Story of the Week: A Sunday Lunch in Clarksdale

Joan Didion (1934–2021)
From Joan Didion: Memoirs & Later Writings

Interesting Links

Video: “‘A Place None of Us Know’: Writing, Loss, and Joan Didion’s Late Memoirs” (David L. Ulin & Honor Moore, LOA Live)

“In One of Her Last Interviews, Joan Didion Talks to Hari Kunzru About Loss, Blue Nights, and Giving Up the Yellow Corvette” (Literary Hub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Quiet Days in Malibu,” Joan Didion
• “Selma, Alabama: The Charms of Goodness,” Elizabeth Hardwick
• “Tall Tale Blue Over Mobile Bay in Harlem,” Albert Murray
• “A Southern Landscape,” Elizabeth Spencer

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Joan Didion in Los Angeles on August 2, 1970, shortly after the publication of Play It As It Lays and weeks after she returned from her trip to the South. Photograph, cropped top and bottom, by Kathleen Ballard for the Los Angeles Times. (CC-BY 4.0, UCLA Library Special Collections)

After Joan Didion finished writing her second novel, Play It As It Lays, she signed a contract to contribute a column in Life magazine, but she became quickly disillusioned when several of the articles she turned in were rejected by the editors. As the summer of 1970 approached, she arranged to write feature articles instead. “I said that I was interested in driving around the Gulf Coast, and somehow that got translated into ‘The Mind of the White South,’” she recalled in a 2006 Paris Review interview with Hilton Als. “I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I would understand California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South.”

Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, recalled that he had imagined they would go on a road trip “to drink Dr. Pepper at the general store and do the underwear and the dirty sheets at the crossroads coin laundry, to go to Little League games and get my hair cut while my wife got a manicure or a pedicure at the local beauty parlor—in other words, to take the pulse of the white South.” As Didion’s biographer Daugherty notes, Dunne’s description revealed “how firmly he’d determined already what the South had to offer” but, for her part, Didion seemed to have “carried no preconceptions into the bayous; more impressively she aimed herself in whatever direction turned up, even when she didn’t understand it, when it appeared to make no connection to anything she might do.” Or, as she put it nearly fifty years later: “The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan. We went wherever the day took us.”

With Dunne driving the rental car, the couple left New Orleans for Gulfport and from there to Biloxi, before heading inland to various cities in Mississippi and Alabama (Meridian, Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Oxford, Clarksdale, Greenville, Covington) and back to New Orleans to return to Los Angeles. Among the people Didion interviewed along the way were Stan Torgerson, the white owner of the Black radio station in Meridian who was celebrated throughout the state as the announcer of Ole Miss football and basketball games; the artist Marshall Bouldin, a well-known portrait painter whose subjects included William Faulkner, both of Richard Nixon’s daughters, and numerous elected officials; and the novelist Walker Percy, whose most famous novel, The Moviegoer, had been published a decade earlier.

In several ways, it was an unsettling time for a trip to the region. The coastal towns visited by Didion and Dunne were still recovering from the devastation (including 259 deaths) caused by Hurricane Camille. There had been widespread resistance and protests during the previous year in response to the “integration orders [that] were flying around Mississippi” (as Bouldin put it). A month before their visit, on May 15, 1970, two Black students, James Earl Green, a high school senior on his way home from work, and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a prelaw college junior, were killed on the campus of Jackson State University after dozens of city police and state troopers unleashed a barrage of indiscriminate gunfire against a crowd of protesters and the building behind them; a dozen students were wounded. Afterward, the police asserted that there had been a sniper firing from one of the windows, but no evidence supporting this claim was found in a subsequent FBI investigation.

“I could never precisely name what impelled me to spend time in the South during the summer of 1970,” Didion later wrote in her notebook. “I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.” Much of the trip she found “fantastic,” particularly their week-long stay in New Orleans and their sojourn along the coast. Yet, despite the richness of her experiences, the piece wouldn’t come together. “The way in which all the reporting tricks I had ever known atrophied in the South,” she wrote at the time. “There were things I should do, I knew it: but I never did them. . . . I was underwater in some real sense, the whole month.”

Didion updated Faulkner’s adage of the South (“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”) with her own maxim: “The Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.” A quarter century later, she concluded, “One of the many differences between the South and California was this: in South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.” She ended up abandoning the project.

Nearly fifty years later, Didion dusted off her notebook from the period and decided to publish, in a small book called South and West, some of the material she had written during and after her trip. For our Story of the Week selection, we present her description of the day she interviewed the painter Marshall Bouldin in Clarksdale, Mississippi. In his foreword to the book, Nathaniel Rich writes, “Didion’s notes, which surpass in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers, are a fascinating record of this time. But they are also something more unsettling. Readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror, how much is familiar in these long-lost American portraits. . . . Joan Didion went to the South to understand something about California and she ended up understanding something about America.”

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One day we drove from Oxford over to Clarksdale, to have Sunday lunch with Marshall Bouldin and his wife, Mel. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission. To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

A Sunday Lunch in Clarksdale