looks like a canal. It’s a nine-mile run to the first meander, and two meanders above that stands the siege city of Vicksburg. Besieged by Yankees during the Civil War and by economic woes today, the city fights hard to survive. It’s a grim reality, but the river towns are dying in Mississippi, by a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease. Most have changed so little over time that if you resurrected a citizen who lived in the 1890s, they would still recognize the streets they once walked. In Natchez and Bienville, you could do that with someone from the 1850s.
Of all the famous Mississippi cotton towns—from Clarksdale in the Delta to Natchez on its bluff—only Bienville is holding its own against the tides of time, race, and terminal nostalgia. The reason is complex, largely illegal, and has occupied much of my thoughts and work since I moved back here five months ago. My gut tells me that Buck Ferris’s death will ultimately be added to the list of smaller crimes committed in the quest for Bienville’s economic survival, but right now my mind refuses to track on that.
Right now I’m thinking how this day feels a lot like the day my feelings about the Mississippi River changed forever. It was May then, too. A glorious May. I loved the river then. As a boy, I’d fished in it, hunted along it, canoed across it, camped above it as a Boy Scout, even skied over its backwaters during flood years. The Mississippi was as much a part of me then as it ever was of Huck Finn or Sam Clemens. The year I left Bienville to attend college at the University of Virginia, I came across a letter by T. S. Eliot, who I had always vaguely assumed was English. To my surprise, I discovered that Eliot had grown up along the same river I had, in St. Louis, and to a friend he wrote this about the Mississippi: I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. I knew exactly what Eliot meant.
All my life, I’ve felt a constant, subterranean pull from the great river that divides America into east and west, this slow juggernaut of water that was the border of my home, a force that tugged at me like spiritual gravity. But after one day in 1987, what it pulled on in me changed. Today smells a lot like that day: Confederate jasmine and honeysuckle, late-blooming azaleas. The sun is hot, but the air is cool. And the river’s running high, just as it was thirty-one years ago.
But unlike today, which began with death, that day began in glory. Glory for my family and my friends. The idea that the angel of death was circling over us would have seemed preposterous.
My brother and I had spent the afternoon in Jackson, the state capital, running in the state track meet for St. Mark’s Episcopal Day School. When I write “Episcopal Day School,” don’t picture an ivy-walled temple of learning. Picture three gray corrugated aluminum buildings without air-conditioning and a bumpy football field in a former cow pasture. Correction: The teacher’s lounge and the library had window AC units. The school board couldn’t have hired anyone to teach us without them. Academic rigor was stressed at St. Mark’s, but—as in the rest of the former Confederacy—football was a religion. Basketball and baseball also rated as manly sports, though second tier, while running track was viewed merely as training duty. Golf, tennis, and swimming were hobbies pursued by dandies. Swimming was the one activity at which I truly excelled, but St. Mark’s didn’t have a team. I had to swim for the City of Bienville.
Thanks to my brother Adam and his senior classmates, St. Mark’s had thus far won both the Class A state championship in football and the Overall State championship in basketball, defeating the preeminent Quad A school in the state, Capital Prep in Jackson. This miracle had been accomplished only twice in the state’s history. It was Hoosiers, rewritten for the Deep South. We’d only managed to win South State in baseball, but at the track meet on that day we racked up our third state title.
Though I was still three weeks shy of turning fifteen, I ran in both the mile and two-mile relays (we won firsts), and I took third place in the high jump. But my older brother was the star of the team. Adam had filled that role in every sport for St. Mark’s since his sophomore year, when he began playing quarterback for the varsity football team. That year Adam McEwan led the Crusaders to a South State title, beginning his meteoric rise to statewide legend status. There’s nothing unusual in that, of course. Every couple of years, a kid from some little Mississippi town gets canonized as the Next Big Thing, the next Hot College Prospect who’s “maybe good enough to go pro.” My brother happened to be that kid. The thing was, most people who canonized him had no idea how unique he really was.
Adam wasn’t like the other small-town demigods—phenomenal at one sport, or two, or even three. He was gifted at everything he put his hand to. I once saw him (having touched a bow and arrow only once, as a boy at day camp) try a compound bow at a demonstration being given by a hunting expert at a local gun show. After an hour of informal advice, Adam outshot every hunter present and even matched the instructor on distance shots.
But Adam’s embarrassment of riches did not end with sports. As a junior, with no background in music, Adam walked onto the stage during the St. Mark’s production of My Fair Lady and sang “On the Street Where You Live” in a tenor voice so tender yet powerful that it literally stopped the show. To add insult to injury, Adam was as beloved by his English teachers as by those who taught calculus and physics. His SAT scores came in fifty points higher than anyone else’s in the senior class, cementing a National Merit Scholarship, and by the afternoon of that track meet in 1987, he’d been accepted to five Ivy League universities. Our father wanted him to attend Sewanee, his own alma mater, but in a rare rebellion, Adam told me he planned to insist on Brown University.
I loved him for that, for breaking free from our father’s life template. Mississippians with Adam’s gifts rarely leave Mississippi, much less the South. When you’re from Mississippi, Vanderbilt is considered a northern school. My brother not only decided to attend an Ivy League school in the far north, but the least structured institution of them all. Oh, I loved him for that.
Yet even so, it was tough to have a brother like Adam.
The three years between us might have provided a protective cushion with a normally gifted older brother, but there was simply no escaping Adam’s shadow. The glare of the spotlight he walked in whited out everything around him. And while I stood six feet tall as a ninth grader, and was no slouch in the classroom, I couldn’t possibly stand tall enough to escape the penumbra around my brother. Yet as I watched him stride like Apollo through our earthly realm, what amazed me most was his humility. Despite being subjected to near continuous adulation, Adam did not “get the big head.” He kept himself apart from all cliques, treated everyone as an equal, and he almost never got angry. Adam seemed, by any measure of human frailty, too good to be true. And while someone so universally admired almost inevitably generates resentment or outright enmity in some people, Adam seemed the exception. Even teams he embarrassed on the hotly contested fields of Mississippi embraced him as a kind of hero, someone they would later boast they had played against.
By the end of his senior year—at least the athletic year, of which that track meet marked the coda—Adam wasn’t the only high school boy feeling immortal. As soon as the coaches handed out our trophies, we broke out in spectacular fashion. After holding ourselves in check for most of the year—limiting ourselves to a few beers on weekends—we switched to Jack Daniel’s or vodka for the ride home, and some guys even broke out the weed. By ten P.M. in Bienville, every member of every St. Mark’s boys’ athletic team was wasted.
We started in one big group, a convoy of cars and trucks that hit all the high school hangout spots like a motorized Roman triumph. McDonald’s, the mall parking lot, the recently closed electroplating factory, and finally the sandbar by the river. But as the hours wore on, the liquor and grass began culling the weaker members of the tribe. Some left to find girlfriends for late-night rendezvous, while others simply passed out in cars at various places around the city. By midnight, we were down to a core squad
