OXFORD MISSISSIPPI : Southern Sanctuary : William Faulkner’s Mississippi hometown is rich in books, blues and engaging characters

Southern California urbanites, finding the appeal of small-town life stronger than ever, might also like the idea of vacationing in a slower, steadier, more personable world. Today, Travel begins a series of articles that will look at a handful of unscientifically selected American towns (with populations under 15,000) that are safe, walkable, affordable, not too busy and not too self-conscious.

It was a Friday afternoon when I drove into town, missed the address I was looking for, and fell to wandering. I circled the central square, and skirted the cemetery where William Faulkner is buried. I cut through the University of Mississippi campus, admiring the red-brick walls, the green-shuttered windows and the northern Mississippi hills that roll through town. Eventually, I found the 102-year-old home that held my bed and breakfast. This is a town with a population of 10,141 , I told myself, ascending the creaky wooden stairs. Slow down, or you’ll run out of Oxford before dark .

But by Saturday morning, I had tasted the crawfish quesadilla at the City Grocery, on the square. I had inspected contemporary folk art in the Southside Gallery (milk jugs, melted and molded over the artist’s home stove until they looked like African tribal masks). I had slipped into a bar called Proud Larry’s to hear a bluesman named R. L. Burnside wrestle with his guitar and moan about slow dogs and fast women. And I had stood at the window of Square Books, Oxford’s literary epicenter, where the shelves are crowded with Faulkner and half a dozen living local writers, including a fairly successful fellow named John Grisham.

By Sunday night, I was seated in a Jeep with a mannequin named Bubba and the prospective mayor-for-life of Taylor, Miss., rolling through darkened Lafayette County toward Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint. Running out of Oxford, it seemed, was not going to be a problem.

Oxford may be small, but it is a haven for the bookish and the bluesy, a site of Civil War and civil rights battles, a handsome town rich in characters and fueled by grits, catfish and pecan pie. If business or pleasure brings you to Memphis, then an hour’s drive dead south will bring you here.

Oxford’s town square was laid out in the 1830s--many say the city’s name was inspired by that other college town across the Atlantic--and at its center stands a great white courthouse, built after Northern troops burned the town in 1864. The courthouse is fronted by a monument to the Confederacy’s Civil War dead. “They gave their lives in a just and holy cause,” it says. In a county 25% black, the monument has stood since 1907.

A handful of restaurants and storefronts huddle around the square, having successfully endured the challenge of a monster mall that opened across town a decade ago. Most prominent among the square’s commercial buildings is Neilson’s department store (pronounce it Nelson’s , and while you’re at it, stress the fay in Lafayette County), which has been in business since 1839 and claims to be the oldest store in the South. Wiley’s Shoe Shop, the Parks Barber Shop and Smitty’s restaurant stand nearby, along with a handful of upscale clothing shops and a few law offices. A block down the hill on South 14th Street stands the Hoka, a raffish theater, cafe and student hangout that screens highbrow movies in a space that was once a cotton warehouse.

Some Oxonians see creeping boutiquism on the square, and note the departure of Sneed’s Hardware in 1987. But as long as a $3 shoeshine, a $5 haircut and a $2.50 bowl of collard greens and hog jowls can be had in the neighborhood, it’s hard for a stranger to take the threat too seriously.

The crime rate isn’t likely to intimidate city people, either. In all of 1992, the FBIfound in its most recent national crime survey, Oxford reported one murder, four forcible rapes, seven robberies and 17 stolen cars.

Oxford’s City Hall stands at the square, too, its red-brick walls positioned to bask in the afternoon sun. A few blocks beyond it, in St. Peter’s Cemetery, lies the grave of Faulkner, who passed most of his life here, perplexing his neighbors with odd and aloof behavior, recasting them as characters in more than a dozen novels set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He died in 1962.

Oxford, however, remains alive with memorable characters, and since the town is so small and unhurried, a curious stranger is likely to meet several of them, then probably cross paths again before another day has passed. Look up from your Bubba Burger at the Beacon diner, and there in a neighboring booth sits your innkeeper. One day, I sat in Marie’s Lebanese Cafe, reading in the Oxford American magazine about a noted journalism professor at the university, Dr. Samir A. Hosni, and waiting to order lunch. Then my waiter arrived--the good Doctor Hosni himself, husband of Marie and helper in the dining room.

I am paid to be nosier than the average tourist, but anyone even vaguely curious in Oxford will very quickly build a substantial and detailed biographical index. Here are three entries from mine:

* Georgia L. Isaiah stepped out to meet me on Sunday morning, after I had pulled off the road to take a picture of perhaps the tiniest restaurant I’ve ever seen: Isaiah’s Busy Bee Cafe, which announced itself with a bright sign at 2013 University Ave. Isaiah, who lives next door, issued orders to Brownie (her golden retriever) and Mane (her labrador retriever), and told me the story of the Busy Bee.

For years, Isaiah cooked for the Ole Miss university chancellors. But in 1971, her husband and her grandmother passed away, and “it just seemed lonesome” at home. So Isaiah opened the restaurant next to her house, put up five tables, and declared her menu: baked ham on Mondays, pork chops on Tuesdays, roast beef on Wednesdays, oven-fried chicken on Thursdays and catfish on Fridays. Fixed price: $7, dessert included. “People used to drive down from Memphis just to have dessert,” she told me. But Isaiah, who is 74 years old, hurt herself in a kitchen fire last year and had a mess to clean up after the past winter’s highly destructve ice storm. The pictures in her dining room of Alex Haley, Martin Luther King Jr. and William Faulkner have had no customers to look down on for a few months. But beginning in mid-April, she’s hoping to resume serving dinner on weeknights, by appointment, to those who call her at (601) 234-8865 to make advance arrangements.

* Leroy Wadlington was a boy when federal officials forced the admission of James Meredith as the first black student at Ole Miss in 1962. As a teen-ager, Wadlington joined the Civil Rights movement and began demonstrating with other black Oxonians, bringing integration to several of the city’s previously all-white restaurants. Now he is the Rev. Leroy Wadlington, 43-year-old pastor of Oxford’s Second Missionary Baptist Church, and a partner with Rev. Duncan Gray, the white pastor at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, in a fledgling pulpit-swapping, congregation-uniting program aimed at breaking down barriers between Oxford’s black and white churchgoers.

Plenty of work remains. After a long Saturday of re-enacting skirmishes from 1863, several dozen Civil War fanatics, all white and most of them dressed in Confederate uniform, feel comfortable leaping to the tabletops in The Gin bar in downtown Oxford, swilling beer, and shouting along with the lyrics to “Play That Funky Music, White Boy.” (I walked in on this scene. With restraint astonishing to a Californian, the bar’s handful of black customers waited quietly and patiently for the retro-soldiers, some of whom had come from neighboring states, to finish and leave.) At sporting events of the Ole Miss Rebels, alumni, boosters and others fly Confederate flags by the hundreds. Overall, Wadlington says, “Oxford has progressed tremendously as far as relationships with race go.” But as long as the Confederate flag is allowed to remain part of Ole Miss traditions, he adds, “these things are going to be occurring.”

* Jane Rule Burdine is a photographer and artist and cook and collector of folk art, and the fixer-up of a fine old house in the country community of Taylor, about 10 miles outside Oxford. The houses don’t really need addresses in Taylor, since there are so few. But Burdine has adopted a street-name and number that the author Willie Morris thought up for her: 3 Railroad Esplanade. She is also the keeper of Bubba the mannequin, who sits in her Jeep’s back seat for security or company or something, and serves as mayor for Taylor’s 288 residents, a post she has held for five years and which she takes very seriously, in her way. On the way to Junior Kimbrough’s, I asked how long she would be mayor. “If I behave myself,” she said, “I might be mayor for life.”

Surrounding Oxford, there’s Memphis (home of Graceland and the National Civil Rights Museum) an hour to the north, Tupelo to the east, Little Rock, Ark., to the west, and Jackson (the state capital) to the south. The cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta begin a few miles to the southwest, and if you continue 60 miles southwest on state Highway 6, you reach the bedraggled city of Clarksdale, where the Delta Blues Museum celebrates the roots of Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, W. C. Handy and other blues pioneers who helped create that American musical form around the beginning of the 20th Century.

Oxford proper has a significant blues landmark, too--but it lies in perhaps the least colorful setting in all Lafayette County. In an orderly, dreary room on the third floor of the University of Mississippi’s Farley Hall, blues archivist and music librarian Edward Komara labors as custodian of the world’s largest collection of blues recordings (about 35,000 of them on vinyl, tape and compact disc, dating back to about 1920). B.B. King donated his record collection a few years ago, and 9,000 albums he collected are filed under lock and key--plenty of Ray Charles, Nat King Cole and Django Reinhart records, along with an old record of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” The collection is open Monday through Friday, but visitors interested in listening to recordings need to call (601) 232-7753 to make an appointment a few days ahead.

Probably the biggest tourist event in Oxford--excluding Ole Miss football games--is the annual Faulkner Conference, which fills the city’s roughly 300 hotel rooms despite its scheduling in mid-summer, when northern Mississippi’s temperature and humidity are at their most oppressive. This year’s conference, the 21st, focuses on “Faulkner and Gender” and will run July 31-Aug. 5. The Oxford Conference for the Book (April 7-10 this year) was created last year to gather writers and editors to mull the processes of creation and publication, and has already begun to draw a comparable crowd.

Between seminars and workshops, the literary visitors linger at the Faulkner grave site or drive out Old Taylor Road, step past the twin rows of cedars, and file through the rooms of a 150-year-old Greek Revival house know as Rowan Oak. Faulkner owned it from 1930 until his death, wrote most of his books there, and was at the kitchen telephone when a caller informed him that he had won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. A few years later, Faulkner outlined the structure of “A Fable” in big block letters on the walls of the office. They remain, as does his black manual Underwood typewriter. (The property was briefly closed in February after the ice storm caused widespread power outages and stripped most of the area’s trees, but reopened in early March.)

These days at Square Books, Faulkner is heavily outsold by John Grisham. Grisham, who grew up a few miles north in Southaven, attended law school at the University of Mississippi 15 years ago, published his first novel, “A Time to Kill,” in 1989, and a year later moved back to Oxford with his wife and kids. He is visible in the community--last summer he coached his son’s Little League team. Grisham is the biggest name, but he’s only one among many successful writers around. Barry Hannah, author of the novel “Geronimo Rex” and several other works of fiction, lives here and teaches at the university. Larry Brown is another neighbor, born here and known for his four novels, but also for his 17 years as an Oxford firefighter. (Brown’s latest book, “On Fire,” is a nonfiction account of that time.) Author Willie Morris, born south of here in Yazoo City and celebrated in New York as the editor of Harper’s magazine in the late 1960s, resided in Oxford a while before relocating to Jackson, and still visits often. Lisa Howorth, wife of Richard and a teacher at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, is the editor of “The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature,” published last year.

“It’s such a wonderful place for writers,” said Anne Rapp, an erstwhile script supervisor from Los Angeles whom I met at a reading in Square Books. Rapp discovered Oxford while filming “The Firm” in Memphis, and in January started renting a two-bedroom house here for $450 a month. She plans to stay several months, working on her writing. She and Oxford “just clicked,” she says.

The Square Books reading is another staple of Oxford’s book culture. Howorth sets up a few rows of folding chairs in the upstairs cafe area of the bookstore, a few paces from an immense selection of work from African American writers and literature from the south, and drags up a dictionary stand to serve as lectern. On the walls hang autographed photos of authors who have come before.

On Sunday, my last full day in town, the touring authors were Valerie Sayers of South Carolina, Pinckney Benedict of West Virginia and Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn of Alabama, each with a new novel out, who read passages about (respectively) a young man with an urge to urinate on his enemies; a drug dealer who soaks hippies in honey and gasoline, then burns them at the stake; and a 12-year-old girl who finds herself in charge of a newly dead body. (Those Southern writers, dull as ever.) Afterward, the listeners lined up for autographed books, and the Howorths took the guest authors, Larry Brown, Ron Shapiro and a few others for catfish at the beloved and rustic Taylor Grocery & Restaurant.

Later still, the more energetic of the group headed off to Junior Kimbrough’s in nearby Holly Springs for live music and a nightcap. The building is a former church, its interior walls now colorized with secular frescoes of Oprah Winfrey and others, and crudely lettered signs forbidding drugs.

A blues band raged in a corner, led by Junior Kimbrough himself, although a succession of fellow musicians took their turns. Games of pool were negotiated at a table in the middle of the room, with nearby dancers taking care to dodge stray sticks. In the back, someone was selling 40-ounce bottles of Colt .45 malt liquor for $2.75 each. Around midnight, I thought I heard R. L. Burnside cursing those slow dogs and fast women again, and I felt almost local.

GUIDEBOOK / The Oxford Option

Getting there: Oxford, Miss., lies about 75 miles south of Memphis, Tenn., via Interstate 55 (which runs south) and Mississippi 6 (which heads into Oxford). Northwest, the only airline with nonstop service between LAX and Memphis, offers restricted round-trip fares beginning at $456.

Where to stay: The 110-room Holiday Inn of Oxford (400 Lamar Ave., Oxford, Miss. 38655; tel. 601-234-3031) is just a few blocks from the city’s central square. Standard rooms for two run $53-$56 per night. There are three bed and breakfasts, each in a handsome old house, each walking distance from the square. The Oliver-Britt House (512 Van Buren Ave., Oxford, Miss. 38655; tel. 601-234-8043) has five rooms renting at $45-$55 nightly. Isom Place (1003 Jefferson Ave., Oxford, Miss. 38655; tel. 601-234-3310), with three rocking chairs on the porch and an impressive collection of antiques inside, has three rooms at $60-$75. The Puddin’ Place (1008 University Ave., Oxford, Miss. 38655; tel. 601-234-1250), where I stayed, offers just one upstairs suite and one downstairs suite with somewhat less precious furnishings, which might make it more child-friendly. Each suite goes for $85 nightly (with higher rates for more than two occupants, and on weekends of Ole Miss home football games).

Where to eat: At City Grocery (1118 Van Buren Ave.; local tel. 232-8080), chef John Currence draws on a New Orleans background and nouveau inclination to concoct dishes such as crawfish quesadillas, and shrimp and grits. Most sophisticated menu in town. Main dishes: $12.95-$18.95. Just across the square stands the Downtown Grill (1115 Jackson Ave.; tel. 234-2659), which also offers Southern fare in a dressed-up setting. Main dishes: $5.25-$18.95. The Harvest Cafe & Bakery (1112 Van Buren Ave.; tel. 236-3757) specializes in homemade soups, meatless meals and fresh bread. Main dishes: up to $6.25. For exotica, there’s Marie’s Lebanese Cafe & Shoppe (1006 Jackson Ave.; tel. 236-7052). Main dishes to $5.99. For catfish and a glimpse of the countryside, drive about 10 miles southwest of town to the Taylor Grocery & Restaurant (P.O. Box 66, Taylor; tel. 236-1716), where meals run $1.50 (for a fried bologna sandwich) to $9.50 (for the all-you-can-eat catfish fillet). Dinner only. Dress way casual.

Where to find William Faulkner’s typewriter: Rowan Oak, the writer’s home for more than 30 years, is now run as a museum by the University of Mississippi. The home (Old Taylor Road at Bailey’s Woods; tel. 234-3284) is open 10 a.m.-noon and 2-4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2-4 p.m. Sundays.

For more information: Contact the Oxford Tourism Council, P.O. Box 965, Oxford, Miss. 38655; tel. (800) 880-6967 or (601) 234-4651.