at me. For a few uncomfortable moments I endure the penetrating gaze of a man who for forty years has searched for illness in reticent people. His perception is like the heat from a lamp. I nod slowly, hoping to communicate, I’m okay, Dad, at the same time searching his face for clues to the anxiety I heard in my mother’s voice on the phone this morning. But he’s too good at concealing his emotions. Another habit of the medical profession.
“Is Mom with you?” I ask.
“No, she’s home cooking a supper you’ll have to see to believe.” He reaches out and squeezes my hand. “It’s good to see you, son.” For an instant I catch a glimpse of something unsettling behind his eyes, but it vanishes as he grins mischievously at Annie. “Let’s move out, tadpole! We’re burning daylight!”
My father served as an army doctor in West Germany in the 1960s, and it was there he acquired a taste for dark beer and high-performance automobiles. He has been driving BMWs ever since he could afford them, and he drives fast. In four minutes we are away from the airport and roaring north on Highway 61. Annie sits in the middle of the backseat, lashed into a safety seat, marveling at the TV-sized computer display built into the dashboard while Dad runs through its functions again and again, delighting in every giggle that bursts from her lips.
Coronary problems severely reduced my father’s income a few years ago, so last year—on his sixty-sixth birthday—I bought him a black BMW 740i with the royalties from my third novel. I felt a little like Elvis Presley when I wrote that check, and it was a good feeling. My parents started life with nothing, and in a single generation, through hard work and sacrifice, lived what was once unapologetically called the American Dream. They deserve some perks.
The flat brown fields of Louisiana quickly give way to green wooded hills, and somewhere to our left, beyond the lush forest, rolls the great brown river. I cannot smell it yet, but I feel it, a subtle disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field, a fluid force that shapes the surrounding land and souls. I roll down the window and suck in the life smell of hardwood forest, creek water, kudzu, bush-hogged wildflowers, and baking earth. The competing aromas blend into a heady gestalt you couldn’t find in Houston if you grid-searched every inch of it on your hands and knees.
“We’re losing the air conditioning,” Dad complains.
“Sorry.” I roll up the window. “It’s been a long time since I smelled this place.”
“Too damn long.”
“Papa said a bad word!” Annie cries, bursting into giggles.
Dad laughs, then reaches back between the seats and slaps her knee.
The old landmarks hurtle by like location shots from a film. St. Francisville, where John James Audubon painted his birds, now home to a nuclear station; the turnoff to Angola Penitentiary; and finally the state line, marked by a big blue billboard: WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI! THE MAGNOLIA STATE.
“What’s happening in Natchez these days?” I ask.
Dad whips into the left lane and zooms past a log truck loaded from bumper to red flag with pulpwood. “A lot, for a change. Looks like we’ve got a new factory coming in. Which is good, because the battery plant is about dead.”
“What kind of factory?”
“Chemical plant. They want to put it in the new industrial park by the river. South of the paper mill.”
“Is it a done deal?”
“I’ll say it’s done when I see smoke coming from the stacks. Till then, it’s all talk. It’s like the casino boats. Every other month a new company talks about bringing another boat in, but there’s still just the one.”
“What else is happening?”
“Big election coming up.”
“What kind?”
“Mayoral. For the first time in history there’s a black candidate with a real chance to win.”
“You’re kidding. Who is it?”
“Shad Johnson. He’s about your age. His parents are patients of mine. You never heard of him because they sent him north to prep school when he was a kid. After that he went to Harvard University. Another damn lawyer, just like you.”
“And he wants to be mayor of Natchez?”
“Badly. He moved down here just to run. And he may win.”
“What’s the black-white split now?”
“Registered voters? Fifty-one to forty-nine, in favor of whites. The blacks usually have a low turnout, but this election may be different. In any case, the key for Johnson is white votes, and he might actually get some. He’s been invited to join the Rotary Club.”
“The Natchez Rotary Club?”
“Times are changing. And Shad Johnson’s smart enough to exploit that. I’m sure you’ll meet him soon. The election’s only five weeks away. Hell, he’ll probably want an endorsement from you, seeing how you’re a celebrity now.”
“Papa said another bad word!” Annie chimes in. “But not too bad.”
“What did I say?”
“H-E-L-L. You’re supposed to say heck.”
Dad laughs and slaps her on the knee again.
“I want to stay low-profile,” I say quietly. “This trip is strictly R-and-R.”
“Not much chance of that. Somebody already called the house asking for you. Right before I left.”
“Was it Cilla, my assistant?”
“No. A man. He asked if you’d got in yet. When I asked who was calling, he hung up. The caller-ID box said ‘out of area.’”
“Probably a reporter. They’re going to turn the South upside down trying to find me because of the Hanratty execution.”
“We’ll do what we can to keep you incognito, but the new newspaper publisher has called four times asking about getting an interview with you. Now that you’re here, you won’t be able to avoid things like that. Not without people saying you’ve gone Hollywood on us.”
I sit back and assimilate this. Finding sanctuary in my old hometown might not be as easy as I thought. But it will still be better than Houston.
Natchez is unlike any place in America, existing almost outside time, which is exactly what Annie and I need. In some ways it isn’t part of Mississippi at all. There’s no town square with a lone Confederate soldier presiding over it, no flat, limitless Delta horizon or provincial blue laws. The oldest city on the Mississippi River, Natchez stands white and pristine atop a two-hundred-foot loess bluff, the jewel in the crown of nineteenth-century steamboat ports. For as long as I can remember, the population has been twenty-five thousand, but after being ruled in turn by Indians, French, British, Spanish, Confederates, and Americans, her character is more cosmopolitan than cities ten times her size. Parts of New Orleans remind me of Natchez, but only parts. Modern life long ago came to the Crescent City and changed it forever. Two hundred miles upriver, Natchez exists in a ripple of time that somehow eludes the homogenizing influences of the present.
In 1850 Natchez boasted more millionaires than any city in the United States save New York and Philadelphia. Their fortunes were made on the cotton that poured like white gold out of the district and into the mills of England. The plantations stretched for miles on both sides of the Mississippi River, and the planters who administered them built mansions that made Margaret Mitchell’s Tara look like modest accommodations. While their slaves toiled in the fields, the princes of this new aristocracy sent their sons to Harvard and their daughters to the royal courts of Europe. Atop the bluff they held cotillions,