by Dwight Garner
“Civilization begins with distillation,” William Faulkner wrote, and in Oxford, Miss., his adopted hometown, it’s possible for a literary pilgrim to visit what’s left of his liquor cabinet.
Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s family home, is open to visitors, and in a glass case you will find a bottle of Four Roses bourbon, which he liked because it was inexpensive and easy to find. There’s his metal mint julep cup. There’s also a bottle of Harvey’s Fine Tawny Hunting Port, which he used for cooking game birds while a second bottle, for drinking, warmed in the ashes of the fire. And there are a few bottles of fine French wine, which he could afford to imbibe after winning the Nobel Prize in 1949.
A trip to view Faulkner’s spirits is the best possible way to begin a long weekend in Oxford, a town in which civilization and distillation, in all their higher forms, are revered. At no time is this more true than on fall weekends when the University of Mississippi football team is making a home stand. Never mind that the Ole Miss Rebels are in the middle of another hapless, hurts-to-watch losing season and haven’t won a Southeastern Conference title since the year the Beatles released their first LP. On home-game weekends the free-floating festivity — a kind of refined, khaki-wearing Mardi Gras — lasts for days. An old saying here goes, “Ole Miss may not win the game, but we will always win the party.”
On a recent Saturday morning in early fall, as the Rebels were preparing to play the University of Georgia Bulldogs, the place to be in Oxford, as it is before and after every home game, was the Grove, the legendary 10-acre tailgating lawn at the center of the Ole Miss campus. This is a sight to see, almost certainly the most convivial landscape in college athletics. A sea of tents in red and blue, the Ole Miss colors, are packed tightly among mature oak, magnolia and elm trees. Many of these tents are tended as carefully as summer homes. You’ll find good linen, elegant pitchers filled with chilled bloody marys, flat-screen televisions, the occasional chandelier. “Y’all behave last night?” is a pretty standard greeting. A visitor from the North finds that food on toothpicks and drinks in clear plastic cups are pressed upon his person at every turn. After a while, his person needs to sit down.
Tailgating in the Grove has been a tradition at Ole Miss since the 1950s, its rituals closely attended to. This is not a land of face- and chest-painters. Many male students wear coats, ties and loafers; female students mostly wear brightly colored cocktail dresses and more makeup than one is accustomed to seeing on a human face in daylight. The polite din is shattered, every so often, when a hoarse voice cries out, “Are you ready?” This is the beginning of the Ole Miss cheer, known as “Hotty Toddy.” Everyone within earshot yells back: “Helllll yes! Daaamn Right!” The batty, but catchy, cheer rolls on:
Hotty Toddy, Gosh almighty
Who the hell are we, Hey!
Flim Flam, Bim Bam
OLE MISS BY DAMN!
Otherwise sane adults are unembarrassed to holler this out every 10 minutes or so. (...)
Amid the crowd, too, you might catch a glimpse of the University of Mississippi’s greatest sports legend, Archie Manning, a kind of secular saint in Oxford. He was Ole Miss’s starting quarterback for three years in the late 1960s and early ’70s — Bear Bryant called him the best college quarterback he’d ever seen — and he is the head of a football dynasty: his sons Peyton and Eli are, respectively, Super Bowl-winning starting quarterbacks for the Indianapolis Colts and the New York Giants. Like his father, Eli was a starting quarterback at Ole Miss; Peyton attended the University of Tennessee. (...)
Mr. Manning’s sons grew up tailgating in the Grove, before it had the recognition it does now. A magazine called Tailgater Monthly — yes, such a journal actually exists — recently named Ole Miss the No. 1 tailgating school in America. This year Newsweek called Ole Miss the most beautiful college in America, as much for its handsome student body as for its leafy campus. The writer and former Harper’s magazine editor Willie Morris, a longtime Oxford resident who died in 1999, once dilated at length on “the beauteous sorority girls for which Mississippi has always been famous.” Don’t underestimate these young women, Morris cautioned. “They are smarter and more tenacious than their sunny countenances suggest. For generations the best of these lustrous cyprinids with double names have grown up to run the Sovereign State of Mississippi, just as their great-grandmothers ran the Old Confederacy, their men dying without shoes in the snows of northern Virginia.”
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photo: William Widmer for The New York Times
