The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney Page B

this jungle required capital and slaves. “The Negroes die off every few years” noted one early visitor, whom I later quoted in my Yale senior thesis, “though it is said in time each hand makes enough to buy two more in his place.”
    All I could see now across the flat plain of the Delta was the longridge of the levee, off to our right, like the edge of the world. The leading roadside industry seemed to involve the slaking of thirst and the recent advent of refrigeration, judging from the hand-painted signs advertising COLD BEER and COLD COKES . The bare cotton fields were studded with shotgun shacks, some swarming with black children, others abandoned and overgrown, tin roofs seemingly held up by bowers of kudzu vines. As we drove through a tiny settlement, Will pointed to the spot where a freedom rider had been gunned down the year before. “This is the south of the South,” he warned, spraying potato chip debris on the dashboard. “Last unreconstructed spot in America.”
    Will had been almost two hours late picking me up at the airport. Cooling my heels outside the baggage claim in Memphis, I saw the Cadillac rocket up the arrival ramp and shoot past me before dodging a taxi and screeching to a halt several feet from the curb. When I ran up, the passenger window slid down. “I’m wasted,” Will said. “You better drive.” He briefly lifted his dark shades to reveal the pink filigree in his eyes.
    I told him my learner’s permit was only valid with an adult copilot.
    “They don’t care about that down here,” he said. So I took the keys and followed his instructions, nosing the big, cushiony-riding Caddy down the ramp and out to Highway 51.
    Will lit a cigarette and debriefed me as we drove south. “Got the house nearly to ourselves. Dad’s in New Orleans and Elbridge has gone down to Destin with his buds. The beauteous Cheryl spent Christmas with us. At one point she tells us she forgot her baton. To which my old man says he’s got a baton she can use, which sends Mom off to her room for two days. Then Dad gets in a swivet about L.B.’s draft status. He wants to use his connections to get Elbridge in the reserves so he can dodge Vietnam after he graduates, and Elbridge says that’s cheating and Dad says that’s just smart. Got pretty hot there at the old dinner table.”
    Once we were in the Delta, the highway was so flat that we seemed, curiously, to be driving uphill. The distance between objects—houses, cars, a stand of trees—seemed enormous, and I sensed a pervasive lassitude. In the harvested cotton fields ragged bits of white fluff clung to the cut stubble, like millions of tiny, tattered flags of surrender. Theblack man who filled our gas tank in Tunica seemed to make an epic meandering journey out of the simple trip from his seat inside the door to our car. The door itself was dangling on one hinge, rather like his overalls, which hung on a single raggedy strap from his shoulder, the other having frayed away. The RC Cola ice chest standing out front was full of trash, the lid long gone. Encrusted with vegetation, several automobiles were rapidly becoming part of the landscape.
    Located some twenty miles north of Greenville, Bear Track had been in Will’s family since the land was cleared in the 1850s—one of the first plantations in the region, three thousand acres of sandy loam planted in cotton. We drove through the naked fields up a long red drive. I was disappointed at first sight of the house itself, a yellow-brick ranch which, except for the surrounding pecan and magnolia trees, hardly answered my notions of an antebellum plantation.
    “You were expecting columns and verandas?” Will said slyly as we parked out front. “The old house got torched by Yankees. Its replacement fell down after the flood of 1927, and that house burned to the ground after a drunken overseer fell asleep smoking in his bed. Which is actually pretty typical Delta history. You hear these fucking people