business. What’s left of the industry has moved on to Biloxi’s back bay.

There’s been another change in the industry. A new group of immigrants has taken over, and they are from, of all places, Vietnam. The first Vietnamese started arriving on the Gulf Coast in the late 1970s, fleeing the communist takeover of South Vietnam. But this particular group of immigrants, despite the fact that they were America’s allies in the war that I refused to fight in, have not been embraced in Biloxi.

Mr Navarro said,

“They come here, the government gives them a cheque, and they buy up our industry.” He sounded perplexed, not angry. “They just kinda snuck up on us and took over the fishing business while we were sleeping.”

His wife nodded sadly in agreement. As we walked outside Mr Navarro said, “I hope you see that not all Mississippi rebels are bad.” His wife repeated her mantra, “It’s a shame you couldn’t see the old Biloxi.” But I wanted to see the new Biloxi, so I went off in search of the Vietnamese community.

It wasn’t difficult to find, but making contact with the people proved more tricky. Many of the immigrants speak no English, and those that do are reluctant to speak it unless they have to. I went to a Vietnamese Buddhist centre, and was put in touch with T. K. Nguyen. Mr Nguyen’s business card described him as a community interpreter/translator, as if he had been designated to speak on their behalf. And, since he was a community spokesman, I wanted to clear up one thing first of all: had the Vietnamese immigrants received much government money?

“No,” said Nguyen, shaking his head irritably as if he had heard that charge before. “They didn’t receive a single penny. The only thing the Vietnamese have done here is work too hard. The old shrimpers worked five days a week, the Vietnamese work seven days a week.”

It was hard to gauge how old Nguyen was. His face had no lines, the hints of grey in his hair made me guess he was just past 50. Our conversation was somewhat formal, possibly because I had my notebook out and this was obviously a professional conversation, possibly because Nguyen is an educator and teachers often have a formal way of dispensing information to those who are younger. Education was Nguyen’s life. Since coming to the US in 1991, he had worked in migrant education programmes, teaching English to Vietnamese immigrants. He had recently started writing a column in the local newspaper, the Biloxi Sun Herald, hoping to teach Biloxians about the Vietnamese community.

We were seated in his living room yet the place didn’t feel like home. The only things that gave the space a personal touch were the portraits of his ancestors arranged around a little shrine for devotional use. He confessed to being perplexed by the America in which he now lived. He didn’t expect to find so much crime. But there was something more complex.

“Democracy is a very sharp sword.”

For him, freedom without a sense of duty to temper it—duty to one parents, to one’s fellow citizens, to one’s faith—could be a dangerous thing.

There was too much emphasis on economic development at the expense of spiritual development in America. Not that he thought that spiritual development was more important than the economic, they just needed to be in balance.

“It's a dilemma to me, but even more for young Vietnamese. They are in the flow of a river, and they have to go along with this feeling: you have to be rich.”

As we were talking, his wife and son slipped out to work, even though it was Sunday. They were employed, inevitably, at one of the casinos.

And now, feeling a little more relaxed he told me a bit about his life. Nguyen started teaching English in the mid-1950s. Many of his students were from the South Vietnamese military and intelligence services. When Saigon fell in 1975 he managed to get his children out of the country but he refused to go.

“I had a duty to stay and do something against Communism.”

Duty, not pleasure, had become the theme of my weekend in Biloxi. Somehow the word 'duty' had a different weight when it came from this man's mouth. Nguyen knew that he would pay a heavy price for remaining in Saigon. He spent 6 years in a reeducation camp. As he told me his story I was doing a quick recalculation on his age - if he started teaching in the mid-50s that meant he was much older than he looked. 

“I'm 65,” he admitted. How did he manage to look so contented and young, considering that he had lived through a war and an internment camp?

“Time is a healing process in the self.”

When Nguyen was released from the reeducation camp, he resumed teaching English because, referring to the North Vietnamese,

“A country that conquers another country with the force of the sword, but whose education is weak, will be conquered by those it seeks to rule, if their education is strong.”

Nguyen might have stayed in his homeland for the rest of his life, fighting on with his weapon, education, but his children in America had had children of their own, and he felt a duty to them as well. So he emigrated.

It was time to go. On my way out, Nguyen showed me the little office where he wrote his articles and pamphlets, trying to educate two groups of people, now neighbours, whose only previous connection was doing their duty as allies in a disputed war. After spending time with T. K. Nguyen, I was convinced it was actually two separate wars: Vietnam's civil war, which was over, and America's, which still simmered on. Time is a healing process, Nguyen had said. Perhaps in his society, I'm not sure about mine. 

Beauvoir, Biloxi

As you drive along Highway 90 in Biloxi Mississippi, just between the modern sports arena and the stretch of new motels and casinos, you pass a sign saying 'Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Shrine'. When you're going a little over the speed limit, you only get a glimpse of what the sign is referring to, a magnificent 19th Century mansion hidden behind a fence and shaded by huge oak trees. 

I decided to visit, not just because from the glimpse I'd had, the house was beautiful, or because it was a place of historic interest, but because of the language on the sign. The word “shrine” was intriguing. Jefferson Davis was the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, and the Beauvoir estate was his residence in the long years he lived after the Confederate defeat in the Civil War. If the sign outside his home had read “Jefferson Davis Memorial”, I wouldn't have thought twice about stopping. But “Jefferson Davis Shrine”, with its religious connotations, seemed a little hyperbolic.  So I made a U-turn and drove back to explore the place.

Within minutes it became clear that “shrine” didn't seem so far-fetched. The place was dedicated entirely to remembering the Confederacy as a vanished nation, its people vanquished, and their leader, Jefferson Davis, a martyr, the only one of the South's leaders to be imprisoned at the end of the Civil War.

Just as at a saint's shrine there are relics, chief of these is the Confederate Flag: the cross of St Andrew—a great blue X—set in a field of red, the cross filled with 13 white stars representing the 13 states that seceded from the Union.

Beauvoir is an antebellum mansion built with the sultry Biloxi climate in mind. It is raised off the ground on a set of pillars so that the main level of the house can catch the breezes that come off the Gulf of Mexico. 

A local volunteer greets you as you walk into the grand foyer of the mansion, and fills you in on the history of the Jefferson Davis family. There was something different about walking around Beauvoir. At Gettysburg battlefield, the Civil War seems like history as a record of the past, at Beauvoir, the Civil War was history as unfinished business. The bookstore was full of revisionist Civil War historical tracts with titles like “Facts The Historians Leave Out”. The woman showing people around the main house was reading a book called “What They Don't Teach You In History Class”. Beauvoir is administered by The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a heritage organisation for descendants of those who fought for the Southern cause. I asked Ms. Klippinger, the lady reading about the history they don't teach you, to put me in touch with the Sons, and she walked into the gift shop picked up a phone and very kindly did. 

So later that afternoon, I found myself just down the road in Gulfport, talking about the Sons with Dr Tommy Hughes, a lifelong member.

"You get brought up in it. It's like going to Sunday school," Hughes explained.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans have 24,000 members, organised into clubs called “camps”. Much of their activity centres around putting on great-granddaddy's uniform and reenacting Civil War battles, although Hughes admitted that wasn't for him. “I have no desire to put on a wool uniform in the middle of summer and suffer like those people.”

Hughes was an amiable, intelligent medical doctor. He gave a quick summary of the local history since the end of the Civil War. As he told it Mississippi had been an occupied state within the United States for almost 80 years after the conflagration ended. Federal troops had been a presence throughout that time and the local population—he did not say white population—had become isolated from the rest of the country by this, in his words, “military occupation.”

The situation changed during World War 2. The climate of the Gulf Coast and its mangrove swamps had led Washington to rapidly build up the area for training troops headed for the Pacific theatre of the war. The war years had acted as a re-introduction to the wider stream of American life for local Biloxians. They were forced to meet Jews, Italians and similar ethnic groups they might have classed as closer to Blacks. Yankees had to interact with Southerners. Both sides grew less suspicious of each other because of these interactions. His conclusions seemed a bit rosy but the historical fact of a re-integration of the region into the country at large seemed to make sense.

So in a new historical epoch why the continued hold of the Sons of Confederate Veterans? Tommy Hughes said he maintained his connection to the Sons in order to pay tribute to his ancestors, and those from the Gulf Coast who fought for the “cause.”

“So, what is the cause?”

“The cause is the constitution, which gives states the right to control their own destinies, not to be controlled from Washington.”

Not for the first time in Mississippi I suggested that the right that the Confederates wanted to preserve when they formed the Confederacy was the right to own slaves.

“I'd like to be open-minded about it, but I'm from the South.” Hughes said. "My great-grandfather didn't own slaves. You can't convince me that he gave up everything to fight for slavery. He was fighting for something else.”

Then he asked me something white folks all over Mississippi had been asking me.

"Have you been to Natchez?"

"No. Everybody tells me I should go.”

“You really must go to Natchez. It's beautiful there,” he said with dreamy pride. “It's the way the South was.”

And, as my time in Mississippi was coming to an end, and Natchez was on my way back North, I went.

Melrose mansion, Natchez

Even on a grey November afternoon Natchez was, indeed, beautiful. Situated on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi river, Natchez, in the years before the war was the first great port north of New Orleans and it had grown rich. Most of Mississippi was laid waste during the war but for some reason, the Union Army decided not to destroy Natchez. One local told me it was because Natchez was so beautiful, the Yankee forces saw no point in destroying it. People in other parts of Mississippi said it’s because the wealthy folks of Natchez didn't resist fiercely enough. Whatever the reason, the town today is the only place in the state where you can see what Mississippi looked like before the war; and it's pretty impressive. There are dozens of grand mansions lining the streets, some in brick, some in white stucco, most with great colonnaded porticos designed to look like Greek temples.

The houses are open to the public. I stopped in at one and asked the woman behind the counter in the gift shop if she could put me in touch with the local camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. As at Beauvoir, it was no problem. She dialled a number and put me on the line with C. C. Miller, a veterinarian. By luck that evening was the monthly camp meeting at the Ramada Inn and Miller invited me along. 

It was a dinner meeting, the head table was on a little dais. At one end was the American flag and at the other was the Confederate flag. About 25 or 30 people were there. The meeting started with the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. I doubt I’d recited the pledge since my last day of high school. It was just a mindless morning ritual but in the present circumstances the words had meaning, particularly: “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

“Indivisible”.

The assembly then turned to the Confederate flag, and right hands open, palm up, pledged this oath.

“I salute the Confederate flag with affection, reverence, and undying devotion to the cause for which it stands.” 

After supper a video was shown about that most precious relic of the cause, the Confederate flag. At the organization’s recent national convention in Chattanooga Tennessee, a group of young African-Americans had brought pressure on the Mayor to stop the Sons flying it. For Black people, the Confederate flag is a symbol of their oppression. The Mayor had bowed to their request, and the video told the story of the Sons’ battle to display their colours. If I hadn't visited Beauvoir I might have found the seriousness with which the Sons viewed the tape comic, but I understood the importance of their flag to them.

When the meeting was over some people came over and asked what I thought about the video. And I had to admit I was in two minds. On the one hand, displaying the Confederate flag doesn't seem an issue worth getting upset over. It's the rebel flag, a symbol known widely outside the U.S. even if the cause that it represents is not. But on the other hand, I'm not Black, so I can't say what the flag means to someone whose great-grandfather was a slave. 

I don't think my Talmudic dialogue between two points of view impressed them. For the Sons, this was a simple question of First Amendment rights, and their’s were being infringed.

One fellow in particular, a round, ruddy-faced man, was extremely agitated just talking about this alleged infringement. So agitated that I never caught his name but I did catch his drift, he was in my face with it. The freedoms guaranteed by the constitution were being so badly eroded by the coercive federal government, that citizens of the United States were no longer free, in his view.

“Well, if you don't think you're free, what is freedom?” I asked trying to remain cool but unable to keep a hint of sarcasm out of my voice. But he rumbled on,

"Look at Ruby Ridge!”

At Ruby Ridge in 1992, federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a white supremacist named Randy Weaver. It was the first in an escalating series of incidents between the federal government and those who wished to live outside its purview, that led to the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City six months before this conversation was taking place. I got the sense that while most of the folks in the room didn't condone the bombing, they understood the frustrations that led Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to take their action.

In a sense, the little groups setting up their own protectorates in places like Montana and Idaho, enclaves that deny the constitutional legitimacy of today's federal government, are the heirs of the Confederate cause. They are mini-secessionists and the right to secede, to break the social compact that created America, was what these fellows' forbears fought for.

And that right was guaranteed by the Constitution according to the ruddy-faced man, whose complexion was getting redder by the minute.

“Those states had the right to secede from the union!”

Now I was hot. I had spent the last 2 weeks driving around Mississippi listening politely to people's opinions. Most of them I disagreed with. But I'd held my tongue because my job was to listen, not to argue. But this guy was too much. I told him:

“First of all that's not true. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that the states can walk out when they want.”

“Oh yes it does.”

And here I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a copy of the Constitution in a small edition from Penguin books. I had a feeling it might be needed this night. I flipped it over to the red-headed guy and said

“Show me!”

As he rifled through it looking for the passage a crowd grew around us. I talked at him while he did.

“And even if it does—which it doesn't, trust me, you’re never going to find it—you can't expect one part of the country to sit still if the other half just walks away. People are gonna fight to prevent that.”

Now the fellow was beet-red.

“There's a lot of people around who think they know the constitution. But they don’t,” and he stormed out. 

The calmer voice of my host for the evening, C.C. Miller, interjected,

“Some fellas get a little hot-headed.”

“Yeah, I see.”

In calmer tones, we continued to talk about our views of America, refracted through the disputed prism of the Constitution, which in C.C.’s opinion had been degraded and reinterpreted away from its original intentions, particularly in religion.

“America is a Christian country” said the veterinarian. “It was founded by white Christians.”

“Look, it may be that the US was founded by white men, most of whom were Christians, but the constitution specifically states there will be no official religion established. How do you think I, as a non-Christian, feel about the idea of the US being a Christian nation?”

He answered, firm but polite,

“You're a minority. That's tough.” 

Sitting with us were a couple of teenage boys who attended private White Christian schools and what contact they had had with Black people was pretty tense. Robert Bush told me about a friend who had been badly beaten up by a group of Black kids. “One day we'll get back at ‘em.” A quiet vow.

I asked the young man if he ever thought about where the kids he claimed had beaten up a pal were coming from, what it was like to know your ancestors had been slaves, bought and sold in this very state, and then freed into profound poverty. Did he ever think what effect that might have on a group of people? He looked genuinely puzzled.

“I've never really thought about that.”

---

The next morning I drove North fast, faster than I should have, still agitated from the night before. Wanted to get out of Mississippi so crossed over the big river at Vicksburg, followed its western shore north through Louisiana and Arkansas. The agitation was partially because while the views expressed the previous evening were extreme, most of the folks in the room were not from the extremist fringe. They weren’t from Timothy McVeigh’s world. The red-bearded fellow was an exception, most at the camp meeting were middle class and well-educated. Miller told me he heard my reports from Northern Ireland regularly on NPR, nothing in America says you are middle-class and educated like listening to NPR. Miller explained he listened, “in spite of NPR’s biases,” because it was the only news outlet that brought reports from around the world to this small city in Mississippi.

But there was more to my agitation than the unreconstructed Confederate views I had had to listen to the previous evening expressed by people who were educated enough to know better. It was the knowledge that their views weren't unique to the South. The Confederate mindset had spread into parts of America well outside the region.

I needed to make one more stop in Mississippi so re-crossed the big river at Greenville, and headed straight through the Delta to Clarksdale; headed downtown, parked by what was left of the town's railroad tracks, and walked into Wade Walton's barbershop, the unofficial community centre for Clarksdale's black musicians.  I had spent a little time there at the start of my Mississippi circuit.

Wade Walton was giving a haircut to a dapper-looking man, Henry Espy, Mayor of Clarksdale. From the barber's chair he asked what parts of the state I had visited.

“Well,” I said, "I've been to Tupelo."

Espy shook his head in mock-seriousness.

"It's cold over there."

"Philadelphia Mississippi"

"Ice cold."

“Biloxi?”

“They just want your money.”

“Then last night I met with the Sons of Confederate Veterans down in Natchez.”

At this, he laughed uncontrollably.

“They’re the Klan!”

We nattered on a bit, then I asked,

“Why stay in Mississippi?”

One fellow hanging around said,

"It's home. I tried living in Oakland California for a while. I came back after a few months.”

“Why?”

“Too fast, too violent. In Clarksdale you hear about people being killed. In Oakland, you hear 'em being killed.”

Mayor Espy answered my question this way.

"I don't think I'm part of Mississippi. I look north to Memphis.”

A new highway was being built between Clarksdale and that city.

“When we get that road…” Espy said, the words trailing off into a smile of anticipation. Then he repeated,

“I look North.

A Black man looking North: As it was in the beginning of America, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.

Amen.

This has been the fourth chapter of Part Four of History of a Calamity, the story of how America went from Victory in World War 2 to Donald Trump and Cold Civil War in a single lifetime … Mine and maybe yours. The next chapters continue my 1990s journeys in flyover country with a trip from Yuma, Arizona to El Paso, Texas along the US-Mexico border. Here’s a preview:

“It’s hard to explain what the ‘border people’ are,” Charlie Page began, “It’s a way of looking at life.” He carried on trying to find the specifics that would explain an idea that was abstract. “The borderline on the map isn't important to them. They go back and forth across it a couple of times a day. The real borderline in their lives is the borderline poverty in which they live.”

And if you need to catch up on previous parts of my book, Part One, Bliss Was It In That Dawn, begins here:

Introduction: An Exile’s Story