The North and the South: Woodville Revisited
Ashley Smith
Woodville, Mississippi is so little—just a square mile, most of which is pastures—that most maps don’t even recognize its existence. Woodville has been described by a cynical travel writer as nothing more than “an intersection of gas stations.” He was describing the four-way stop at the crossroad of U.S. Highway 61 and State 24, a road that runs through the center of town, rolls on west, and finally dead-ends about twenty miles away at Fort Adams.
Other reviews of Woodville suffer from too little cynicism. Rob Reiner’s location scounts for the film Ghosts of Mississippi dubbed it “a town frozen in time.” Apparently, Woodville’s town square was the perfect place to shoot a flashback sequence of a small 1950s Southern town—a scene later deleted from the movie. The production crew just threw a layer of dirt over the paved roads, pulled down the Pepsi sign from Polk’s Meat Market, and was ready to roll. In my opinion, Woodville wasn’t frozen in anything—it was stuck.
In Woodville, probably as in many other small Southern towns, time is a funny thing. It’s never just now; it’s always also then. Meaning seeps from the past through every current moment like the way blood starts to show up on the little piece of tissue put on a nick from shaving. When someone from Woodville describes where the Variety Shack is, they say it’s on the corner of Main Street right where the one traffic light was until they took it down, across from the snowball stand that used to be Velma’s Dress Boutique, just up from where, one time, the Mayor’s son skateboarded down the street, naked as a jay bird. Time moves like an unbalanced equation, slowly shifting emphasis from what was to what is. This change takes a while. One hundred and seventeen Commerce Street was Miss Sarah Jenson’s house for thirty years, but it would continue to be called “Miss Sarah’s old house” until new occupants have lived there longer than she had. When Woodvillians talk, there is an implicit mistrust of the present tense.
Aside from its deleted appearance in a major Hollywood movie, Woodville is famous for one other thing. Three-tenths of a mile east on Highway 24 is Rosedown Plantation, boyhood home of Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederacy. It is currently occupied and maintained by two Southern dandies—a minor detail that most everyone in town tries to ignore or at least dance around. “There goes Ernesto again with his little…friend,” they say, their voices dropping a register toward the end in what I can only guess is their desperate attempt to find a tone only heterosexuals can hear.
Until I was old enough to move away for college, I waited. And I watched Mary Pace Rosenblatt, a girl a few years older than I, leave our high school to finish her junior and senior years as a boarder at Mississippi School for Math and Science. MSMS was in Columbus, Mississippi, way up in the northern part of the state. Columbus, also a fairly small town, seemed so sophisticated compared to Woodville. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that Columbus was Tennessee William’s birthplace, or because MSMS was on the campus of Mississippi University for Women, where Eudora Welty spent a few semesters. It also didn’t hurt that in Columbus there was the possibility of snowfall. Snow was such an exotic event in the lower half of the state that a light freeze usually meant school was cancelled.
When Mary Pace returned to Woodville for her first visit from the land of erudition, she had dropped the “Pace” her mother had so delicately adorned her with and became “Mary…just Mary.” Mary Pace did what all those who tried to leave Woodville do: she reinvented herself. Mary Pace hated being one of those Southern people with double first names, and would do whatever necessary to assimilate into her new northern surroundings, even if they were just in the northern part of Mississippi.
The way I remember it, we were taught that the only two geographic distinctions in the United States were the North and the South. Surely some of this idea was carried over from the Civil War divide; but more than anything, it was just the way we saw the world or the country: upside down, looking up at it. There was the South, and then there was everything else. “East Coast” and “West Coast” were irrelevant. Forget the “Northeast.” Boston was the North. Chicago was the North. Los Angeles was the North. Where I was from, even Nashville was sort of the North. Just about anywhere besides Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was the North. These few states made up the Deep South, drastically unlike, say, Kentucky, or the “fake South” as my family called it. “Those are hillbillies, and we are rednecks. It’s very different,” my grandmother would say.
My first journey out of the South was when I was seven. My parents and I went to New York City—the real North. I always liked to pretend that I was older than I really was. At three or four, I remember straddling my little orange bicycle—still with its training wheels—and telling my babysitter that I was really thirteen and just small for my age, that she could go on home because I could take care of myself. By the time I turned seven, I had begun to imagine that I was in my mid-twenties. The trip to New York was over Thanksgiving break of second grade, and before I left, my classmates had given me strict instructions to look out for famous people. As soon as I laid eyes on the city, I could feel everything that Woodville lacked. The sidewalks breathed; people were actually out walking on them! The city was a pulsating thing, and there were all kinds of places to eat. This was what all the talk was about—the movies, the TV shows, the pictures and songs.
The trip was particularly embarrassing because the only winter coat I had was a puffy jacket with red and white vertical stripes and a great big profile of Mickey Mouse on the back. My mom had bought it for me assuming that since she loved Mickey as a child, all little girls must, too. As far as I was concerned, the Mickey jacket ruined the look I was going for—namely, a young professional, twenty-something, living alone in the urban wild.
For the duration of our stay in New York, I always kept a safe distance of three steps ahead of my parents. In a pizza parlor where we lunched, I sat at a separate table and held a newspaper in front of my face while eating my pie. I imagined that my apartment was in the upstairs of the building, and I had just rolled out of bed on a Saturday morning to come down for a slice. “Ashley, do you want to see the Rockettes tonight?” asked the voice from the other table. I froze up and pulled the paper closer to me face.
“They’ll be at Radio City Music Hall. Don’t you want to go?”
“She’s pretending she can’t hear, Denise.”
The tips of my ears turned red and my face grew hot. Mom and Dad were blowing my cover...and the truth of the matter was I really did want to see the Rockettes.
Later that night, the Rockettes can-canned their hearts out, but all I remember was being upset that I had to wear thermal underwear speckled with different colored hearts. When I sat down, the hearts poked their ugly faces out of the gap where my shoe and pant leg separated. The people around me were all smartly dressed in simple black outfits, and there I was, a seven-year-old who was supposedly in her twenties wearing long johns with these stupid little love-shaped polka dots! I fussed with them endlessly, trying to hike them up to my knees and pull my pants over the lump. The lady next to me saw my struggle and smiled, finding humor, I’m sure, in my embarrassment over kiddy fashion.
Two years later, my parents and I went to California—another “Northern” excursion. We flew into Los Angeles and drove up the coast to San Francisco and into the Napa Valley. I know that during this trip I saw Disneyland, the Pacific Ocean, and the Golden Gate Bridge; however, all I really remember is one transaction over a pack of chewing gum: the cashier handed me some change, and I said, “Thank you.”
The lady behind the register broke out into laughter, saying, “Where are you from, Alabama or something?” It never occurred to me that I had an accent. Until that moment, I thought that I sounded just like CNN newscasters—clear, crisp, and from nowhere in particular. Horrified that even though she couldn’t pinpoint my state she could still nail my region, I didn’t speak another word to anyone but my parents for the rest of the trip.
I returned home to Woodville with surfboard key chains that said “Seal Beach” and a new resolution. I told my best friend, Kristi Evans, that from now on we were going to talk like we were from the North. No more of this “y’all” business. No more flat i’s. If we needed to speak in the first person, it was going to be with an Iye. “Don’t even let me catch you saying you’re gonna cut off that light,” I pressed. “From now on, we turn off the light.” Kristi stopped playing along after a few hours. I don’t think I ever stopped. I thought if I tried hard enough I might be able to erase myself right out of the South.
That same year, my parents decided I was finally old enough to walk the few blocks into town by myself. During the summer, I would carry two quarters in my hand and travel to the Coke machine outside of Martin’s Pharmacy. My bare feet burned underneath from the heated blacktop, and I would steer toward the tree-shaped shadows where the sun’s heat hadn’t soaked in so much.
With the sweaty can of Dr. Pepper cooling me down, I’d sit on the concrete ledge by the machine, my legs dangling over, and watch the cars and people go by. The block was a string of connected storefronts, each with a decorative façade and an awning. Across the street, prisoners roamed around the plot of ground surrounding the courthouse doing landscaping chores. The men wore white pants with thick green horizontal stripes. Above them, the shade of live oaks mingled with drooping Spanish moss looked as if the trees’ green leaves had aged into coarse gray strands.
Though this was supposedly the active center—with the courthouse, city hall, the post office, two banks, a law office and a couple more drug stores—it seemed far removed from the city life I saw depicted in movies. Woodville at its midday busiest didn’t convey the feelings of rush and urgency like the urban centers where street-smart women whistled for taxis or men in sharp business suits filed through revolving doors. Woodville was quiet. And while this little town was never a Manhattan, I had heard the stories of Woodville in the fifties when there were three movie theatres and five groceries and Saturday night meant a mob scene right in the place where I was parked. People used to get dressed up just to leave the house, and if they wanted to, they could go out to eat—and not in the back of the gas station.
In September of 2000, I moved back to Woodville for several months after having lived in Boston for four years. Until then, I had never really noticed that with one exception, all of the town’s eating establishments were in or added onto the back of its gas stations. Often ad hoc structural additions, they mostly included take-out counters and indoor picnic tables layered with muddied grease, or in some cases, several tables with plastic checker tablecloths stuck firmly in place with some mysterious tack. Woodville has no McDonald’s or Burger King. In fact, the only fast-food chain at all is the Sonic, a retro-feeling drive-in like Mel’s in American Graffiti where the servers roller-skated out to your car. The Sonic opened in 1985, but because no one who worked there at the time or since could roller skate and carry a milkshake simultaneously, the management decided that all food was to be delivered steadily and on foot.
Other than the Sonic, Woodville eateries include Three Way Seafood out of the Texaco station, Ace Jr. serving hot plate lunches from the Exxon, the Corner Grill attached to the Chevron, and Cliff’s at the Shell. Down the highway toward the Louisiana border is Buckhorn, a diner and deer-processing joint hooked onto the Citgo. Ten miles up 61 on the way to Natchez, in the back of a tiny filling station, past the rows of video rentals, the Feed Sack offers sit-down lunch and dinner.
For many deer men, Woodville is nothing more than a pit stop: a place to load up on Budweiser and gas before heading out to Lake Mary or Woodlawn or other popular hunting destinations. I once met a girl from northern Mississippi whose family took frequent hunting trips down my way. She asked me where I was from, and, even though she was from the same state as I, when I told her the name of my town, she responded, “Where’s Woodville?” I explained that it was in the very southwestern corner of the state and told her about the big intersection with the Ace Jr. convenience store on the corner. “Oh yeah,” she said, “ I peed there once!”
Mid-September of 2000 meant three things in Woodville: the beginning of a heated presidential election, high school football, and love bug season. Love bugs are flying pairs of little black insects that seem to be forever in the process of mating. Their love-bond is a physical one, for they are joined at the rear of their bodies and continue all locomotion like this. They swarm up like a modern-day plague on the Bible Belt from September to November, just before the first frost. Love bugs would be terrifying if they might bite; but where they lack in the possibility of physical harm to a person, they make up with ruining the paint job on an auto. On roads with rolling hills, the valleys are spoiled with a black soup of love bugs, and there is the sound of multiple splatters, like popcorn releasing from the kettle, as a car tears through the dark cloud and rises out of it, covered in bug guts. Love bugs are more of a nuisance than harm, and that year it was as if they heralded my arrival.
During the 2000 election, I was still registered to vote in Mississippi, and since my state was no doubt voting Republican with or without my consent, I chose to make my vote Green. Fuelled in part by sheer contrariness, I made a five-by-four-foot sign from green cardboard with hand-painted white lettering endorsing Ralph Nader. I then hung it from my bedroom window—the space on the second storey above the garage that, during the Christmas season, is reserved for the illuminated wreath. Since we lived on Depot Street, a heavily traveled connector that runs from Highway 61 four blocks up to the heart of the courthouse square, my sign was sure to be seen by all of Woodville whether they were coming or going. In fact, within days, my little show of support spawned the erection of no less than twenty-five George W. Bush placards in my neighbors’ lawns. At least the political debate was out in the open. At least solid Republican support wasn’t just taken as a given.
I had returned home that fall to help my mom prepare for and run a booth in an upcoming series of Junior League Christmas shows in several Southern cities. When there was downtime, I’d distribute pro-Nader flyers in the town square. The best time to strike was 3:20 on weekday afternoons, just as school let out and all the parents and teachers headed for the post office to check their mail. My high school algebra teacher, Miss Nancy, accepted one of my leaflets, but said, “Ashley, they’ve been saying it’s kind of strange that Ralph Nader isn’t married. Maybe he’s….” Her voice lowered to a whisper as she leaned in closer and said, “…gay.”
Katie Spinks, my closest friend from eighth grade till graduation, guided my reintroduction to Woodville that particular fall. Once I was old enough to drive, only fifteen in Mississippi, Katie and I would set out to Baton Rouge after school almost every other day. Mostly we’d sit through movies—anything that was playing—and so it happened that we endured Father of the Bride 2 multiple times. Otherwise, we just roamed the capital city by car listening to the same Van Morrison tape flip from side to side several times before we turned around and began the ninety-minute journey back to Hickville.
That year, Katie was in college in Hattiesburg, a town much more cosmopolitan than Woodville. Since she was home for the weekend, we went to a Friday night football game at our old school, Wilkinson County Christian Academy. Going to a football game in Woodville is, for the locals, the equivalent of going to the most happening bar in Boston—for sure, this is where the action is. For me, however, it was like finding myself in a dream where the cast of characters from my past appears alongside the forty yard line clutching waxy, red Coca-Cola cups and watching the boxy kids in maroon jerseys bang about. It felt as if they hadn’t moved in the five years since I’d seen them last. Of course, all had continued their lives and made significant changes, but there, on the football field, in a familiar context, they oozed a stagnant sense of stasis.
The night was a hasty mix of how-do-ya-do’s and Velveeta topped nachos and the sound of cowbells clanking whenever the Rams scored a touchdown. For the halftime show, the Darling Dancers performed a routine to the techno remix version of “I’m Gonna Let It Shine,” a song we remembered singing a capella in Vacation Bible School. The girls, clad in sparkly body suits, waved one finger in the air while their other hands rested half akimbo on their swaying hips and shine shine shine echoed through the field’s tinny speakers.
* * * * *
It’s been four years since that fall on the football field with Katie. I left Woodville for the second time, and with this next birthday, I will have spent one-fourth of my life in the North. In three or four years, if I haven’t found my way back down home again, that figure will have changed to a full one-third. If it gets past the halfway mark, does it make me any less Southern? Now I find I’m ashamed that it’s slipping away—my drawl, my past, and, in some respects, my identity. Time is a funny thing in the North: I never can quite catch up with it. The past feels like it’s done with before it even happens.
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