AMERICAN SCENE: Yazoo City: South Toward Home

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Yazoo City, Miss.; pop. 11,732; 40 miles northwest of Jackson; site of a Confederate navy yard burned down but never captured by Union troops. Principal industries: cottonseed oil, lumber, fertilizer and clothing.

It was to this fiercely proud, well-mannered community that Jimmy Carter journeyed last week for a sweltering 90 minutes of questions and answers with 1,500 of the local citizenry in the high school gymnasium. Yazoo City had turned out five more votes for Gerald Ford than for Carter last November (2,330 to 2,325), but still folks could hardly have been happier to have him as a guest. Among those on hand was Author-Journalist Willie Morris, who celebrated his Yazoo roots in his autobiographical memoir, North Toward Home. His account of Carter's visit written for TIME:

The thrall of the office is extraordinary. One senses it in unsingular things. For instance, I never saw so many lawns being cut at the same time. The smell of newly mown grass drifted out of the hills onto the flat land and overpowered the senses. There were American flags on the houses of the meanest and most ageless old recluses of my boyhood. The place was taut with pride. There was something touching in the spontaneity.

I am constantly coming back nowadays, but I must admit that the Yazoo of my truest reality is a languid village on a summer's day of 30 years ago, when one big car whipping through with out-of-state plates was diversion enough. I know what Mark Twain meant when he returned to Hannibal: "I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them."

The familiar was familiar all right, because physically the town has not changed all that much in a quarter of a century; the crepe myrtles still grace the houses, which go by the family names of four generations ago. But the strange, in this case, was stranger yet, and came in waves: the Secret Service men with their crackling radios, and the communications technicians and the White House advance people, and then the TV people and newspaper and magazine reporters, and next the curious from other towns, and finally the firemen and troopers and deputies from other towns too. One TV crew got up at 5 a.m. to video-tape a Delta sunrise, and in front of Owen Cooper's house on Grand Avenue, for which Mr. and Mrs. Cooper bought new carpets, drapes and sheets for their overnight visitor, I sighted a TV crew shooting another TV crew at work.

The Yazoo Motel was taken over en bloc by the White House, with the mystically regarded communications equipment quartered there. In Stubb's restaurant next door. Sheriff Homer Hood showed up in a suit and tie for the first time in recent memory, and at lunches there was an amalgam of reporters, cameramen, White House people, Secret Service and old country boys from the seed stores, feed stores and sawmills, who seemed to wish to preserve an integrity of disinterest but shamed themselves with sneaky over-the-shoulder glances at the outlanders. People watched the national TV news every night to see if they had been on yet.