Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (21 page)

As for other, more academic, aspects of baton twirling, an exhibition was given the first evening by members of the cadre—all champions, and highly skilled indeed.

Instruction in speed and manipulation is a long and nerve-racking process. There is something quite insane about the amount of sheer effort and perseverance which seems to go into achieving even a nominal degree of real excellence—and practice of four hours a day is not uncommon. In the existentialist sense, it might well be considered as the final epitome of the absurd—I mean, people starving in India and that sort of thing, and then others spending four hours a day skillfully flinging a metal stick about.
Ça alors!
In any case it has evolved now into a highly developed art and a tightly organized movement—though by no means one which has reached full flower. For one thing, a nomenclature—that hallmark of an art’s maturity—has not yet been wholly formalized. Theoretically, at least, there should be a limit to the number of possible manipulations, each of which could legitimately be held as distinct from all others—that is to say, a repertory which would remain standard and unchanged for a period of time. The art of baton twirling has not yet reached that stage, however, and innovations arise with such frequency that there does not exist at present any single manual, or similarly doctrinaire work, on the subject. Doubtless this is due in large part to the comparative newness of the art as a large and intensely active pastime—the Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute, for example, having been founded as recently as 1951. The continuing evolution of the art as a whole is reflected in the names of the various manipulations. Alongside the commonplace (or classic) designations, such as
arabesque, tour-jeté, cradle,
etc., are those of more exotic or contemporary flavor:
bat, walk-over, pretzel,
and the like . . . and all, old or new, requiring countless hours of practice.

During the twirling exhibition I fell into conversation with a couple of graduate law students, and afterward went along with them to the campus coffee shop, the “Rebel Devil”—nearly all shops there have the word “Rebel” in them—and we had an interesting talk. Ole Miss prides itself, among other things, on having the only law school in the state which is accredited by the American Bar Association—so that these two graduate law students were not without some claim to representing a certain level of relative advancement in the community of scholars. They were clean-cut young men in their mid-twenties, dressed in summer suits of tasteful cut. In answer to a question of mine, we talked about Constitutional Law for ten minutes before I realized they were talking about
State
Constitutional Law. When it became apparent what I was driving at, however, they were quick to face the issue squarely.

“
We
nevuh had no Negra problem heah,” said one of them, shaking his head sadly. He was a serious young man wearing glasses and the mien of a Harvard divinity student. “Theah just
weren’t
no problem—wasn’t till these
agi-ta-tors
came down heah started all this problem business.”

They were particularly disturbed about the possible “trouble, an’ I mean
real
trouble” which would be occasioned by the attempted registration of a Negro student [James Meredith] which was threatening to take place quite soon, during that very summer session, in fact. As it happened, the authorities managed to delay it; I did, however, get a preview of things to come.

“Why they’ll find
dope
in his room the first night he’s heah,” the other student said, “dope, a gun, something—
anything,
just plant it in theah an’
find
it! And out he’ll go!”

They assured me that they themselves were well above this sort of thing, and were, in fact, speaking as mature and nonviolent persons.

“But now these heah young unduhgraduates, they’re hotheaded. Why, do you know how
they
feel? What
they
say?”

Then to the tune of
John Brown’s Body,
the two graduate law students begin to sing, almost simultaneously:
“Oh we’ll bury all the niggers in the Mississippi mud
. . .
”
, singing it rather loudly it seemed to me—I mean if they were just documenting a point in a private conversation—or perhaps they were momentarily carried away, so to speak. In any event, and despite a terrific effort at steely Zen detachment, the incident left me somewhat depressed, so I retired early, to my cozy room in the Alumni House, where I sipped the white corn and watched television. But I was not destined to escape so easily, for suddenly who should appear on the screen but old Governor Faubus himself—in a gubernatorial campaign rant—with about six cross-purpose facial ticks going strong, and he compulsively gulping water after every pause, hacking, spitting, and in general looking as mad as a hatter. At first I actually mistook it for a rather tasteless and heavy-handed
parody
of the governor. It could not, I thought, really be Faubus, because why would the network carry an Arkansas primary campaign speech in Mississippi? Surely not just for laughs. Later I learned that while there is such a thing in television as a nationwide hookup for covering events of national importance, there is also such a thing as a
Southwide
hookup.

The Institute’s mimeographed schedule, of which I had received a copy, read for the next day as follows:

7:30 Up and at ’em

8–9 Breakfast—University Cafeteria

9–9:30 Assembly, Limber up, Review—Grove

9:30–10:45 Class No. 4

10:45–11:30 Relax—Make Notes

11:30–12:45 Class No. 5

1–2:30 Lunch—University Cafeteria

2:30–4 Class No. 6

4–5:30 Swim Hour

6:30–7:30 Supper—University Cafeteria

7:30 Dance—Tennis Court

11 Room Check

11:30 Lights Out (NO EXCEPTIONS)

The
“Up and at ’em”
seemed spirited enough, as did the “NO EXCEPTIONS” being in heavy capitals; but the rest somehow offered little promise, so, after a morning cup of coffee, I walked over to the library, just to see if they really had any books there—other than books on Constitutional Law, that is. Indeed they did, and quite a modern and comfortable structure it was, too, air-conditioned (as was, incidentally, my room at the Alumni House) and well-lighted throughout. After looking around for a bit, I carefully opened a mint first-edition copy of
Light in August,
and found “nigger-lover” scrawled across the title page. I decided I must be having a run of bad luck, as a few minutes later, I suffered still another minor trauma on the steps of the library. It was one of those incredible bits of irony which sometimes do occur in life, but are never suitable for fiction—for I had completely put the title-page incident out of my mind and was sitting on the steps of the library, having a smoke, when this very amiable gentleman of middle age paused in passing to remark on the weather (102
⁰
) and to inquire in an oblique and courteous way as to the nature of my visit. An immaculate, pink-faced man, with pince-nez spectacles attached by a silver loop to his lapel, nails buffed to a gleam, he carried a smart leather briefcase and a couple of English-literature textbooks which he rested momentarily on the balustrade as he continued to smile down on me with what seemed to be extraordinary happiness.

“My, but it’s a mighty warm day, an’ that’s no lie,” he said, withdrawing a dazzling white-linen handkerchief and touching it carefully to his brow, “. . . an’ I expect you all from up Nawth,” he added with a twinkle, “find it especially so!” Then he quite abruptly began to talk of the “natural tolerance” of the people of Mississippi, speaking in joyfully objective tones, as though it were, even to him, an unfailing source of mystery and delight.

“Don’t mind nobody’s business but yoah own!” he said, beaming and nodding his head—and it occurred to me this might be some kind of really weirdly obscured threat, the way he was smiling; but no, evidently he was just remarkably good-natured. “ ‘Live an’ let live!’ That’s how the people of Mississippi feel—always have! Why, look at William Faulkner, with all his notions, an’ him livin’ right ovah heah in Oxford all the time an’ nobody botherin’ him—just let him go his own way—why we even let him teach heah at the University one yeah! That’s right! I know it! Live an’ let live—you can’t beat it! I’ll see you now, you heah?” And his face still a glittering mask of joviality, he half raised his hand in good-by and hurried on. Who was this strange, happy educator? Was it he who had defaced the title page? His idea of tolerance and his general hilarity gave one pause. I headed back to the grove, hoping to recover some equilibrium. There, things seemed to be proceeding pretty much as ever.

“Do you find that your costume is an advantage in your work?” I asked the first seventeen-year-old Georgia Peach I came across, she wearing something like a handkerchief-size Confederate flag.

“Yessuh, I
do
,” she agreed, with friendly emphasis, tucking her little blouse in a bit more snugly all around, and continuing to speak in that oddly rising inflection peculiar to girls of the South, making parts of a reply sound like a question: “Why, back home near Macon . . . Macon, Georgia? At Robert E. Lee High? . . . we’ve got these outfits with
tassels!
And a little red-and-gold skirt? . . . that, you know, sort of
flares out?
Well, now they’re awful pretty, and of course they’re
short
and everything, but I declare those tassels and that little skirt get in my way!”

The rest of the day passed without untoward incident, with my observing the Strut platform for a while, then withdrawing to rest up for the Dance, and perhaps catch Faub on the tube again.

The Dance was held on a boarded-over outdoor tennis court, and was a swinging affair. The popular style of dancing in the white South is always in advance of that in the rest of white America; and, at any given moment, it most nearly resembles that which is occurring at the same time in Harlem, which is invariably the forerunner of whatever is to become the national style. I mused on this, standing there near the court foul line, and (in view of the day’s events) pursued it to an interesting generalization: perhaps
all
the remaining virtues, or let us say, positive traits, of the white Southerner—folk song, poetic speech, and the occasional warmth and simplicity of human relationships—would seem rather obviously to derive from the colored culture there. Due to my magazine assignment, I could not reveal my findings over the public-address system at the dance—and, in fact, thought best to put them from my mind entirely, and get on with the coverage—and, to that end, had a few dances and further questioned the girls. Their view of the world was quite extraordinary. For most, New York was like another country—queer, remote, and of small import in their grand scheme of things. Several girls spoke spiritedly of wanting to “get into television,” but it always developed that they were talking about programs produced in Memphis. Memphis, in fact, was definitely the mecca, yardstick and
summum bonum.
As the evening wore on, I found it increasingly difficult, despite the abundance of cutie pieness at hand, to string along with these values, and so finally decided to wrap it up. It should be noted too, that girls at the Dixie National are under extremely close surveillance both in the grove and out.

The following day I made one last tour, this time noting in particular the instruction methods for advanced twirling techniques: 1-, 2-,
3-finger rolls, wrist roll, waist roll, neck roll,
etc. A pretty girl of about twelve was tossing a baton sixty feet straight up, a silver whir in the Mississippi sunlight, and she beneath it spinning like an ice skater, and catching it behind her back, not having moved an inch. She said she had practiced it an hour a day for six years. Her hope was to become “the best there is at the high toss and spin”—and she was now up to seven complete turns before making the catch. Was there a limit to the height and number of spins one could attain? No, she guessed not.

After lunch I packed, bid adieu to the Dixie National and boarded the bus for Memphis. As we crossed the Oxford square and passed the courthouse, I saw the fountain was still shaded, although it was now a couple of hours later than the time I had passed it before. Perhaps it is always shaded—cool and inviting, it could make a person thirsty just to see it.

O
NE NIGHT NOT LONG
ago I was sitting around the White Horse Tavern, in New York City’s colorful Greenwich Village, having a quick game of chess with a self-styled internationally famous blitz-chess champ. Six snappy ones and I pretty well had the game sewed up, when the champ suddenly said: “Say, see that guy at the bar—he was in the Cuban fiasco.”

“Cut the diversionary crap, Champ,” I countered, not bothering to look around, tapping the board of play instead, “and face up to the power.” I had slapped the old de Sade double cul-de-sac on his Lady—and, as Bill Seward says, that’s a rumble nobody can cool.

“No, man,” insisted the champ in petulance, “I’m not kidding—just ask him and see.”

Well, to make a short preface even terse (the champ, by the way interfered with the pieces when I did look around, and so eked out another shoddy win), I investigated further to find that it was, in fact, true: this man
had
participated in the Cuban fiasco, of April 17, 1961, right up to the eleventh-hour moment of the fiasco proper, “Bad Day at the Pig Bay.” His story was so interesting that my immediate hope was to share it with whatever sort of sensitive readership I could muster, and to that end I invited him over to my place for some drinks and a couple of hours tape-recording of his curious tale. Here then is the story of Boris Grgurevich, thirty-three, born and raised in New York City; it is a verbatim transcript of the recorded interview; and what is even more weird, it’s
true:

Well, now let me ask you this, how did you get involved in this Cuban fiasco?