Old Glory (60 page)

Even without people, though, Vicksburg spoke more loudly about itself than most places. I had to climb up steps past a Confederate cannon which was aimed at the river across Washington Mall. The first time I saw it, in the rain on Thanksgiving, I mistook it for an empty historical symbol, a curio set up to please the eye of the sentimental tourist. It was more complicated than that.

In 1863, General Grant’s campaign came to a dead stop at Vicksburg. Its bluff was too high to storm. It was a natural castle, defending the whole of the lower Mississippi. From Vicksburg to New Orleans, the Confederacy was safe as long as its army held the town. On a night in
May, Union troopships ran south around Vicksburg bend and landed a few miles downstream, and Grant’s army marched on Vicksburg from behind. With their ships on the river and their gun emplacements at the back of the bluff, they had the town surrounded. When the Confederates refused to surrender, Grant ordered his army to starve the town out. The siege lasted for forty-seven days. On the Fourth of July, Vicksburg gave in; and until the 1960s, there was no public holiday in Vicksburg on Independence Day. The memory of that Civil War siege was still vital to the character of the town in the late twentieth century. Natchez, the next bluff city down the river, had surrendered to Grant without a fight, and that wasn’t forgotten either. In the 1970s, an effort had been made to patch up relations between the two towns by mounting a high school football game. It had ended with riot police, Mace and water cannon.

On the day after Thanksgiving, browsing in the library of the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, I found a memoir by a veteran of the siege which had been published by the Mississippi Historical Association in 1903. Colonel J. H. Jones had commanded a section of the 38th Mississippi Regiment. He quoted a song that his men used to sing to taunt the Union forces less than a hundred yards away across the trenches:

He recorded the conversations that took place over the lines at night. Soldiers of the Army of the Confederacy set ingenious riddles for the Union men to solve. They shouted: “Why are greenbacks like the Jews?” According to Colonel Jones, “The Yankees ‘gave up.’ ” The answer, yelled in enormous chorus, was “Because they have Abraham for their father and no redeemer.” Jones was good at communicating the surreal personal relations between soldiers from the two armies in the War between the States:

Friends? kindness? borrowed? dead? life?

Colonel Jones’s regiment failed to kill sufficient men from the 17th
Illinois to collect enough greenbacks to keep themselves supplied with the Union forces’ rations: on July 2 they had to dine off the quartermaster’s mule.

Vicksburg did badly on national anniversaries. It surrendered on July 4. Thirteen years later, in the centennial year of 1876, the Mississippi made a cutoff and left it dry. Most towns, like Kaskaskia and Tiptonville, simply shrugged and shrank when the river left them behind. Vicksburg insisted on remaining a port. The Yazoo entered the Mississippi ten miles to the north of town. Vicksburg blocked it off and dug a long canal to divert the river around the Mississippi’s old meander course so that steamboats could still use the harbor. It was a city that had made a habit of resisting the inevitable. The pug-nosed cannon on Washington was cast in Vicksburg’s most characteristic expression, of scowling independence.

I was waiting for the sun. The river was dark with rain and ribbed with whitecaps. I had taken a room at the Downtowner Motor Lodge and was puzzled by something that happened in the lobby there at noon, when men in expensive suits disappeared into an elevator marked
PRIVATE
. I changed into my own suit, which had been expensive enough in its day but now gave me the air of an itinerant preacher who had fallen on hard times. I took the elevator. Behind a padded leather door on the top floor, I found the Rivertown Club.

The elevator ride took me into the heart of an abstraction I had heard of but never seen fleshed out: the New South. People had talked of it in Memphis, but they themselves had seemed hopelessly trapped by a very Old kind of South, and when I pressed them to say more about this idea they said, “You ought to go to Atlanta,” which would have meant rerouting the course of the Mississippi by four hundred miles. In fact, the New South was in just the right place: high on top of an anonymous motel, right across the street from the lordly grey-stone hotel which had been out of business for a decade. The New South had the right view, too. It looked down over the slope of the nineteenth-century city to the river and the swamps; and in the middle of miles of boggy green there was the long raised strip, checkerboarded with pale cement and blackberry tarmac, of a new industrial park.

It was the voices of the New South that I noticed first. The men at the bar were making the sort of noises I had heard coming out of national conventions in St. Louis. Some did talk with the elastic, treacly vowels of Mississippi, as if the meandering style of the river had somehow worked its way inside their mouths; but I could hear Harvard Business School over in the corner, Brooklyn Irish on the sofa, the sand-and-snap
of the urban Midwest in the armchair just behind me. The woman who was tending bar was as unsurprised by my own accent as I was surprised by hers.

“You’re not from Vicksburg,” I said.

“Me? Hell, no, I’m from Manhattan. Lower West Side.”

Her husband had taken a job in Vicksburg six months before. She still found it like living in a foreign country. She told me how her mother had flown out to visit her with two suitcases full of New York food.

“The things they
eat
here, I can’t get used to it. Know what I miss most? Italian bread. What do you reckon a psychiatrist would say if you told him you had whole dreams about Italian bread?”

“I don’t suppose there are very many shrinks in Vicksburg to tell it to.”

“Right. You got it there.”

The bartender was part of the New South. I had it all explained to me over lunch, with the voices coming from all states north and east of Mississippi.

“I closed down the store in Chicago ten years back. I should’ve come twenty years sooner.”

“No one works anymore in the East. Move your pinky and you’re into another goddamn labor dispute.”

“Here they want to work. We pay good money. No one joins a union; they don’t need to.”

“This is mostly black labor, is it?” I asked.

“Sure. There’s a pool of labor here that you couldn’t find anyplace in the North. They’re keen, some of them are skilled; they’re real good workers.”

“Look at it this way: in an energy crisis, which place is going to win—the place in the sun, or some icebox up in Massachusetts or Minnesota? There are guys here who can save a whole year’s worth of Northern profit on their Southern fuel bills.”

“But there’s something special about Vicksburg. Look at Natchez. That place has just kinda
sunk
. What’s Natchez, anyway—just a whole lot of itsy-bitsy old ladies with antebellum homes. Natchez gave up. Vicksburg went on trying.”

“You know …?” This was said in a Mississippi accent. “There’s a line I keep on hearing from fellows who’ve come down from the North. They say, ‘Look, I don’t know whether you’re thinking of seceding again, but hell, if you
are
, we’re going to join you this time.’ ”

I looked down at the town from the window. It was a little hard to reconcile what I could see with my eyes with this tale of paradise on
earth. The streets were too wide and too tall for the few people who were walking on them. Their grandiose mixture of shabby Greek and shabby Gothic gave the people the air of stretch-panted tourists wandering at a loss around the set of a high Victorian melodrama.

“If you’d seen Vicksburg fifteen years ago …” a real estate man said. “Then,
everybody
lived downtown. There was an antebellum mansion on one side of the street, and a black family lived in the house right behind it. Black and white, black and white, black and white. All the way down the street. We
had
integration. Now the whites have moved out. The antebellum mansions, they’re museum pieces. Downtown’s all black.”

“Where did the whites go?”

“Out to the county.”

The county
. I knew what that meant. It was a code word for something that had much the same effect on the life of American cities as cyanide does on human beings.

“Why, though? In a place like St. Louis, people move to the county because there’s a lot to run away from in the city. Surely there’s nothing much to run away from in downtown Vicksburg?”

“I don’t know. It got to be the fashion. People couldn’t afford to run big houses any longer.… Now they’re trying to get folks back. They’re doing up the Vicksburg Hotel there, turning it into condominiums. It
could
work, but most people round here think it’s just going to be all walkers and white sticks.”

“It’s certainly where I’d want to live if I lived in Vicksburg,” I said.

“Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“If you did, would you want to send them to a Negro school?”

“Hey, you know what they say about Vicksburg? The Syrians own it, the Catholics run it, and the Negroes enjoy it.”

In the afternoon I ran my boat up the Yazoo River to the new port and the industrial park. The old harbor on Levee Street had been left to pleasure boats and the U.S. Coast Guard, but two miles up the Yazoo, around a bend in the canebrake, there was the twentieth-century equivalent to the crowded wharves of a Bingham painting. A big fleet of towboats, tugs, barges and small oceangoing ships was hidden deep in the swamp. There was the smell of sawn wood in the wind. Black longshoremen were swinging steel containers out over the river on cranes. A towboat in a hurry threw up a wake that nearly rolled me over, but I wasn’t going to be stopped from putting my nose into this unexpected busyness.

For the Port of Vicksburg wasn’t just a river town that was still in working order; it was a river
new
town, a river version of life out in the county. Somehow (and the cannon on Washington Mall seemed to suggest as good a reason as any to explain it) Vicksburg had managed not just to hold on to its connection with the Mississippi but to turn its river wharves into the focal point for all its industrial activity. It had set up its own customhouse so that containers could be shipped directly abroad without being unsealed by excise men in New Orleans. It had built factories on reclaimed swampland behind the wharves, and some of them were doing things that had died out fifty years ago in other river cities.
New
sawmills? I had thought that a contradiction in terms. But they were here, their lumberyards packed with oak, gum and hickory. Tows were leaving dock pushing huge cargoes of oil, steel and lime.

None of this looked in the least like
Jolly Flatboatmen in Port
. It wasn’t easily fitted into my own picture of the river as a wide, working highway, lapping at the towns it touched and threading them together in an unwinding panorama; there was far too much steel netting, concrete and corrugated iron to make anything pretty of it. But it did work. I had watched town after town divorcing itself from the river, putting the Mississippi out of mind, fencing it off as a dangerous monster; at last I had come across a town that was having a second honeymoon with the beast. What the picture needed was a Muscatine sunset of gold and silhouettes. It was an unkind trick of the weather to have hoisted storm clouds and a light that looked used and grubby even before it touched the parking lots and the prefabricated, cost-efficient warehouses.

I turned my boat around. Sloping up the bluff was a green tongue of the Battlefield Memorial Park, dotted with obelisks, temples, arches and bad heroic statuary of ragged soldiers and generals in frock coats. Vicksburg had arranged itself with commendable legibility, putting the past of its siege behind it on the hill and placing the New South in front of it in the swamp. On the hill, the statues were, mercifully, in silhouette; the swamp stayed stubbornly in three dimensions.

“
The Syrians own it
 …” That had puzzled me before I’d heard it. I had seen their names on stores: Monsour, Abraham, Jabour, Nasif, Nassour, Baladi. For me there was an odd personal coincidence in seeing these very un-Southern names here. Just a year before, suffering from a bout of cabin fever in England, I had run away to Aleppo for a month, looking for another foreign space. What on earth had brought these fellow travelers to roost in Vicksburg? I went to The Hub—a
clothing store—to buy a pair of gloves to keep the Mississippi cold out of my fingers and met the owner, Mr. Abraham. He told me that the Syrians—or, as they now preferred to call themselves, the Lebanese—had arrived in Vicksburg at the turn of the century. They had been carpetbaggers, peddling fancy goods from township to township through the Southern states. In Vicksburg they had found a city elastic enough to let them settle in. They had built an Eastern Orthodox Church. Their carpetbags had grown into little grocery stores, the grocery stores into big businesses. Why, said Mr. Abraham, Shouphie Habeeb is the president of the First Federal Savings 8c Loan Bank; and he only came over in the 1920s.

I went to visit Shouphie Habeeb in his office. The long arc of his career was mapped around the walls. It started with a photograph of a tiny grocery on Pearl Street and came to a peak with Old Glory mounted on a brass stand, inscribed to Mr. Habeeb and presented to him by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

His voice was pure Mississippi, his clothes Fifth Avenue; his round, sallow face and broody eyes were Arab. I remembered a goldsmith in the Aleppo souk whom I had visited every day for a week in a state of panic indecision about a bracelet. He had been gray, patient, gentle, and absolutely immovable on matters of money, which he regarded as squalid intrusions into a conversation that had run from Sufism to Plato to the teaching of St. Paul. Mr. Habeeb could easily have been this man’s first cousin.