Better Than Fiction 2 (5 page)

He asked my name and asked it again.

‘Pia?’ he said. ‘I can’t hear well. Pia, is that it?’

Bill tried to correct but I jumped in. ‘Pia is great.’

No one had called me Pia before, but for whatever reason I thought it might be the best way to go. I was nervous and the politics of my Iranian name was the last thing I needed to throw into the mix, where foreign regions and distant eras especially were involved. I was still tiptoeing, still a few days from realizing that in this region there was black and white only, and this was going to be the first place in my life that I would pass as one hundred percent white.

Bill walked us through the house, but I was mesmerized by Jimmy the whole time –
I was in contact with a living, breathing Faulkner.

By the time we finished, he turned to me and wondered what time I wanted to get up tomorrow.

I had no idea what he meant and must have looked confused.

‘Well, don’t you want to see some things?’ he said.

‘You don’t want to miss this,’ Bill whispered in my ear, perhaps worried I was hesitating.

But I was already there. ‘I’m in,’ I remember saying, a sentence I would say again and again in my life to subjects whenever there was a fork in the road. ‘I’m in for whatever.’

I remember that night feeling a little less lost, thinking I had a piece of myself I had never found in college:
I was a person who could be in for things
. I could do this, and probably could do it again and again.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University
of Mississippi – ’Ole Miss,’ as I was getting slowly though uneasily used to saying – was over two decades old, a place ‘to investigate, document, interpret, and teach about the American South through academic inquiry and publications, documentary studies of film, photography, and oral history, and public outreach programs.’ And it was a program in a public co-ed research university, Mississippi’s largest university with well over twenty thousand students. I, meanwhile, was coming without a major – all Sarah Lawrence students graduated with a generic ‘Liberal Arts’ diploma – from a small private liberal arts/arts conservatory with a population of 1200 then. Even academically, I was from a different planet.

Robin, the Southern Studies student I’d connected with, decided I could stay at her apartment as long as I wanted. She was an always-smiling, always-helpful, bottle-blonde nerd – all novel to me. I experienced many firsts with her: She was the first stranger I ever sent an email to (since 1994 I’d been ‘online’ in chat rooms, but I’d never actually emailed a stranger). The first Southern woman I’d befriended. The first graduate student I had ever met. And she had the first fold-out couch I’d ever slept on.

Robin introduced me to some of her friends and that meant going to bars and restaurants around the main square. It was with her I had my first grits and my first hushpuppies, foods that would come to be my favorites in life. Even the air was something I was to notice – they told me to take it in, that mix of magnolia blooms and bourbon, could I smell it? I closed my eyes and concentrated and let that particular delicate sweetness rush over me and realized I could. They laughed knowingly and I came to understand it was a game for them at first –
let’s see what the New York girl can take
– but even I was surprised at how at home I felt with it all.

It was also the first time I was
a New York girl
. In New York I was an LA girl. In LA, an Iranian girl. But here there was no other interpretation. ‘You are so New York,’ one of Robin’s friends said, though I couldn’t bring myself to get her to elaborate. I took it as a compliment.

One place they seemed determined to take me was Graceland Too. At first I thought this was because I told them I’d been to Graceland – perhaps they thought I was an Elvis fanatic – but then it became clear to me: it was a major destination. Thirty miles north of Oxford, in Holly Springs, there was apparently a private home that was its own informal Elvis museum, a sort of shrine to the man by an eccentric guy named Paul McLeod who stayed up 24 hours a day they said to give these ‘tours.’

It was apparently also something students in town did after drinking. That entire evening at a local bar, beers would appear in front of me, with someone, usually her friend Josh, shaking his head and saying, ‘Trust me, you’re gonna need it.’

We made it there well into the early hours of the morning. Indeed the rumors of the owner having altered his face surgically to resemble Elvis seemed true – at least, a very Elvis-looking man greeted us at the door of this ramshackle home, collected $5 from each of us, and then spent what felt like many, many hours talking at us nonstop, as he took us from room to room filled floor to ceiling with Elvis memorabilia, from stamps to books to albums to dolls to seemingly anything imaginable that was Elvis-themed. I remember at one point it felt like we’d never get out, but then somehow eventually we did. (The story had a strange end far beyond our imagination: In July 2014, McLeod was found dead on the Graceland Too porch, two days after fatally shooting a visitor who appeared to be a burglar.)

On the car ride back, I remember being in the backseat with
Josh, an Alabama grad student who seemed impossibly foreign to me, and resting my head on his shoulder as I fell asleep. ‘Welcome to the South,’ I remember him laughing. I must have snapped into consciousness and said something because I remember him telling me, ‘And your adventure is just about to begin.’

I came to the adventure in the name of William Faulkner, but soon it was clear to me that Jimmy Faulkner was the real adventure. For the next 10 days, this man became a daily part of my life.

‘Good morning, Pia,’ he’d say at 7am, which felt late to him because he always got up at 5. (
Farmer’s hours
, Bill explained to me, even though he was not a farmer and never had been.)

I became this Italian New York girl Pia who had a fancy job in publishing – he kept forgetting I was a student and instead focused on my magazine internship. As much as I’d tell him I was an intern and had no power, he’d insist it was an important job. At times, I worried he thought I was a key to him getting a potential book by John Faulkner published; I started to think that was why he was interested in driving me for hours all around the county, showing me ‘secret Faulkner spots,’ but Bill told me he’d occasionally take a liking to a visitor and give them the extended tour. Hearing that, I felt somehow relieved that I was not special, or less likely to be special.

We’d go to all sorts of places. One afternoon he drove us to the banks of the Tallahatchie River. Some of his friends were there and they looked like they were pacing, looking for something. ‘Confederate gold,’ Jimmy explained, and soon I saw several had metal detectors. ‘They say there’s something,’ Jimmy went on, half-heartedly, like someone who maybe knew better or maybe not.

Another day we’d be in the cemetery, where he’d be telling me stories about obscure relatives. Or in his home, where he’d show me Confederate currency in a sock drawer and then make me an afternoon omelet. Or we’d be at a truck stop diner – a thing in the South, I realized! – where I’d listen to his endless stories while discovering the joys of collards and candied yams as my new favorite side dishes.

Often we’d go by Square Books right in the center of town, where Jimmy was treated as a celebrity, before the giant Faulkner displays. He’d show me all the fruits of the various annual Faulkner conferences and all his talks, with the pride of a man who, late in life, had become a scholar. Faulkner was still more popular than the other big writer in town, Jimmy seemed to proudly grumble, referring to John Grisham, whose massive compound seemed to look down on the city from every angle.

Another time he said he wanted to take me to a ‘juke joint.’ I had no idea what that was and played along. I remember feeling slightly uneasy after we pulled up to what looked like a tin shack off the side of a very green highway, with a bunch of cars crowding a dirt path. ‘Here we are,’ Jimmy said, smiling mischievously. It turned out that this was Chulahoma, ‘Junior’s Place,’ built by the great Mississippi hill country blues legend Junior Kimbrough and now run by two of his sons (he was rumored to have 36 children) since he’d died a couple years before. I was familiar with Junior because Moby had recently released his album
Play
, and that had got me interested in the blues musicians on Oxford’s Fat Possum Records – who had produced Kimbrough in his final years. I later learned that a ‘juke joint’ was both a lovely and a sad place – something created out of necessity, the refuge of plantation workers and sharecroppers after the Emancipation Proclamation, since there
were still not public spaces that allowed black people to mix with whites. That sadness followed all the way: Just a few months later, the historic juke joint burned down.

But my best memory of all is an early one. In one of my first nights hanging out with him, Jimmy invited me to a family gathering at his favorite place, Taylor’s Grocery. This was a strange sort of rundown mom-and-pop restaurant that had an amazing reputation in town, packed with families and music playing – a sort of cozy, cramped dining establishment full of red checkered tablecloths. Jimmy didn’t ask what anyone wanted, but when the waitress came over, he ordered for all of us. I was too busy taking in the atmosphere to even notice, and soon sweet tea appeared before me and eventually a big plate of … fried catfish.

At that point I’d been a strict vegetarian for eight years, and I had snacks on me at all times for emergencies like this. I knew there was no way I could eat that fish and yet there was no way I could say no. I tried for a second to reach into my purse for a bag of nuts and explain to Jimmy, but he, hard of hearing, was yelling louder than ever in that busy dining room, telling me not to be afraid, I’d love it – he knew it was my first catfish (though not my first meat in ages – we’d never discussed vegetarianism). I realized I had no choice. Gingerly I cut into it and slathered it in sauce and took a bite, cringing. And then another and another. I didn’t pause to think about the taste. Lost in that evening of music and laughter and conversation, I felt a part of Jimmy’s world and so was that food.

I assumed I’d spend the night ill but instead when I got back to Robin’s I lay in bed unable to sleep. I was full of energy, an energy unlike any I’d experienced in ages. This was the beginning of my pescatarianism, which would of course lead to omnivorism – but at least I could say a Faulkner did it to me.

Here was another piece of me. I was a person who could in the moment overstep my own beliefs, who could become someone else. Pia, Italian, New York Girl, fish-eater – none of those things held me back. They only reminded me that I, 22, could perhaps be anyone I wanted, and perhaps even one day in ways that I wanted.

We would sometimes spend eight-hour days together with only bits of silence here and there. Often I’d be asking questions and recording him, but other times we were just two friends hanging out, with no conversational agenda. One time he asked me about my family and I almost got into our years as immigrants and how I wished I could one day go back to Iran, when he cut in, ‘Do they live in Italy still?’ I shook my head, ‘No, they’re in California.’ He looked sad for a second, as if he knew. But instead he said, ‘We’ve all been from here – this land is all I’ve ever known and will know.’