BB King and Stevie Ray Vaughn are what’s on the playlist at Little Dooey in Starkville. With blues playing in the background, you’ll choose from boiled crawfish, shrimp, or a plate-sized barbecue sandwich, served by a college student in a neon Dooey t-shirt, and you’ll fix your drink in a side room with a hardwood floor that’s sticky from the spray of sweet tea. Ten-gallon dispensers of the nectar line the wall so that patrons are never without refreshment. On the way from the gravel lot to the main Dooey building, you’ll pass the screened Little Dooey Fellowship Porch, which I suspect bears no resemblance to the similarly named church fellowship hall of your youth, and I’m just betting is a pretty raucous place most Saturday nights. Fellowship can be defined in a lot of ways.
Right across the street is an ages old cemetery, with the once defunct but now revitalized cotton district beyond that. Near enough to MSU, and popular with everybody, the restaurant is swamped on game days so the best time to enjoy it is mid-afternoon on a weekday, which is what we’re doing now. Life’s Lonesome Road takes over the sound system as we leave. I’d totally recommend the pulled chicken sandwich with a side of baked beans.
I have a love/hate relationship with Mississippi. Both of my parents called it home for a good many years and many relatives continue to do so. It’s where my family tree took root and where my grandparents lived and died. It nurtured generations of farmers and land owners in my clan and did a pretty good job of perpetuating our ancestral line. So for that, I’m thankful and indebted. I may not be wild about the lack of some things, like entertainment and smooth roads, but it’s where my story began so I have to sort of claim it.
Actually, I don’t hate Mississippi. In fact, as an Alabama resident, I’m grateful for the state. If not for Mississippi, Alabama would rank last in most critical national measurements instead of only near the bottom. We’d be bringing up the rear in education and poverty and healthcare were it not for our neighbor to the west. About the only thing we can claim ourselves first in, with Mississippi a close second, is the rate of obesity. Apparently, a good number of Alabamians just can’t say no to fried chicken dinners and Sonic chili pies and the ready supply of Twinkies and cheese puffs at the Dollar General checkout. Well, we’re actually first in more than obesity. Alabama is pretty proud of Tuscaloosa’s winning powerhouse football record. We usually lead the pack there.
That’s just ink on paper, though. What no one measures about Mississippi is what can’t really be quantified. It’s a feeling, a flavor, an appreciation for something innate and spicy and alive and totally unexpected. There just must be something in the water that sets it apart from all the other 49. You might look for it in the flaky deliciousness of a fried peach pie from 45 Pantry Café, brought in just that morning from a local kitchen, but you’d be mistaken. Or you could be certain it’s the Blues piano at the Hollywood that the State Tourism Department proudly promotes, but again, that’s not all there is. In truth, you really won’t find it in either place. You also won’t feel the full vibe on the square at Oxford or at a casino in Tunica. You definitely won’t find it in the prepared notes from the guide at the Capitol building in Jackson. Even Waverly Plantation and the Biloxi Lighthouse are far too staged. They hide Mississippi’s crazy much too well for a traveler to get a true sense of the state. You can just about guarantee that anything found in a travel guide is the equivalent of stashing clutter in the bathtub when guests arrive. It’s not the real you and it’s not the real state.
You’ll get a glimpse of Mississippi’s crazy in the lineup of local hard workers who dust off the flannel shirts and cowboy hats to line dance to Rockin’ Robin at the Dennis Community Center on the Saturday morning of the local historical society’s kickoff. You might find a bit of the crazy in the Wyoming transplant of a college professor who offers to take students on a guided, if not university sanctioned, midnight coon hunt, giving any of the night’s catch to locals at the corner gas station who make sure it doesn’t go to waste. I’m sure he would call that experiential learning if pressed. You might pass the same university’s experimental car on Highway 25, out for a test run of the totally electric driverless supercar’s flexibility at both on and off-road travel. The Ivy League Northeast might lay claim to top honors in biomedical research, but if you’re ever in need of a driverless electric off-road supercar, you know where to go. Take that, Harvard.
Mississippi is not just crazy; it’s creative with a side of humor. It shows up in town names that are adjectives like Strong and Chunky. I’m imagining my return address label listing Chunky, Mississippi. I’d much rather meet the mail carrier at the end of my shaded tree-lined drive fronting the manor house in Hickory Grove or Holly Springs, or Magnolia. Egypt and Prairie, Mississippi have to be sturdy and farm proud, while Pontotoc and Tishomingo and Mantachie and Oktibbeha suggest old and native and deep-rooted places–those populated by people of the earth. If there’s one thing Mississippi must be first at, it’s pride in place. But then, that can’t be measured.
It can be painted, though, in the eerie ghost stories of Kathryn Wyndham Tucker and the short stories of Eudora Welty. William Faulkner was pretty good with words and John Grisham is still powering through legal thrillers when he’s not dining at the Graduate in Oxford. Who knew Mississippi could be literary?
The Magnolia State is not always counted last. It does have its firsts. It is first in catfish and it’s first in sweet potatoes. I’m sure there’s some other first that’s just not on the nation’s radar, like the most heat generated in a single day or the most miles of lonely interstate between exits, but who really cares about that. The state is definitely not first in revenue, thanks in part to the location of Mobile just over the line in Alabama and New Orleans just over the line in Louisiana and Memphis just over the line in Tennessee. In the game of city musical chairs, Mississippi was left standing, wondering what on earth just happened.
But that’s OK. Being first is tiring. My Ole Miss cousin, who is wise in the ways of SEC football, pities the rabid Alabama fans whose mood is governed by the outcome of a Saturday ball game. “We don’t have to always win,” he comments. “We just set up in the Grove and have a good time before the game. We know we’ll likely lose but that makes the days we win that much better. We’re going home, win or lose, and there’s always tomorrow.”
As luck would have it, MSU was set to play Alabama on the first Saturday after Alabama’s devastating loss to LSU, marring a perfect season. Alabama fans were none too happy about that and bent on revenge, but a very creative local coffee shop found a bit of humor even in that dour situation. “We had nothing to do with last Saturday, Nick” read the large black letters at Strange Brew.
Because win or lose, Mississippi people just go back home and don’t count the numbers that suggest they are less than OK. For in the things that really count, they are more than OK. And anyway, much as we’d all like to, we can’t all be Alabama.
Roll Tide.
