"Very few people really know Willie Morris," says David Halberstam of his friend and editor at Harper's magazine. "On the first level−perhaps you've read his book, North Toward Home−you visualize some terribly brilliant, worldly young editor. Then you meet him−the second level−and you confront this drawling, rather slovenly, Good Ole Mississippi Boy, all wide-eyed and awed by the Big Cave, as he calls New York City. And you say, 'My God, this guy is a fraud.' Then there's a third level, one he doesn't let many see, where you discover behind these two guises this very complicated, enormously sophisticated, strong man."
Third-level Willie Morris is now accessible to those who don't know him in the 120th Anniversary number of Harper's, out last week. This time he has turned south toward home, going back to his hometown of Yazoo City (pop. 14,000, slightly more than 50% black) in these days of court-ordered integration. The 22-page result, entitled "Yazoo . . . notes on survival," is thoughtful, deeply personal and brutally honest. Morris, now 35, leaves nothing out, not his ex-wife's hatred of Yazoo, not even an intensely Southern "premonition that had been working its way up my frontal lobe . . . that I would meet there, on my home ground, a violent death, perhaps even a death accompanied by mutilation and unfathomable horror. My premonition had an animal force to it, unlike the other premonitions in my life. Some bastard is going to kill me in Yazoo."
Alluvial Soil. Morris was not killed. But the fear is always there, and Morris' essay witnesses the collision of boyhood recollections and journalistic reality. Or, as the author puts it, "the old warring impulses of one's sensibility to be both Southern and American." Morris' roots are sunk deep into "the black alluvial soil" of the Mississippi Delta, and "the pleasant, driftless Southern life" is his heritage and the source of his sensibility. But he has been 15 years away: to college in Texas, to England as a Rhodes scholar, back to Texas as an editor of the two-fisted weekly Texas Observer, and the past seven years in Manhattan. Driving through Yazoo's "streets which are a map on my consciousness, I see the familiar places−the hills and trees and houses, in a strange, dreamlike quality, as if what I am seeing here is not truly real, but faintly blurred images caught in my imagination from a more pristine time."
The Mississippi that he rediscovers retains its "extraordinary apposition of violence and gentleness," but is also subtly changed. Segregated schoolhouses in Yazoo were eliminated smoothly, although classrooms remained black and white. Morris shows the new mood: the white postman playing cards with three Negroes on his route; the white father who will not send his children to the white private school, because it is based on "pure ole hate." And, Morris writes, "I would see among blacks a new commitment to Mississippi as a place, as a frontier for redeeming some lost quality in the American soul . . .
This generation of children, white and black, in Yazoo will not, I sense, be so isolated as mine, for they will be confronted quite early with the things it took me years to learn, or that I have not learned at all."