Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 22, 1994 TAG: 9405240042
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: OXFORD, MISS. LENGTH: Long
But by Saturday morning, I had tasted the crawfish quesadilla at the City Grocery, on the square. I had inspected contemporary folk art in the Southside Gallery. I had slipped into a bar called Proud Larry's to hear a bluesman named R.L. Burnside wrestle with his guitar and moan about slow dogs and fast women. And I had stood at the window of Square Books, Oxford's literary epicenter, where the shelves are crowded with Faulkner and half a dozen living local writers, including a fairly successful fellow named John Grisham.
By Sunday night, I was rolling through darkened Lafayette County toward Junior Kimbrough's juke joint. Running out of Oxford, it seemed, was not going to be a problem.
Oxford may be small, but it is a haven for the bookish and the bluesy, a site of Civil War and civil rights battles, a handsome town rich in characters and fueled by grits, catfish and pecan pie.
Oxford's town square was laid out in the 1830s - many say the city's name was inspired by that other college town across the Atlantic - and at its center stands a great white courthouse, built after Northern troops burned the town in 1864. The courthouse is fronted by a monument to the Confederacy's Civil War dead. ``They gave their lives in a just and holy cause,'' it says. In a county 25 percent black, the monument has stood since 1907.
A handful of restaurants and storefronts huddle around the square, having successfully endured the challenge of a monster mall that opened across town a decade ago. Most prominent among the square's commercial buildings is Neilson's department store (pronounce it Nelson's), which has been in business since 1839 and claims to be the oldest store in the South. Wiley's Shoe Shop, the Parks Barber Shop and Smitty's restaurant stand nearby, along with a handful of upscale clothing shops and a few law offices. A block down the hill on South 14th Street stands the Hoka, a raffish theater, cafe and student hangout that screens highbrow movies in a space that was once a cotton warehouse.
Some Oxonians see creeping boutiquism on the square, and note the departure of Sneed's Hardware in 1987. But as long as a $3 shoeshine, a $5 haircut and a $2.50 bowl of collard greens and hog jowls can be had in the neighborhood, it's hard for a stranger to take the threat too seriously.
The crime rate isn't likely to intimidate city people, either. In all of 1992, the FBI found in its most recent national crime survey, Oxford reported one murder, four forcible rapes, seven robberies and 17 stolen cars.
Oxford's City Hall stands at the square, too, its red-brick walls positioned to bask in the afternoon sun. A few blocks beyond it, in St. Peter's Cemetery, lies the grave of Faulkner, who passed most of his life here, perplexing his neighbors with odd and aloof behavior, recasting them as characters in more than a dozen novels set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He died in 1962.
Surrounding Oxford, there's Memphis (home of Graceland and the National Civil Rights Museum) an hour to the north, Tupelo to the east, Little Rock, Ark., to the west, and Jackson (the state capital) to the south. The cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta begin a few miles to the southwest, and if you continue 60 miles southwest on state Highway 6, you reach the bedraggled city of Clarksdale, where the Delta Blues Museum celebrates the roots of Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, W.C. Handy and other blues pioneers who helped create that American musical form around the beginning of the 20th century.
Oxford proper has a significant blues landmark, too - but it lies in perhaps the least colorful setting in all Lafayette County. In an orderly, dreary room on the third floor of the University of Mississippi's Farley Hall, blues archivist and music librarian Edward Komara labors as custodian of the world's largest collection of blues recordings (about 35,000 of them on vinyl, tape and compact disc, dating back to about 1920). B.B. King donated his record collection a few years ago, and 9,000 albums he collected are filed under lock and key. The collection is open Monday through Friday, but visitors interested in listening to recordings need to call (601) 232-7753 to make an appointment a few days ahead.
Probably the biggest tourist event in Oxford - excluding Ole Miss football games - is the annual Faulkner Conference, which fills the city's roughly 300 hotel rooms despite its scheduling in mid-summer, when northern Mississippi's temperature and humidity are at their most oppressive. This year's conference, the 21st, focuses on ``Faulkner and Gender'' and will run July 31-Aug. 5. The Oxford Conference for the Book (April 7-10 this year) was created last year to gather writers and editors to mull the processes of creation and publication, and has already begun to draw a comparable crowd.
Between seminars and workshops, the literary visitors linger at the Faulkner grave site or drive out Old Taylor Road, step past the twin rows of cedars, and file through the rooms of a 150-year-old Greek Revival house know as Rowan Oak. Faulkner owned it from 1930 until his death, wrote most of his books there, and was at the kitchen telephone when a caller informed him that he had won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. A few years later, Faulkner outlined the structure of ``A Fable'' in big block letters on the walls of the office. They remain, as does his black manual Underwood typewriter.
These days at Square Books, Faulkner is heavily outsold by John Grisham. Grisham, who grew up a few miles north in Southaven, attended law school at the University of Mississippi 15 years ago, published his first novel, ``A Time to Kill,'' in 1989, and a year later moved back to Oxford with his wife and kids. He is visible in the community - last summer he coached his son's Little League team.
Grisham is the biggest name, but he's only one among many successful writers around. Barry Hannah, author of the novel ``Geronimo Rex'' and several other works of fiction, lives here and teaches at the university. Larry Brown is another neighbor, born here and known for his four novels, but also for his 17 years as an Oxford firefighter. (Brown's latest book, ``On Fire,'' is a nonfiction account of that time.) Author Willie Morris, born south of here in Yazoo City and celebrated in New York as the editor of Harper's magazine in the late 1960s, resided in Oxford a while before relocating to Jackson, and still visits often. Lisa Howorth, wife of Richard and a teacher at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, is the editor of ``The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature,'' published last year.
by CNB