Old Glory (61 page)

“I was wondering,” I said, “whether I should say ‘Ma’a
salaama’
to you. Do you ever speak Arabic still?”

“Oh, one or two words. Words of endearment, sometimes, when I speak to my children when they’re babies.…”

“There must be something in you which reminds you that you’re Arab as well as American.”

“Oh, yes. We’re Byzantines—Phoenicians. That’s what I am: a Phoenician merchant.” He laughed a long, up-and-down-the-scale Mississippi laugh.

He told me how his father had opened the grocery on Pearl Street in 1920. It had started with a capital of a hundred and fifty dollars. “Fifty dollars from a Protestant, fifty dollars from a Catholic, fifty dollars from a Jew. They trusted my father. He was a clever man.” He gestured at the granite of his multimillion-dollar bank. “You see? Here I am—still in the store.”

He talked of his early days in Vicksburg, when the Lebanese were still thought of as carpetbaggers. The Habeeb family had had ambitions:
the grocery was just their first foothold on the cliff of American society. Shouphie’s brother had wanted to go to medical school.

“You could see he was chosen to be a healer. Look at my hands.” He laid them palms downward on his desk. Their backs were dark with hair. “Now, you should see my brother’s hands. Not a hair on them. Long fingers. Even when he was a little boy, he had healer’s hands. He had to go to college. Every dollar we made, it was to send him to college. Imagine! A Lebanese, from Mississippi, going to college in 1931! It was unheard of. Now my brother is a famous doctor. He was a pioneer of anesthesia. I’m the one who stayed in the grocery.” He passed the dusty little American flag on its stand to me. It had been given to him in 1958.

“Acceptance! From the Daughters of the American Revolution to a Lebanese carpetbagger! You see, I bought acceptance with service.” He pointed to a row of awards and plaques on the wall. The Lions Club. The Rotary Club. Mr. Habeeb had been honored by almost every institution that I’d ever heard of in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.

“I was the first Lebanese they allowed to join the country club. That was really something. In 1961. It was an issue. It was like letting in a Negro. Five years later, they made me the president. There you are: acceptance with service again.”

“Aren’t you paying another price too? Like losing one identity in exchange for another? Every time you get a new scroll for your wall, aren’t you becoming less of a Phoenician?”

“No. I don’t feel that.”

Yet the congregation at the Orthodox church was getting smaller. It had shrunk to about a hundred people. Twenty years ago, all services had been held in Arabic. Now Arabic was used only for processional chants at Christmas and Easter as a concession to “the old people.” Shouphie Habeeb himself had a young wife who was a Presbyterian; his own children went to the Presbyterian church and not to the Eastern Orthodox.

“Surely your kids won’t think of themselves as Lebanese?”

“I don’t know. I hope they will. We Lebanese have very long memories. Something continues in the blood. Perhaps just a talent, a kind of intelligence. A national character isn’t something you can destroy in a generation or two. It keeps on coming back.”

He touched his flag again.

“You do know what the D.A.R.
is?
”

“Yes, I do.”

Mr. Habeeb smiled. “
Acceptance.
”

“
The Negroes enjoy it.…
” That seemed to be the real sting in the tail of the local proverb. I had passed their tumbledown green shacks by the river on Levee Street. I had played pool in the Monte Carlo Lounge, with its signs of the zodiac on the walls, its wrecked lavatory, its loud rock, its thumbtacked posters for local black leaders. The air had seemed heavy with despondent lassitude. The volume of the jukebox had been turned too high for anyone to talk. One drank one’s beer slowly, straight from the can. One shot one’s pool. One sat on a bench in the half-dark and stared the afternoon out. I made the mistake of mentioning my visits there in the Rivertown Club. “
That
place? What the hell d’you think you’re trying to do? Get yourself killed?”

“I should think I’m as likely to get killed in the Rivertown Club.”

“Hey—this guy’s been going to the Monte Carlo Lounge!”

“He can’t have much to live for.”

That was nonsense. In the Monte Carlo I simply joined the grim democracy of people who had time to kill and little left over from their welfare checks to kill it with. The New South had passed them by. The first time I went, I was asked where I was from. When I said I came from Europe, it was enough. I wasn’t anybody. I was the guy who lost at pool.

Downtown, there were hardly any black businesses. Apart from the Monte Carlo, there were a shop that sold wigs, a record store and a closet-sized men’s boutique with a window full of shiny suits and sharp hats. I had to locate a funeral parlor to meet a man who had made real money in black Vicksburg.

Willy Jefferson was in his sixties. The Jefferson Funeral Home had been started by his uncle in 1894, and it was the kind of family empire that was an isolated fortress of black power and influence in a town ruled by whites.

“
Blacks
” Willy Jefferson said. “I just can’t seem to get used to that word. I know I should, but to me we’ve always been Negroes. I don’t feel I’m a ‘black.’ I’m a Negro.” His voice was very low and hoarse.

I told him about how I had followed Otis Higgs to his defeat in Memphis and how deeply segregated I had found the city. Yet I had been told in Memphis that things were far worse in Mississippi.

“Maybe so. Maybe so. But not in Vicksburg. Vicksburg’s always been a very open town. The river’s kept it open. It’s never been conservative like other places in this state. Vicksburg’s had the whorehouses. It’s had
the bars. It’s had the gambling joints. It’s always been a kind of cosmopolitan sort of place, you know what I mean? There’s a saying here: this ain’t Vicksburg, Mississippi, this is Vicksburg, U.S.A.

“In Jackson, now, that’s different. You’d go in a store in Jackson, they wouldn’t let you try on a pair of shoes. You had to buy them first. You couldn’t have a Negro putting his feet in a white man’s shoes! Not in Jackson. But in Vicksburg, you’d go in a store, and it was always ‘Why, hello, Willy! Come on in!’ ” He raised his gravelly whisper by an octave or two and produced an immaculate parody of a country-club accent. “ ‘You want shoes, Willy? Well, just try these for size!’ ”

“So that’s why there are no black shoe stores in Vicksburg?”

Jefferson laughed. “I guess … 
if
you was to look at it that way around.…”

His own version of Vicksburg was nostalgically rooted in the past, before the great shift to “the county.” When he talked about the town, it was a place where whites and blacks were next-door neighbors, even if the whites did live in mansions and the blacks in clapboard shacks. In 1965 his son had died; and it had been his white neighbor who had been the first to visit Jefferson’s house. He was a friend of the president of the First National Bank. He lunched regularly with white businessmen. He had never envied blacks in the North.

“Up in the North, it’s hidden. Here it’s all on the surface. You know what you’re dealing with. And the white people here, they look for you. Of course, you got to show respect. In Vicksburg, we been respectful. All we want is fair play.”

I was out of my depth. I wasn’t equipped to play this masked, courtly Southern game of black-folks-and-white-folks. Trying to find securer ground, I asked Jefferson about the funeral business.

“We keep bodies longer,” he said. “You know, when a white person goes, you read in the paper,
Miss Simms, died yesterday a.m., funeral this afternoon
. It ain’t like that with us. There’s more mourning to be done. Then there’s always some nephew out in California, trying to borrow carfare … Oh, it’ll be five days or a week before the funeral. And then that’s something else too.”

“How long can you keep a body?”

“I don’t know. My old daddy … he kept one for six months. On ice.” It was the corpse of a man who had been shot by a white, and the defense lawyer had artfully delayed the trial until he was sure that the D.A. would not be able to produce the vital evidence.

“There was the defense attorney—he was laughing his head off. ‘Where’s the body?’ he was saying. ‘How can you have a murder trial
without a body?’ Then my old daddy comes on. ‘That’s okay. We got the body.’ ” Willy Jefferson was croaking with laughter. He remembered he was in his funeral home and put on his undertaker’s voice again. “Defense attorney, he goes kinda pale. ‘You got the body?
Where?’
‘Right here,’ says my daddy. ‘Outside the courthouse. In the hearse.’ You should’ve seen them. There was
outrage
. Dragging a six-month-old body through the streets of Vicksburg in a hearse!”

“But the man was convicted.”

“Oh, yeah, he was convicted, all right. They didn’t have no choice. Then there was an old lady I buried, oh, just three weeks ago, now. Back in ’75, her uncle died. I said to her, When do you want the funeral, Miss Ellen? ‘Sunday week,’ she says. ‘Sunday
week?’
This was a Monday or a Tuesday. ‘Yes,’ says Miss Ellen. ‘He’s my last uncle on this earth, and I want to keep him around for as long as I can.’ ”

On Sunday morning I went to the First Baptist Church on Cherry Street, a great pseudo-classical temple in cream and duck-egg blue. I was a minute or two late, and the all-white congregation of nearly five hundred people was riding the crest of a hymn that was making strident demands on God’s time and favor. I had listened to it as I ran up the street in the rain; a clamor of wants and needs under the very cursory guise of praise.

Sitting in a pew with my hand over my eyes, I made my own list of wants. I wanted a long letter from home. I wanted calm weather. I wanted something else which I couldn’t identify exactly. It was an ending. Not a destination; not the Canal Street wharf in New Orleans. I wanted an ending which was emptier and more open than that. It wouldn’t be river and it wouldn’t be ocean. It would have no particular color. It would be somewhere from which there would be only one place to go, and that would be home.

The preacher had a squashed face, a hectoring manner and a school globe. I was sitting too far back to spot the loop of the Gulf of Mexico on it. “What in the world shall we do?” asked the preacher. “What in the world shall we do?”

He made his globe spin. The colors of the countries swirled, and England was lost in China or Japan. The preacher was talking about Russian Communism. Then he spoke of the American hostages in Iran, of fanatic Muslims crazed with power, of the infidel Khomeini. He jabbed at the globe with his finger. He was finding heathens and atheists on every continent.
Here
and
here
and
here
went his finger, turning the world to a revolving ball of ungodliness.

Finally he edged the globe around so that we could see the Americas. His finger tapped the metal. He was home to Cherry Street, Vicksburg. His voice suddenly softened. Only he was not speaking of Vicksburg, he was speaking of Antioch.

“And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch …”

He told us about how Barnabas and Saul and the rest of the disciples had set up their church in the small town from which Christianity was to radiate out across the world. We in this building were like the first Christians. Vicksburg
was
Antioch.

“What can we do? I’ll tell you what we can do in this troubled world! Share our testimony! Share our people!”

We were going to change the face of the globe. There’d be no threat of nuclear war with the Russians, no hostages in Iran, if only we could send out enough missionaries to convert the infidels to Southern Baptism. I felt profoundly unenthusiastic about this solution. Just the day before, the Ayatollah Khomeini had been speaking of America as “the Great Satan.” Now Vicksburg was responding by vilifying the Ayatollah not as an irrational despot but as the Prince of Darkness himself. I feared that the preacher was trying to prepare us for a new age of holy wars, with the God of Cherry Street ranged against the forces of Marx and Allah.

The collection plate was going around. It had been a rousing sermon, and the envelopes and cash were coming out in wads. Rejecting a dime as being too conspicuous an announcement of how I felt, I put a quarter on the edge of the plate. I reckoned that on a quarter even the most cheeseparing Southern Baptist missionary would find it hard to travel any farther east than Battlefield Mall.

“Thank the Lord,” whispered Miss Lily. “Thank the Lord.”

She was very old. Each day at lunchtime she came down to the motel dining room, limping badly on two sticks, and the black waitresses brought her dishes of mushy baby food which she poked at suspiciously and usually left uneaten. On Sunday, I waited for her to come down and joined her at her table by the wall.

“I can’t see too good, now. I can’t hear too good. I get things mixed in my mind. But I thank the Lord.”

She had scabs on her eyelids, and the skin of her face was like the bark of a dead sycamore. Her immense age was set off by the plastic whiteness of her new teeth: they looked horribly immortal.

“They told me you was from the Old Country.”

“England.”

“Ah. England. Me, I was from Germany.”

She had come to America in 1890. She was ten. There had been a ship, a big ship … but she couldn’t remember more.

“We had cousins. Not here. Up at Milliken’s Bend. That was where we went to live. Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana. Ain’t nothing left of it now. The river took it away.”

To me it was a name on a chart. Twenty miles upstream, the river had moved west, leaving its meander-courses as canebrake and swamp. It had swallowed the town of Milliken’s Bend. I had sailed over the top of Miss Lily’s family house when I was on the
Frank Stegbauer
.

“It weren’t a big place. Not like Vicksburg. It was all swept away in a flood. All of my family was saved, though. Thank the Lord.”

She had left Milliken’s Bend to go to Vicksburg, where she took a job as a stenographer at the Illinois Railroad station.