Besides girls with brown eyes and good coffee, there's not much in the world I love as much as a good story, especially if it's a story about Mississippi. My life has been blessed in so many ways. That I've been surrounded by so many, more than excellent, raconteurs means more to me than I can say.
Telling stories runs in my family. Besides basic communication and fellowship, telling stories is the foundation of good writing. Both my nephews are excellent writers. I knew Jack was and suspected Campbell might be. I read over some of Campbell's master's thesis on Christmas, and he's a fantastic writer. I haven't read anything Collins wrote yet. She's pretty young but the quickest of the three and fierce like a lion, so I don't see how she could be anything but an excellent writer. Their mom tells great stories. She favors our mom, who could hold her own among all the men around her who thought they knew better.
Of all the boys my baby sister brought home, she married the one that told the best stories. I don't know if that was part of her criteria, but it was a big part of mine. There was this one fella called the Prince of Darkness, who apparently could sneak across enemy lines with nothing but a pen knife and take out a platoon, but he couldn't tell a story worth a damn. He couldn't tell stories, but there are some pretty good stories about him, though. Ask me about the alligators or the fight at CS's sometimes.
I don't know if it was his intention, but Jay collected a remarkable group of storytellers around him through the years, which surprised the hell out of me, seeing as two-thirds of them are Phi Delta Thetas. Bowman's really good, but the king will always be Hank Aiken. I think the key is that they're all very active readers, and for whatever else is going on up there, Oxford has an excellent culture for reading and writing. Square Books is a big part of that; the bar at City Grocery has a reputation for wetting some excellent writers, most notably Larry Brown. I wasn't there, but the people who know tell me that Barry Hannah is probably the most responsible for the literary culture at Ole Miss. It's not so much that he was an amazing writer himself, which he was, but that he promoted and mentored and made welcome so many other writers, creating a seed and a tree that still bears fruit up in Oxford town.
I never knew my great-grandfather. He seemed to have been excellent with his hands, having built a schoolhouse and a store and used his ox team to plow most of the roads up in Atalla County in that time. "Good with his hands" is an accurate way to describe my Great-grand, who everyone called Cap, but an interesting choice of words, seeing as, of hands, he had only one, losing the other in an accident as a young man. Whatever else Cap did in life, he must have been an excellent storyteller because his children were and their children were.
One of the great pleasures of my young life was shadowing my father when he was with his cousins and friends, so much so that I learned to carry things and mix drinks and light cigarettes in hopes that I'd be useful enough that they'd tolerate my presence. It's not that they were captains of industry, marshals of law, or bulwarks of Mississippi politics; (although they were); they fascinated me because of the stories they told, mostly about each other, but also about the life and conditions and events and passions that make up Mississippi.
Dad had a cousin on his mom's side, Ben McCarty, and a cousin on his dad's side, Robert Wingate, who both told excellent stories, some of the best. There was a fraternity of men around my dad who all looked into their glass and swirled the ice as they told stories like it was a scrying glass that showed them the past. Dad did it too. Smoking and drinking, especially to excess, was part of the culture of men in their generation. It probably contributed to why there are so few of them left, but it made them all excellent at gesturing while they talked, and they talked a lot.
Daddy idolized his older cousin Robert Wingate, and I did too. Robert was the keep of the family legends for many years. Besides Wingate, Dad's best friend was Rowan Taylor. Rowan had an excellent mind, one of the best I've known. He was an avid reader and often found ways to introduce himself to and associate himself with the many excellent writers in Mississippi. I'm sure he knew her before, but through his beloved Suzanna Marrs, he was able to befriend Eudora Welty in the last years of her life. Miss Eudora was selective about her companions. That she allowed him was something of an honor. In conversation and as a storyteller, Rowan practiced a very precise sort of conservation of words that made him seem stoic to some but, to me, made him seem more interesting than the others. I always found his choice and economy of words as interesting as whatever story he told. Like Miss Eudora, Rowan was a life trustee of Millsaps, which benefited us in many ways.
For several reasons, reading and writing were difficult for me, but befriending and knowing and loving these amazing people made a shy boy like me, whose eyes didn't work properly, want to read and want to write and want to tell stories. It's the wanting to that makes us all capable of doing the worthwhile things in life, no matter how difficult they are for us. Some of them are lost to us now, but their voices, their ideas, and their stories are, and will always be, a part of me.
