Don't Miss Oxford

Southern culture, Faulkner, and the Flying Tuk

by

Jack Mayfield remembers William Faulkner well. “We used to play at Rowan Oak [Faulkner’s home] as kids. My family lived just up the street,” recalled the bearded septuagenarian, smiling his sweet, crooked smile, a halo of white tendrils framing his weathered face. “He liked kids; didn’t have much time for grown ups though. He pretty much kept to himself.”

Mayfield is a good yarn-spinner, the unofficial town historian in Oxford, Mississippi, where he was born along with seven generations of his kin. The Ole Miss graduate and former history professor leads private tours out of the town’s turreted tourist information office these days, taking folks around Oxford’s pristine main square in the back of an open-air golf cart taxi called a Flying Tuk, a fine way to get a bracing bead on the well-manicured landscape. 

And there’s a lot to see in this town in northwest Mississippi, chartered in 1836 on land originally occupied by the Chickasaw Indian Nation. The town wags suggested the name Oxford to add highbrow heft to their bid for the state’s premier university, and it must have worked; the town became home to University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss as everybody calls it, in 1848. The reference to that other university across the pond doesn’t end there. A past mayor imported double-decker buses and even a few iconic red telephone booths all the way from London, a cultural disconnect if there ever were one.  

Then again, Oxford, consistently named one of the prettiest college towns in America, isn’t your typical small Southern town. It’s a literary hotbed, a place that inspired Faulkner along with other writers including Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Willie Morris, and John Grisham. Oxford, with its gently rolling hills and stately stands of magnolias and red cedars, is also a vibrant arts incubator and the Southern epicenter of the Slow Food movement. There is a respectable little music scene; the engaging live show, Thacker Mountain Radio hour carried on the local PBS station; and even a James Beard Award-winning chef, John Currence of City Grocery fame, who won Best Chef-South in 2009.

Locals point to the diversity afforded by some of the twenty thousand students enrolled in Ole Miss, young people that bring energy and prattle to the downtown bars and music venues. Judging from a recent visit, the students appear to be a preppy bunch, more button downed than boho. On a Saturday night, they’ll tip the average age at a bar like Proud Larry’s to just old enough to drink, which certainly makes for a lively scene.  

A Spin Around Ole Miss

It was late in the evening September 30, 1962, that the riots started on the campus of Ole Miss. James Meredith, the first African American student to break the color barrier in the racially divided state, was expected to attend classes the next morning. “Those were outside agitators,” recalled Mayfield. “That was one brave young man, that’s for sure.” A powerful memorial, labeled “Courage,” of Meredith approaching an open, columned space, stands not far from the university building housing the office of Multicultural Affairs. 

It takes more than a minute to explore Ole Miss; even a full day isn’t long enough to stroll this leafy campus. There’s the Blues Archive, with more than 100,000 artifacts, including B.B. King’s personal record collection and archival photos chronicling Southern blues-ways, African American studies, and Southern culture.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture is here too, repository and locus of research for history and culture that includes the Southern Foodways Alliance, presided over by the award-winning food writer John T. Edge. And there are multiple museums, from Cully Cobb’s collection of old tools to Dunn-Seiler’s geologic history of Mississippi and the impressive collection of Greek and Roman antiquities as well as Southern folk and American art.  

Beyond its cultural cachet, the burnished brick presence of Ole Miss is famous for its rabid cadre of Rebels football fans who come out 100,000 strong for catered tailgate parties on the ten-acre swath of campus green called The Grove. “During football games, Oxford becomes the third-largest city in the state,” said Mayfield. “It’s something to see.”

Raise a Dram With Faulkner

There’s a path leading from the campus through a stretch of lovely woods to Rowan Oak, the home of Mayfield’s famous neighbor, the Nobel prize-winning author and playwright William Faulkner, for more than forty years. You don’t have to be a Faulkner scholar to appreciate a tour of the author’s home turf, with its writing room papered by storyboards written in his own hand and telephone alcove, covered by doodles and phone numbers. The second floor addition, which extended the home in a roundabout kind of way, includes a bedroom with personal effects, his cameras, riding boots, and a bookshelf lined with mysteries. He wasn’t fond of air conditioning. His wife Estelle was longsuffering, but she installed a window unit the day after the famed author’s funeral. In a show of literary solidarity, Faulkner fans can pay a visit to his grave on a hillside in St. Peter’s Cemetery. Since his death in 1962, drams of whiskey—he liked Wild Turkey—are left at the grave in his honor.   

Local Art and Flavor

Taking a ramble around Oxford’s pretty town square delivers a cluster of indie galleries, small cafés and coffee shops, and three wonderful locally owned bookshops for browsing. But you’ll need to head a little out of town to find The End of All Music, David Swider’s well-curated collection of all things vinyl that is one of the tidiest record stores you’ll ever visit. A few miles away, Oxford Treehouse Gallery offers works by more than twenty local artists, housed in an airy light-filled space conceived and built by owners Walter and Vivian Neill. Their own creations, Walter’s inspired metal sculptures and Vivian’s beautiful oils, are reason enough to visit. 

Feeling peckish? Stop for lunch at CANOODLE, an alleyway eatery from chef/owner Corbin Evans, offering a brilliant mash-up of Southern ingredients and Asian fare. Try the pork butt ramen or the ginger-chicken jook with brown rice grits. 

Award-winning chef John Currence has five restaurants in town, including the fantastic City Grocery where shrimp and grits are raised to toothsome heights with perfectly spiced Gulf shrimp and stone ground Original Grit Girl grits. Emily Blount’s inventive Italian restaurant, Saint Leo, is the latest addition to a thriving and diverse culinary scene.  

There are good cocktails to be had all over town; but head to The Coop, the rooftop space at the Graduate Oxford hotel, for one of Chip Moore’s perfect Manhattans. He has a stash of barrel aged booze, and they are all delicious. The hotel is the best place to stay in town, a college-themed art-filled space with comfy beds and gaggles of students studying at all hours of the day in the inviting lobby—yet another aspect of place to remind you that Oxford is a fetching college town in a class by itself. 

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