“I was born in Yazoo City at the edge of the Mississippi Delta in 1956, the year Elvis Presley made his television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show but was shown only from the waist up.”

I was born in Yazoo City at the edge of the Mississippi Delta in 1956, the year Elvis Presley made his television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show but was shown only from the waist up. My father was in the service, and I moved from city to city as a “Navy brat.” But no matter where we lived, each summer I returned to Yazoo City on a Greyhound bus to visit my grandparents. My mother, concerned that I would lack the proper southern upbringing, decreed that my grandmother would be the overseer of my southern belle soul. I grew to love those rides on the bus, arriving at the end of a long kudzu tunnel down Highway 49 where my grandmother was waiting in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. Having the keys to her old blue Plymouth long before I had a driver’s license was my first taste of freedom and responsibility. It wasn’t long before I was making the beer runs to town for my grandparents’ country store and jook joint on Wolf Lake. My memories of those summers are mixed with euphoric freedom and hard-fought accomplishments in a racially segregated and impoverished agrarian landscape.