William Faulkner) had called him ‘the only person who likes me for who I am.’ For all these reasons, he had become the primary Faulkner family spokesman and informal historian.
Soon enough he made it there, a slight, white-haired old man, with eyebrows and a mustache that refused to blanche quite that far, an aristocratic nose and piercing blue eyes: indeed a carboncopy of any Faulkner image I’d ever seen.
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 Universityof 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
Soon enough he made it there, a slight, white-haired old man, with eyebrows and a mustache that refused to blanche quite that far, an aristocratic nose and piercing blue eyes: indeed a carboncopy of any Faulkner image I’d ever seen.
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 Universityof 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
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