For Jackson, Mississippi the Civil War was catastrophic, but by the 1880s, the city had begun to rebuild and piece itself together slowly along its two main two axes, Capitol and State Streets.
The Pearl River provided then as it does now a natural barrier to expansion to the east, so that the city grew west along Capitol behind the bluff and north along State following the bluff. The southwesterly course of the floodplain largely prevented significant development on South State Street beyond its parallel to the divergence of the Illinois Central and Gulf & Ship Island Railroads, yet inevitably attempts were made, paramount among them the hamlet that became known as Duttoville.
Located south of Porter and on either side of Gallatin adjacent to the Illinois Central Railroad, Duttoville was named for Father Louis Anthony (Luigi Antonio) Dutto, one of the most fascinating figures in the ecclesiastical history of Mississippi. Dutto was born in the commune of Boves in Italy’s Piedmont region and educated at Brignole-Sale, a pontifical college in Genoa. A very learned man, Dutto was the author of The Life of Bartolome de las Cassas (published posthumously; 1902). He was ordained for the Diocese of Natchez before he was 24 years old and arrived in Jackson on August 25, 1875 to assist Fr. Picherit in attending the surrounding missions. Dutto succeeded Picherit as pastor in 1885.
Fr. Louis Dutto
According to an anecdotal biography written in 1932 by Rev. P.H. Keenen, a personal friend, “Father Dutto was a great financier, having special aptitude in this line. He was sought as adviser in matters financial by young businessmen, and his advice, when followed, usually brought success, and often wealth. . . . He himself acquired much property. On the missions he seldom asked his people for funds—he gave instead of asking. His business acumen enabled him to do this.”
In 1886, Fr. Dutto bought land in what was then the southwestern portion of the city, which, according to the account given by McCain in The Story of Jackson, “he divided into lots on which homes were erected and gardens cultivated by certain Catholics who had to come to the city to engage in commercial and agricultural pursuits. This section is still known as Duttoville.”
By another account (Jackson Daily News, May 30, 1979 p. 15A) Dutto acquired the property in 1891 from F.A. and Mary F. Wolfe, J.W. Langley all along Gallatin Street and the I.C.R.R. and the G.&S.I. Railroad and the “Muh (pronounced as the pronoun “me”) Estate, “vast acres” of land just outside the city limits, Dutto sold lots to working class people who could not pay taxes on simple homes, including many Italian immigrants (likely the “certain Catholics” referenced above). The area soon became a thriving community with a planing mill, brickyard and other enterprises that provided work for residents, and many worked in Jackson proper. Anticipating being acquired by Jackson at an early date, the settlers, to avoid city taxes, incorporated in 1903.
Jackson topographic map, 1905
The original Duttoville was bounded on the north by Town Creek, the east by the Pearl River with the Illinois Central and Gulf & Ship Island railroads to the west. Later the village expanded west of he railroad tracks to Terry Road. The first (and only) mayor was J.R. Root; aldermen were W.L. Porter, Joe Karese and Will Muh; J.E. Robinson was town marshal, and J.W Langley was city clerk. We’re told a small jail was built but “never occupied”.
When Jackson first attempted to incorporate Duttoville, the tiny village put up a fight. The Duttovillers went to court and fought the incorporation and won. The city of Jackson appealed, and after two years, while the case was still pending in court, the citizens of Duttoville and Mayor Hemmingway of Jackson made a compromise.
The city agreed to extend water, lights, telephone, a fire station, police protection, a grammar school (George School) and other amenities. But the area continued to be called by its original name, which in time became corrupted into “Doodleville” or “Dooleyville” both used well into the mid-20th century as a popular though derisive term for the part of town bordered by Battlefield Park on the south, Terry Road on the West, Hooker Street on the north and South Gallatin on the East, well west of the original settlement.
Belhaven resident Wilfred Cunningham, who grew up on Farish Street, remembers going to Doodleville as a very young man. “This was in the late Forties, and I was in my early teens. Anything south of Capitol Street on Farish Street we considered Doodleville,”
“The area was much more depressed than North Farish. I seem to remember the roads weren’t paved, the streets were graveled, I thought we lived poorly on Farish, but Dooley was a lot more run down.” Cunningham said. “The houses were row houses, shotgun houses like we had on Farish. People from Doodleville would come to Farish where we had the ice cream parlors, the stores, the clubs, and the Alamo. There wasn’t any industry of any kind there for jobs, so most of the people worked in north Jackson. For some reason I was always told not to let the sun go down on me there. I never ran into such a problem, but I always got the impression that there was a gang of some kind that kept Doodleville for people who lived here and weren’t friendly to outsiders.”
Jackson bluesmen Cary Lee Simmons and Bubba Brown composed the “Doodleville Blues” in the 1930s, and it was a local hit, getting lots of laughs when Simmons performed it for his friends in Jackson. He made a recording in 1967, which you can listen to here.
I got a girl in the Bamas, I got on that lived out on Bailey Hill. I got a girl in the Bamas, and I got one that lived out on Bailey Hill. But don’t none of them suit me like that one I got down in Doodleville
The womens on Farish Street shakes until they can’t be still. I said, the womens on Farish Street shakes until they can’t be still. But they cannot sake like those gals Live down here in Doodleville
Turn your lamp down low. Somebody done shot poor Bud, Buddy Will. Turn your lamp down low. Somebody done shot Buddy Will. I told him to stay off Mill Street and get him a gal in Doodleville.
I won’t have a gal on Farish Street, Wouldn’t speak to one that lived on Mill. I won’t have a gal on Farish Street, Wouldn’t speak to one that lived on Mill. ‘Cause the next woman I got, she got to live in Doodleville.
They got the meat from the slaughterhouse And the wood from Grimm Stage Mill. They got the meat from the slaughterhouse And the wood from Grimm Stage Mill. And if you want to live easy, get you a girl in Doodleville.
Spoken: I got a secret for you though. It’s a mad dog out, and boys, it ain’t been killed. It’s a mad dog out, and boys, it ain’t been killed. And you better be careful, careful, careful how you doodle in Doodleville.
Even studded with jewels such as the old fire station and the magnificent Art Deco George School, Duttoville languishes in slow decay, but it’s the most fascinating neighborhood in the city of Jackson, the sad shadow of a good man’s dream.
This piece by acclaimed rogue New Orleans journalist (and Mississippi native) Don Lee Keith came to light a week ago in a folder of notes, letters, and other odds and ends while I was looking for something else.
Reading over it again, I made the decision to republish it on Mississippi Sideboard, since, as I’ve stated before, one of this platform’s functions is to preserve amusing or interesting ephemera. Keith’s piece is both interesting, amusing, and sheds a colorful light on people, a time, and a place.
I’ve long since lost the original copy, have only a vague idea of where I may have found it to begin with, and days of research has turned up nothing about the original publication. I did, however find rough drafts of “Fear and Loathing Beneath the Magnolias” in the Earl K Long Library’s archive with Keith’s other papers. If anyone can provide a citation, I’d be much obliged.
JACKSON, MISS.— A year and a half ago, when the post-Junior League women of this capital city began planning the 14th annual Mississippi Arts Festival, they took a shoot-for-the-stars attitude. They set their sights on the likes of Leontyne Price for opera, Liza Minelli for pops, and they wavered between Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote for their literary choices.
Throughout the months of letter writing and phone calling and contract negotiating, the pickings got slimmer. By last weekend, when the festival curtain opened, the committee had altered its preferences and settled on Joanna Simons instead of Leontyne Price. Robert Goulet cost $12,500, which was more realistic than Liza Minelli’s $65,000, so it was Goulet on the festival stage. But by some peculiar move of fate, both choices for the literary star—Williams and Capote—had agreed to appear. When that word was received, the women went into orgasmic ecstasy. They congratulated each other over sherry and called their friends long distance and bored their husbands, talking about nothing but their achievement. “Just think,” they all said, “Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Together for the first time on one stage. Ours. What a coup!”
What they did not know was that Williams and Capote did not want to be together on any stage at any time, did not want to speak or even see each other, much less appear on the same program. The two men had locked creative horns in the season’s most celebrated battle of egocentric frenzies. Inviting that pair to the same gathering was tantamount to pitching a couple of savage vipers into the same pit.
***
Truman Capote had been writing something called Answered Prayers for nearly 20 years. At least that’s how long he’s been talking about it, skillfully interjecting mentions of the book into every major interview, persistently reminding the public that his “life’s work” has a title taken from St. Theresa: “More tears are shed over answered prayers then over unanswered ones.”
In the meantime, of course, he has come out with several other books—most notably In Cold Blood, which he touted as a “new art form” –but no one had seen a word of Answered Prayers until the summer of 1975 when a story in Esquire was billed as a chapter from the long-awaited, finally forthcoming, novel. A few months later, in the same magazine, there appeared a second story, seemingly unrelated but supposedly part of the novel, which set New York society’s teeth on edge. Capote, in that story, sliced his friends off at the ankles. He told secrets, bared confidences, detailed scandals, disclosed intimacies and hung out more dirty linen than a lot of that gold-plated coterie had ever counted on seeing in print. Immediately, the social set reacted like a burnt spider.
Capote offered no explanation or apology. In May of 1976 he published a third story from the novel. And here is where he gave the shiv to a literary friendship that had spanned three decades.
Capote created an admittedly pseudonymous character called Mr. Wallace. He is America’s most acclaimed playwright. He is “a chunky, paunchy, booze-puffed runt with a play moustache glued about his iconic lips.” He has a corn-pone voice and a pet bulldog. He is paranoic. He is a hypochondriac and expects to die at any moment. He is convinced the critics have turned on himl He laments the death of his homosexual lover. And Mr. Wallace—whom the world took to be an unmistakable portrait of Tennessee Williams—is made more memorab le in Capote’s story for having engaged the services of a male prostitute and then proposing to extinguish his cigar in the young fellow’s rear.
The ink of that Esquire story was scarcely dry before Williams had dipped into an ample supply of venom and pulled out a vengeful epithet for Capote.
It was “rattlesnake”.
***
Well before Christmas, chairman of the Mississippi Arts Festival, Mrs. Heber (“Sister”) Simmons, began making overtures as to the availability of Tennessee Williams. It seemed more logical to invite the playwright because he was, after all, a native Mississippian. He had never appeared on stage in his home state. And, despite the height to which he had raised eyebrows with his revealing Memoirs (1975), there was an undeniable devotion to him among some of the state’s more literate groups.
Williams’ agent, Bill Barnes offered no encouragement, however. Sister Simmons, never a woman to be outdone, shot at the other star, firing off inquiries to Capote’s agent. The reply was a polite No. “Mr. Capote feels that he must closet himself in order to finish the book he is currently writing.”
So, for the first time, the festival committee went to the festival board about an alternate choice for a literary star. James Dickey was considered, a contract was drawn up, tut the board had second thoughts and opted for John Gardner. Gardner’s contract was in the hands of the board, ready for signing, when a telegram arrived from Capote’s agent saying that yes, he would appear. The women in charge of the shindig clasped their bosoms and signed with thanksgiving.
But Sister Simmons would not rest easily until she knew for certain that Williams had personally refused to come to Jackson. She sent out new feelers, fresh inquiries, and dispatched another wire to agent Barnes, with a copy to Williams himself. Then it dawned on her that the festival coffers were empty. All the money had been allocatged.
Raising money in Mississippi to bring in Tennessee Williams can be a furrow-browed chore, particularly when you’re already shelling out three thou for Truman Capote. Potential donors—all the way from bank presidents to prominent professionals—are likely to glance to the side and shuffle nervously at the prospect of paying good money to the likes of those two, regardless of their individual achievements. A kind of magnolia-scented macho rises likethe swamp fog, and when the topic invades beer sessions or hunting outings, the term “damn queers” is heard out loud.
So, Sister Simmons had a few weeks of constant turn-downs ahead, even after Williams informed his agent that he was, indeed, interested in coming to the festival, Finally, with two-thirds of the $4000 pledged, she confronted the board, which eventually agreed to underwrite the rest. If Williams would come, an admission fee of $5 would be charged.
Now, Sister Simmons sat back and waited There was little else she could do.
***
When Capote’s agent, Irene Smookler, was told that Williams might be appearing at the festival, she said she’s pass that word to her client. Two days later, she phoned Nora Jane Ethridge, seminars chairman, with this message: “Mr. Capote doesn’t care of Mr. Williams comes. He just doesn’t want to look at him.”
***
Less than two weeks before Festival, a contract with Williams had been signed. His agent has been assured the yes, the playwright was being paid more than Capote. The program had been updated to include Williams and was at the printer. Now, it was Thursday afternoon and Ms. Ethridge was on the phone to Barnes, confirming arrival time and other such details. Mr. Williams was scheduled to go on stage Sunday at 1 p.m., she said. There was no possibility of a conflict since Truman Capote would have already spoken and left town.
“Well, the phone fairly exploded,” says Nora Jane Ethridge. “Bill Barnes just went crazy “Capote? Capote?” he yelled, and went right into a fit about how anybody with any sense would never invite the two men to the same thing, and what did those deceptive women who called themselves fine Southern ladies mean, and if Mr. Williams had cone to Jackson and found that Truman Capote was on the same program how me, Bill Barnes, would have been fired, and well, it went on and on—and before I knew what was happening he had hung up the phone right in my face!”
For two days, the women in charge of the festival breathed short, careful breaths, their optimism corseted by fear that the playwright would cancel. They sent a lengthy telegram to Williams, saying how pleased, how every pleased everyone was that he was coming. They implored Jacksonian author Eudora Welty to call his New York hotel and if she couldn’t get him in person to at least leave a message that she, too, was pleased. And it wasn’t until the 6 p.m. pl,ant landed on Saturday night that anyone was actually sure that Mississippi’s most acclaimed literary son was coming home again.
By then, nerve endings were blood raw from all the excitement that Truman Capote was in town.
***
Capote’s Saturday had begun with a brunch at the Ethridge house. Predictably, conversations often got around to a mention of Williams. One guest said she was looking forward to meeting him. “You’re in for a big no-treat,” advised Capote. When someone else brought up the question of when Williams latest play, Vieux Carre, might open, Capote remarked, “Oh, his plays open and close so fast you can’t keep up with them.” More immediate concern, however seemed to be on his own appearance on stage.
***
The crowd arrived early and waited anxiously but patiently. It was an odd assortment and a peculiar one for an auditorium on a religiously-oriented campus. Embroidered jeans sat right next to double-knit leisure suits. Gum-chewing teenagers shared arm rests with blue-haired matrons wearing canary diamonds. And all conversations, regardless of subject matter, halted at 3 o’clock sharp when the place was thrown into sudden darkness, except for a single pink pinspot trained on an edge of the stage. From behind the red velvet curtain, he appeared. His head was tilted back at a rakish angle as he struck a pose, he remained there for a moment, affecting a dislocated hip stance not unlike that of Vogue models of the early 1960s. He was wearing a tannish suit with narrow lapels, and an orange turtleneck sweater. His hands were at his sides until all at once, his right arm shot upward and stayed there, straight, with its hand bobbing limply from its wrist. Amid the roar of applause, someone wondered loudly if he had borrowed that salute from Natalie Wood’s last scene in Gypsy.
Then Capote walked to the podium. The edge of its top reached him mid-chest. He leaned forward to the microphone. He blinked several times in rapid succession and began to speak. Capote’s voice is even more celebrated than his prose. It is as recognizable as a whining mammy-cat—fragile yet somehow strong, condescending but commanding, a rather freakish effect devoid of gruff bass notes, almost as if the transition of adolescence has never visited his vocal cords. He commenced the twice-told tale of a guy in New York who went to a pretty model’s apartment in the Dakota to pick her up for a date. In the living room the man encountered a Great Dane, and while the girl finished dressing, the man amused the dog by bouncing a rubber ball, which the animal would catch in its mouth.
The faint ringing that had begun in the sound system of the auditorium had now reached a loud, hollow echo level and the author stopped his story. Three men appeared from three different directions, each intent on correcting the embarrassing dilemma, but they succeeded only partially. The somewhat muted echo continued its distraction. And Capote continued the saga of the big dog that sprang for a rubber ball and leaped through an open window to its death a dozen floors below.
The audience had started to adjust to the little man on sage. Fewer and fewer nudged each other in the ribs when his voice struck lyric soprano notes. But nervous laughter would mount within the group, erupting every minute or so at the least opportunity. When Capote began reading an early story, “My Side of the Matter,” virtually every sentence was punctuated by spratic giggles from his listeners. It seemed an appropriate response, so with each appreciative round of laughter, his interpretation of the story grew more dramatic.
“My Side of the Matter,” is about a young man with a persecution complex who is riddled with paranoia concerning his wife’s family. It is told in first person, and more than one astute reader has noted its similarity to Welty’s brilliant story, “Why I Live at the P.O.” Capote has vowed that he wrote his story long before reading Miss Welty’s.
Certainly he has written better stories, but seldom has he written more expressive orf, indeed, more theatrical ones. His reading left no point unmade, no nuance unrealized. His gestures were plentiful, and each sweet of the hand, each snarl, each frown, was rewarded with laughter.
But the Peter Lorre-like imp did not go on with his caricature after that story. Instead, he switched the turntable speed from humor to tenderness, and he read his highly autobiographical, “A Christmas Memory”. This time the audience adopted a reverence. Several women dabbed at their eyes in the closing words. Clearly, Capote had won. He had converted the disbelievers, even those who had come to point and smirk, and his victory was evident in the unrestrained applause. The jarring, erratic cadence of the crowd clapping almost managed to drown out the hollow echo of the sound system.
Already four persons had stalked out to the lobby, had demanded and received their money back. One said the Festival folks were putting on a shoddy show. Everybody else, however, appeared determined to hear Capote’s response to audience questions, and the most sensitive of the lot were in for a few attacks of chagrin. When a girl rose and asked if he would mind signing a book for her father, paperbacks suddenly began appearing from purses and from beneath vests, and a lot of autograph seekers gathered at the steps leading to the stage. That’s when the Capote performance fell apart; it had lasted an hour and 38 minutes, and if anybody who had stayed to the finish felt it hadn’t been worth the money, no one said so.
***
The first thing anyone noticed when entering the auditorium of the Millsaps Christian Center Sunday afternoon was the table placed at center stage. Right smack in the middle of it was a bottle of wine, and to the right of the bottle was a glass, half full of the dark red liquid the sight had the same effect on the first to arrive, and the last. It caused people to sit stiller than people had sat the previous afternoon. Those who had to speak did so in whispers, almost as if the presence of wine in a placed named Christian Center demanded awe. And when Tennessee Williams came on stage promptly at 1 p.m. and stumbled just enough to drop two of the books he was carrying (but managed to hang onto the raincoat draped across his arm) several persons closed their eyes, in dread that it was all true, all those stories about his getting liquored-up and falling out in public. Some remembered what Truman Capote had said on that talk show, that Williams was going around claiming he had cut down on the booze. Capote said he had cut down all right, at least to three or four bottles a day.
At the podium was the woman lieutenant governor, a tall lady who kept reminding the audience, over and over, that the man was a native Mississippian. When she hammered on that point for the fourth time, they laughed. They laughed even harder when she said the governor himself would have been there, had he not been in the hospital getting a medical check-up. The joke was an inside one shared by those who recalled the governor having been hospitalized last year. That, too, was supposedly a check-up but informants reported he was suffering from a gunshot wound accomplished by his wife. They continued the laughter when the tall woman presented Williams with a certificate declaring him an honorary colonel on the governor’s staff.
It was hardly a reassurance when Williams took the mike from the woman and proceeded to sing the first few bars of the esoteric Mississippi state song. And it failed to squelch any scattered uneasiness when, in the midst of an introduction by a lady from his hometown, Columbus, Williams sauntered over to the table and seated himself in the chair behind it.
Oh, Christ, he really is drunk, they thought. But he wasn’t.
After the introduction, he slowly, methodically, raised his wine glass and proposed a toast: “To the imminent recovery of the governor.” The whole place fairly shook with guffaws.
“I know all about Southern proprieties,” he said, “and I don’t want to offend you. Yet I suspect that you expect me to be somewhat unconventional.” And he read a poem called “Ole Men Go Mad at Night”. When he came to a reference regarding “a fox teethed boy” he offered a sliver of parenthetical insight. “That is preparing you for the general, upcoming mood of this afternoon,” he said, “Not that you are not already adequately prepared. And on he went with the poem.
He sat on the edge of the chair, leaning rather precariously on the table, his head framed on one side by the wine bottle and on the other by the microphone. Not infrequently he reached up to stroke a mustache more carefully clipped than his enunciation. On a couple of occasions, he giggled his celebrated giggle, a sort of gentle cross between the sounds of a robust wind chime and a soup spoon caught in a garbage disposal.
He leafed through the book of poetry, hesitating here and there to consider a selection. “I’m doing this unplanned,” he said, smiling, “so in the meantime, you can bite your nails to the quick.” The audience laughed its last laugh of the afternoon. It soon became obvious that Williams was not aiming for humor. He was aiming for sensitivity. He was not offering the audience comedy. He was offering the audience challenge.
He read a longer poem, “The Lady with Nobody at All”. By now he was more relaxed, more comfortable. He was more peaceful. But peace and Tennessee Williams have not walked together often. Throughout most of his 66 years, he has been plagued with gnawing distresses, by claustrophobia, by fear of heart attacks, drinking. His audience didn’t bat an eyelid when Williams read a short piece of fiction named “Mama’s Old Stucco House”. Its central character, Mr. Jimmy, picks up hitch-hiking young men from the nearby air base and entertains them at the house where his mother is dying. There wasn’t a gri9n, even, when Williams read such lines as “An old faggot took me to New York.” The audience was responding to the playwright’s challenge. It was regarding serious creativity as serious creativity. This was no freak they were listening to; eccentric, perhaps, plenty eccentric, but no freak. They were being enlightened, not merely entertained, and it seemed so incidental, whatever might be his sexual preference.
With the final words of the story still hanging in the air like moth trailings, the audience sat motionless, somehow transfixed by a collective shot of Novocain. Then, after a few brief seconds of steady applause, everyone stood at once. No early jump-ups, no late dawdlers. In a single, united movement, the crowd was on its feet, together. It was as if that particular moment had been choreographed, rehearsed, waited for.
***
Capote had been placed on a Delta jet that morning. Williams had now finished his appearance. Nora Jane Ethridge’s festival duties were three quarters complete. With Williams holed up in an anteroom with a television crew, and the team from People magazine nowhere in sight, Ms. Ethridge could stop fretting and drop all pretenses. She stood backstage with her hands on her hips. “The one yesterday was all you ever hoped for. Why, I had Truman eating out of my hand. But that one, she said, pointing a thin finger toward Williams’ interview room, “he really showed out at first he was the most ungracious, most insulting person I believe I ever saw. But after a while, he was eating of my hand, too. When he’s through in there, we’re going over to my house to have a drink and relax a little before he has to go to the airport.”
Williams sat cross-legged in a wicker chair and accepted a jelly-jar sized glass bucket full of vodka. He was over the rigors of performance. In a couple of house he’d be gone. Around him milled other guests, anxious bo hear but cautious not to seem pushy. All hesitation vanished, however, when the playwright slid into the subject of Capote. They clustered around him, savoring each provocative explicative he spat out. Truman is a gutter rat,” he proclaimed. “Ill-born and ill-mannered. He’s never created an original character and what’s more, he is deliberately malicious. I’d sooner bed down with a cobra than to be in his company.”
***
The folks in Jackson will be talking a long time about the 14th annual Mississippi Arts Festival, the year when those two came to town. Long after they’ve ceased to remember what the men said on stage, they will recall what was said about each other. Long after Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote have forgotten what each was all about, or indeed, that there was a clash, Jackson will recount tales of it all. By then, some of the stories may still have some vague basis of fact, and perhaps that will be enough. After all, some vague basis of fact is what started it all in the first place.
CS’s Restaurant at 1359 ½ N. West Street has for years served and influenced the Belhaven and Midtown neighborhoods. It has a narrative and history reminiscent of an earlier and more tranquil Jackson, and like the kites flown at old Riverside Park, thereby hangs a tale. The life of this establishment has been the common denominator of being located on the southwest corner of North West and Adelle Streets with a street number varying from 1357-1361. It has been an eatery in one form or another for 77 years. It remembers when streetcars ran up and down West Street and the country was still in the grasp of the Great Depression. Millsaps boys would sometimes grease the car tracks so that the vehicle could not climb a nearby hill. Boys have always been boys.
The property shared tenancy with the Millsaps College chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity in 1937.The site was originally the home of this fraternity and was a residence for several families prior to that dating back to 1930. It was originally (and later) the College Grill, becoming Adelle Grill in 1939. It retained this name until 1959, when it again became the College Grill under new ownership. In 1969, it became Hollingsworth’s Fine Foods under the proprietorship of Lloyd W. Hollingsworth and remained such until 1976 when it became known as Everybody’s Restaurant. How it became CS’s remains a state secret.
Pat Boland bought Everybody’s in 1978. In visits with Pat, he spoke of how he used to eat at the restaurant while still in high school. One of eight children, he remembers how much his parents enjoyed dining at the old Rotisserie at Five Points, and “I wanted to be in the restaurant business even then. When Everybody’s became vacant I bought it. I wanted to do something new and different both with the menu and the atmosphere.” He started with naming menu items for employees and customers. Many associate the menu with the Inez Burger. Inez Birchfield came to work at CS’s in 1979, left temporarily in 1990 and returned in September 1997. The original Inez Burger was “stolen from the Jackson Municipal Airport”, where Pat once worked and put on CS’s menu in 1980. It consists of homemade chili, nacho cheese and Jalapeno peppers. Other “name” burgers include the Suzy (bacon, Swiss cheese & grilled onions) and the Joe B (bacon, mozzarella and Jalapenos). Mexican, Mushroom and Everyday burgers, which come in different sizes, round out the burger menu and of course, ‘you can have fries with that.’ Plate lunches and entrees are also available.
In 1986, the beer laws changed from 18 to 21 years old and CS’s became more of a true restaurant than a hangout. The atmosphere is unique. Gone are the college motifs, the booths, fraternity crests and at times – but not all the time, the jukebox. Today the front door and walls are adorned with bumper stickers, handbills, photos, posters and pennants spanning nearly half a century. An estimated 3,000 beer cans from the same time period cover wall shelves with some from as far away as Australia. The collections were the brain child of Pat and two partners who thought their walls should “say something.”
I have my own memories of the restaurant from when I was a teenager in old Jackson and the establishment was called the Adelle Grill. Regardless of the name or time this little cafe was a Mecca for Millsaps students who in the 1950’s shared Cokes, shakes and dreams in individual booths. There were several tables in the back for “fine dining.” There was the ubiquitous jukebox playing records by Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck and the Four Freshmen (no rock’n roll or Hank in this culturally refined milieu), and that staple of the 50’s – the pinball machine in the corner near the front door. Should a member of the college crowd have occasioned a glance in that direction, he or she would have seen the adolescent Billy Harvey easing a ball toward the “special” hole where free games awaited. His bike on the sidewalk outside and his heart on the game, Billy wished desperately to grow up a little more so he could be a college man and sit in one of those curtained booths with a girl who looked like glory.
Bert Case and his family lived directly across Adelle Street in a two-story brick home attached to Case’s Canteen, one of Jackson’s many “ma and pa” groceries and incidentally, near the site of the city’s very first Jitney Jungle store (at the corner of Adelle and Grayson – now North Lamar), back in 1912.
The prices, fashions, trends and dreams have indeed changed over the years – but we can still ‘have fries with that’ and enjoy our lunch among the memorabilia that forms the texture of our past. Bert moved on to prominence at WLBT-TV and subsequently WAPT; his old home now a parking lot. Hollingsworth’s is now CS’s where the burgers are bigger. The shakes, booths, jukebox and pinball machine are gone as is Billy’s bike and the years he rode it. The “glory” girls are grandmothers now and the music is – to put it positively – “different”. But CS’s has a history and Inez was not the first famous inventor of a good burger to add to Saturday afternoon memories of our youth.
Adelle Grill, College Grille, Hollingsworth’s, CS’s; I’ll drink to them all!
Bill Harvey September 2014
Bill Harvey is a native Jacksonian, living most of his life in Belhaven. An MSU Bulldog, he has had careers in journalism, education and as development director of the Andrew Jackson Council, Boy Scouts of America. Bill enjoys photography, music, writing articles for neighborhood sources and sharing experiences with friends at a local coffee shop. (Text copyright Bill Harvey, used by permission.)
Red Rose imitation smoked sausage was originally produced by the Jackson Packing Company, which from 1945 to 1990 sold processed meats from their plant on South Gallatin Street. Red Rose was marketed under the company’s flagship Magnolia brand, which was purchased by Polk’s Meat Products in Magee. The sausages are sold in 24-ounce packages, usually three links. Red Rose at home is sliced into sections, split, fried or grilled and served with beans or potatoes. Two Jackson eateries, the Beatty Street Grocery and the Big Apple Inn on Farish, serve Red Rose sandwiches.
This recipe is a riff on the restaurants’ sausage sandwiches, the innovation here combining the slaw with the sausage stuffing, which works beautifully. Peel the casings from the sausages, break the filling into a heavy skillet—chopped onion would be a nice option—and cook until heated through. Continue cooking until most of the grease is cooked out. Drain thoroughly and add about 4 ounces of slaw; that works out to half a large container from KFC. Serve warm on Bunny burger or slider buns with a dusting of black pepper and several shakes of Crystal hot sauce.
Hoeing up a bed for onion sets wears me out, but if I were capable of digging a hole through the earth to the other side of the globe and found a patch of soil, it would be on Ile Amsterdam, situated in one of the most desolate stretches of ocean in the world.
The island was named by one of those intrepid Dutch explorers of the 17th century, van Diemen, who in 1633 named it after his ship, the Nieuw Amsterdam, which was (incredibile dictu) named after a Dutch settlement on the east coast of North America at the mouth of the Hudson River.
Now under French administration, Ile Amsterdam is 21 square miles of rugged terrain in a Mediterranean climate: warm, dry and sunny. La Roche Godon, the only settlement on the island, is home to about 30 non-permanent inhabitants involved in biological, meteorological and geomagnetic studies. Doubtless out of sheer coincidence, both Jackson and Ile Amsterdam have a volcanic presence, but while the mountain on the island is potentially active, I have every assurance that despite a considerable amount of shifting, the cone beneath Jackson is very much extinct.
The island was once home to one of the few species of flightless ducks in the world, the Amsterdam wigeon, which was of course quickly exterminated once discovered, but still has the Amsterdam albatross as well as Amsterdam fur seals, which bask in thousands on the rocky coastline.
Many Mississippians have become famous in the world of music as well as in the world at large: B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Rogers, not to mention Elvis Presley, but one Mississippian who is a titan in the sphere of 20th century music will likely never become known outside of a select group of musicians and musicologists for whom his works constitute a mind-boggling landmark in musical composition and theory.
In all honesty, as a somewhat tone-deaf wordsmith I can’t even begin to encompass the achievement of Milton Babbitt, which to the best of my understanding (another admittedly modest attribute) lies in that arcane area of human intellect where music and mathematics merge, a slope of Parnassus I’ll never attempt, much less scale. Perhaps my fellow laymen might be sufficiently impressed to know that among his many, many awards, Babbitt received a citation from the Pulitzer judges in 1982 “for his life’s work as a distinguished and seminal American composer”.
For all that his work was of the most esoteric nature and his accolades are of the highest order, Milton remained a down-to-earth sort of man, fond of baseball and beer, and like any good Southern boy (he claimed Mississippi as his home), ate grits every morning of his life when he could get them.
In a 2000 interview with Jason Otis of The Northside Sun, Babbitt said that his father moved to Jackson from Omaha where he was a mathematician at the University of Nebraska because C.W. Welty, Eudora’s father, made him an offer that according to Milton, “he couldn’t refuse. My being born in Philadelphia was the result of the fact that my mother was a Philadelphian and she would always go back to be with her parents when her children were born. So I and my two brothers were born in Philadelphia, but we all grew up in Jackson. My parents and a brother are buried there. Jackson was my home”
Two years later in an interview with American Public Media Babbitt said, “My early musical influences began in Jackson, Mississippi. Here I grew up, of course, and my first musical influence came from a violin teacher with whom I went to study at the age of 4. She gave me a violin, and as I practiced, I thought, this is exactly what I’d like to be doing in music—don’t ask me how or where—although I wasn’t really all that excited about the practicing. If you want an anecdote, I’ll tell you one. My teacher was a lovely and sophisticated woman who had studied with Leopold Auer.”
“I know you Yankees think that if you grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, you went around in bare feet, but we lived in a very cultivated crowd. Our public school was very sophisticated, and we were taught how to speak English in a very special way, because we were told that we were the last bastions of high culture. It was a little bit of that that brushed into everything. Anyway, my teacher, Ms. Hutchison, said one day to me, ‘Well, if you’re really interested in playing the violin, why don’t you see if this is the kind of music you might play?’ And she gave me the violin part of the Mendelsohn Violin Concerto, which I took home. Now this was a violin concerto that I had never heard performed; we didn’t have an orchestra, and remember records were very far and few between, so we didn’t have a record of the Mendelsohn Violin Concerto either. And I thought that if this was all that a violin concerto was, why couldn’t I write one of my own? So I started writing something I called ‘Violin Concerto for a Single Violin.’ I could’ve been very chic; I could’ve called it ‘Violin Concerto for Solo Violin,’ but I wasn’t that mature yet.”
“The truth of the matter is, after my experience with the violin concerto, I suddenly realized that the violin didn’t get you very far socially. Nobody really wanted you to play this damn solo violin. So I went to the local band director, the man who ran every band in town, the lovely, lovely Italian who didn’t speak very much English, but who had a very good musical background. Let me tell you, this is America, so I might as well tell you how he got there. He got to Jackson, Mississippi, from one of the smaller towns in Italy by virtue of a beautiful Mississippi girl who went to Italy to study voice—what else? That’s very American. She brought him back to Jackson where she thought he could be a big important person. Well, he was, relatively speaking. So I went to him, and I said I wanted to study the trumpet. And he said, ‘Why do you want to study the trumpet?’ I named all these jazz people of whom he had never heard who played trumpet or cornet. He said, ‘Look, you’re obviously interested in music. Play the clarinet because when you play band arrangements they have the violin parts, and you’ll learn a great deal about music, and you’ll learn a great deal more music that way.’”
“So I agreed and I took up the clarinet. That became my primary instrument. I played the clarinet and eventually saxophone. All throughout high school I played in every kind of band, everything from an imitation Guy Lombardo to an imitation Ben Pollock, which means, you know, the range from what would then be called popular music to jazz. My early influences, however, I must tell you, were largely in popular music—all kinds of popular music. And you’ll be amused to know that while I was in Jackson, Mississippi I never heard a note of country music. The country people are out there, but we’re not country people. We didn’t hear any country music. We never heard any blues either, though the blues virtually originated in Jackson, but that was not us. It didn’t have anything to do with race—by the way, that’s a great mistake—it had to do with education. We went to Davis School, which, well, you want me to tell you an anecdote about that? I’ll tell you because it involved somebody else who came from Jackson, Eudora Welty, with whom I grew up. Her father was the president of the insurance company of which my father was the actuary and vice president, so we literally grew up together. Eudora Welty went to the same public grammar school that I did, the Davis School, and you can guess which Davis that was: Jefferson Davis, of course. So anyhow, the story was that [Eudora] would go down to the ladies room where the students were in their little stalls, and our English teacher, Ms. Granbury, would come down there, and if she heard a single grammatical mistake in the conversation among these stalls, she would immediately tell them, ‘Go to my office when you have done what you have to do here.’ They would be reprimanded and disciplined.”
“So much of what we are is what we were,” Babbitt told Otis. “I spent my time in Jackson hearing and playing music that I would not have heard if I had grown up anywhere else. Jazz musicians from New Orleans would come up from the river and I often used to play with them on Saturday nights. Our music teacher didn’t play records for us because there weren’t any records to play. We learned to read music and to play music and to listen to music. It was extraordinary. It’s not the kind of musical education I would have gotten in New York, but then I was exposed to a great deal of jazz and popular music that I might not have been exposed to elsewhere.”
In this short excerpt from his Journals, artist and naturalist John James Audubon, who knew the older cities of the state on the Mississippi well, describes his only visit to Mississippi’s new capital city on the Pearl.
May 1, 1823 – “I left the bayou on a visit to Jackson, which I found to be a mean place. The hotel atop the bluff was the lowest sort of dive, a rendezvous for gamblers and vagabonds. Disgusted with the place and the people, I left and returned to my wife in Natchez.”
Contemporary visitors echo Audubon’s impressions; Anthony Bourdain called it a “ghost town.” Jackson is still a mean place, in every sense of the word, crippled by petty avarice and racial tension.
In my hometown of Bruce, Mississippi, Mr. Buddy Massey grew cotton every year in his circular drive at the Shell station on the corner of Hwys. 9 and 32. So when I hacked out a small garden on what was once a barren, sun-scorched verge in Jackson, Mississippi, I figured if Buddy could grow cotton on the street, I could, too.
This project encountered obstacles right off the bat. First and perhaps foremost I discovered you need permission to grow cotton in Mississippi; the shadow of the boll weevil still looms over the Cotton Kingdom, and the Mississippi Code states specifically that “Every person growing cotton in this state shall furnish to the commissioner and the corporation on forms supplied by the commissioner such information as the commissioner may require concerning the size and location of all commercial cotton fields and of noncommercial plantings of cotton grown as an ornamental plant or for any other purposes.” Having found that out, I knew having the Mississippi Department of Agriculture in a building a mile and a half away magnified my chances of getting busted for cotton, and though the novelty of being hauled to court for growing cotton in Mississippi did have some appeal, I called the Commission out of a hard-learned habit of caution when it came to flirting with the law. The MDA folks directed me to a scholar at Mississippi State University who assured me that such a small “field” as mine wasn’t an agricultural time bomb. Naturally, I considered his opinion testament; if he’d been from Ole Miss, I’d called him a lying son-of-a-bitch.
Second, getting the seed; cotton seed, because of the restrictions, is not something you find in a yard and garden emporium. They seem to be sold not by the bushel, nor even the pound, but by the seed; the individual seed, mind you. At a loss, I issued an appeal on the local social networks for help, which came forthwith, netting me not only enough seeds for my modest enterprise, but enough to plant a city block. For some time, I considered the novelty of becoming a Jesse Cottonseed, spreading the wealth of white gold across Jackson’s cityscape, but in the end, I decided that I would never live down the shame of being the man who reintroduced the boll weevil to Mississippi. I’d probably be pilloried, then burned at the stake, at the very least tarred and feathered and exiled to Arizona.
Third, waiting for it to get warm; we had a typical winter, but a cool spring. The first batch, planted in outside seed flats on April Fool’s Day of course failed, so I decided to sit on my haunches and seed while my part of the earth tilted more towards Sol. The first week of May, I heard that cotton planting had begun in the Delta. With two beds ready, I sowed my cotton by hand, which was a less-than-mystical experience than I had anticipated, but shouldn’t have, since cotton itself is a plant, and what aura it has is what we have given it; besides, it was the seeds themselves which no doubt found an exhilaration in being thrust into warm, moist soil after such a wait.
Of the four beds planned, the ones on the east and west were planted on May 5. Since my appeal for seeds had netted no less than three copious batches (in different colors, I might add, blue, brown and purple due to the fungicides which coated them), they were mixed together in a batch and sown, some in short rows, others in small hills. Predictably, once the seed was planted, the rains ceased, and watering began, not just for the cotton, but for the other seeds and seedlings already in place; their roots, once established, would sustain them in months to come, but the roots themselves had to be encouraged.
For whatever reason, the cotton seeds proved fickle. To make a series of mini-rows, a total of perhaps fifty were planted each round, each planting a mixture of the three seed types, those with a purple coating proving the most viable. Rainy weather in mid-May helped the second set, and before long the rows (as such) began to take shape, not only in lines but in triangles and circles. Only the closest of seedlings needed thinning. In Delta fields, such fussy tending is not necessary, but being fractional this acreage needed more attention to crowding; in this instance, optimal outcome involving big, pretty plants that would bloom and boll. A rainy May helped; the cotyledons and stems grew big and fat.
By the end of the month, some seedlings had preliminary leaves, and I decided to wait on thinning. On the one hand, I wanted the best plants possible, but then I’ve seen cotton growing close together, and in the best situation of open field and plentiful rain, all the plants were tall, leafy and in flower. Somehow back in the back of my mind I kept trying to imagine what kind of machine planted cotton, and I couldn’t envision it being less haphazard than me. I tried to imagine how cotton must have looked in its primeval state in Tehuacán, predictably failed but persisted. While many scoffed at my crop, growing cotton had become more than an endeavor; it had become a responsibility, and my care paid off. By the first week in June, the cotton was about six inches tall and the cotyledons were being replaced by true leaves. Though my beds received only five hours of direct sun a day, the stems were strong and red, so I decided thinning needn’t be that drastic, since cotton in row crops grows much closer together.
In the Deep South, we have nothing resembling the graduated springs and falls of more northerly latitudes, and while our winters are predictably brief and comparatively mild, summer has such a duration that it can be divided into three parts: new summer, high summer, and far summer. The summer solstice marks the beginning of the high summer, when daytime temperatures are in the nineties and seventies at night. By that time, the cotton was a foot high; it was lay-by time. The cotton grew taller, I took no notice of what was happening beneath the canopy of leaves and found myself surprised in early July by the first blossom, a pale crimped envelope of crepe protruding from a frilly green box.
Again, I’d been anticipating a transcendental moment for the occasion, but my reaction was more composed of surprise and curiosity, which for all I know may well be the essential elements of a transcendent experience. I lack a frame of reference. Pale at first, the petals of the blossoms turned a rich purple before dropping. My neighbor John Lewis said that in Leflore County they have a saying: “First day white, second day red, third day from my birth I’m dead!” When the blooms had fallen, they left a tight, blocky wad of green still enclosed in a feathery case. On this bud empires had grown and tumbled, but other work distracted me.
The first boll opened the last week of August. I saw it under the light of a nearly-full moon, a low, white symmetrical glow against shadowed green. Again, no thunder and lightning came, but though a friend in Arcola had sent me photos of a local field crop waist-high and plush with open bolls along with disparaging comments about my “scrappy-ass Jackson ‘plantation wanna-be’ cotton”, I was proud of my little fraction of an acre. Sure, I was a half-assed farmer in the middle of Mississippi’s capital city, but I was making an effort, and I was, after all, making a crop, one that fit well with my modest and unpretentious character as an urban planter. It’d never make anything like a bale, but I’d have cotton to harvest.
To my astonishment, the opening cotton proved unrecognizable to many if not most of my neighbors. On many occasions I found myself faced with the question, “What is that?” as someone pointed to the whitening bolls. “Cotton,” I’d say, and they would either slap their foreheads or form a silent “o” with their lips. These reactions became a general rule of thumb for determining who of my neighbors were from where, and I’d always ask, but then I found that people from North Carolina and Tennessee didn’t recognize the plant, either. Most of them didn’t know an oak from an elm, either, but I’d cherished the notion that most Southerners would recognize the most iconic crop of their homeland out of repetition if nothing else. Perhaps the image of a cotton boll itself has become so divergent from reality that its actuality has become inconceivable to anyone save those who plant the seed.
As the weeks drew on, every surface of the cotton, leaves, stems, even the ripening bolls, became scorched, ruddy and freckled beneath the unrelenting sun. While the cotton was reddening, the trees were yellowing, becoming sallow, assuming that peculiar jaundice I found familiar from past Septembers. The air itself became hazy because what brief winds we had were picking up the dusty earth and passing it around as they do with pine pollen in June. Everything had a sense of resignation about it, even the light, which seemed suspended in ether, hung between a pale blue sky and a dark dun earth. The world was a sepia silhouette, creaking with crickets, and the leaves were falling. Blistered by the sun and exhausted from their efforts to make seed, the cotton plants drooped under the weight of the swelling bolls, which were opening ever-so-slowly.
October became a coda; the heat and the light had waned, and the year itself was coming to a close. I picked my cotton, ending up with no more than a grocery sack, but a better harvest came from the very reality of growing cotton on the side of a street in Jackson, Mississippi.
and other amenities. But the area continued to be called by its original name, which in time became corrupted into “Doodleville” or “Dooleyville” both used well into the mid-20th century as a popular though derisive term for the part of town bordered by Battlefield Park on the south, Terry Road on the West, Hooker Street on the north and South Gallatin on the East, well west of the original settlement.
