| BY MARK COATNEY
The Mississippi
Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis
and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. A lot of writers,
including Bill Faulkner, have called that sentence their
own, but the man who originated it was David Cohn, a writer
from Greenville, Miss. A lot of southern writers have hung
their hats in Greenville — Hodding Carter, Shelby Foote,
Walker Percy — but our host for tonight is the most
prolific of them all, Bern Keating, who has written more
than 30 nonfiction books on subjects ranging from the Mississippi
River to the Old West.
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| DIANA WALKER FOR TIME |
| Southern hospitality at the home of Bern Keating |
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Bern
takes us to the library, which for a town of 49,000 is absolutely
enormous. There's a wall of fame there with bios and books
by the local lights, a truly impressive roster for such
a small town. Like many of the writers, Bern wasn't actually
born here. "My wife's from across the river, in a little
town in the Arkansas Delta, and we didn't want to live there,"
he says (using a confusing bit of regional nomenclature;
while the whole area is called the Mississippi Delta, "Mississippi
Delta" also refers to the Mississippi side of the river,
and the Arkansas side is called the Arkansas Delta. Got
that?). "We heard Greenville had a lot of artists and
writers, and so we moved across the river."
And into
a grand old southern literary life. Like seemingly everybody
who ever ran into the guy, Bern has a "Bill Faulkner
got embarrassingly drunk and stayed for a week" story,
although his is particularly good — Faulkner shows
up to a party at Bern's house carrying a satchel he says
contains the best manuscript he's ever written, and then
proceeds to go on a three-week bender. When he sobers up,
Faulkner's depressed for weeks because he thinks he's lost
his masterpiece. Bern's had it the whole time, and gives
it back, although he probably shouldn't have — the
bag contains Faulkner's worst book, "A Fable."
As with
most southern writers, relations between blacks and whites
are still a big topic for Bern, a subject that takes a kind
of strange twist when he leads our caravan of cars to the
edge of town and shows us a couple of very nice houses he
says are owned by black people. His point: Blacks aren't
being held back any more in Mississippi.
Then
we go to Does, a restaurant in a poor, largely black neighborhood
that Greenville's white residents say is a "bad part
of town" but seems perfectly fine. We eat a wonderful,
artery-clogging meal of steak and hot tamales (southern
ones are smaller and wrapped in paper instead of corn husks),
and then we hightail it back to the boat.
And there
we see the future of this town. Bern's stories are amazing,
but it's all in the past; there's no similar literary scene
of young writers in town today. The future is the same as
the future of seemingly every town on the Mississippi bank
of the river — a casino, sitting about a hundred yards
from where we are docked.
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